| Rat-race or real impact? Victoria Belcher | 9 February 2010 |
Printed in the Northland Age on 9 February 2010
Some of the campaigned for education reforms of the National Party are now being implemented, with nation-wide numeracy and literary standards being introduced for students in years 1 to 8. The standards have enormous potential, so it is crucial that they are implemented and evaluated well. We need to make accurate and appropriate information about our schools available, both so that parents can make informed decisions, and schools have the incentive to educate well.
The reforms will see children's progress evaluated and reported at least twice a year. While salient progress indicators can present a clear picture of how a child is performing, there are fears that the information will be too generic and will rank schools performance narrowly against standards, without taking into account different starting points for students. So, a student may appear to be performing badly if they don't meet the bar that standards set, even if they have made significant progress. If a school has many students in this position it would appear that they're doing a poor job, when that may not be the case.
This doesn't mean we should shy away from information being made public about how schools are performing. Arguably, if schools were open to public scrutiny they would have an added incentive to improve. But it does mean we need to be sure the data has enough depth and rigor to be genuinely useful. A way to do this would be to incorporate data that shows not just raw marks, but improvement levels (value-added indicators).
Value-added indicators have the potential to more fairly and accurately represent student progress (and schools' impact on this) on a case-by-case basis. They can take into account the social background of the student and the incremental effects of teachers, not just the overall output of the school.
School are rightly fearful of becoming stuck in a rat race to get to the top of one dimensional performance charts. But this doesn't mean standards are a bad thing—it just means the data collected needs to be better. If effectively embraced, the new policy has the potential to be an instrumental step in building a brighter picture for New Zealand education.
