Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Minister of Education Erica Stanford have announced the introduction of standardised testing in primary schools across New Zealand.
Speaking to media during a visit to Silverstream School in Upper Hutt, Luxon said education achievement was not meeting expectations.
”Under our Government, that changes,” he said, claiming education reform would be “evidence-based”.
The issue is that Parents can;’t understand where their Child is at educationally because of the purposely bullshit report cards that are more focused on the Childs feelings than educational achievement.
The issue is that poverty is so much more wide spread in NZ that many schools are simply attempting to socialise the feral children who are dumped upon them by a system that has already given up on them.
Yes there has been a drop in education standards, but that has happened everywhere, our public education system is fucking amazing and does an incredible job educating our young people.
The solutions are better communication with parents with far more flexibility in terms of hours and zoom meetings when parent/teacher events occur.
The solution is far more money into our schools, upgrading facilities, building in more special needs teachers and teacher aides alongside better social service outreach and adult education programs.
The solution is not standardised tests because that is a trojan horse towards league tables and that’s a move towards privatisation of education.
National are privatising everything else, why would you pretend that they won’t try it win in education?
National are taking legitimate parent frustration at the obtuse reporting system and manipulating it into a solution that is the baby steps towards their true ideological agenda, which is to privatise NZ public education.
The Coalition are making honest,earnest attempts to mend the broken education system and for that they should be commended.
What by under funding it?
More idiotic, delusional comments by Bob the troll. You need psychiatric help.
The Coalition are making earnest attempts to break the education system and for that they should be condemned.
Maybe ask a primary school teacher how they feel about yet more paperwork, that’s all it is really. Teachers are assessing their pupils on a daily basis they know where they’re at. Is it called virtue signaling or gaslighting let’s add woke to the mix.
It makes teachers accountable. You know…like any job in real life, a foreign concept to hard lefties. “OMG…now I am accountable, help me, what amma gonna do. What if they find out I’m no good???”
You know what you can’t make a child do anything they don’t want to do until they are ready ( potty training comes to mind ) and willing,ie. read and write,spell,do maths etc.etc.. All parents will know that their own children learn at different speeds. Just because they go to school at 5 doesn’t mean on day one they are ready. Some children will never ever ever be good at science and maths and guess what you can have the best teachers in the whole wide world and the results will be the same. In reading there is also comprehension of what you read as well as wrote words
Look to USA to see where NAct’s education policy is leading.
The previous US Secretary of Education (Trump admin.) made no secret that her goals where to dismantle public education, insert christian dominionist values into the education system for the glory of its god and promote privatisation (charter education) as a means to do so.
The answer is to adopt the Finish system, one of the most successful in the world.
Where all teachers have a Masters degree.
Where is one of most highly regarded professions.
Where there no exams until the last year of school.
Where all children receive free proper meals.
I could go on at length, but it’s too depressing.
Before all the conjecture leads to panic , all National announced was testing that takes place already.
PATs have been in place for 50 years. E- asStle for some 20 years and school entry assessments for decades including oral language and concepts of print.
Learning outcomes have to be measurable , where your child’s learning is at and analysis of next steps is the least expected for effective teaching.
It seems these tests are being confused with the generalised waffle of prior ” National Standards ” which every teacher from class to class, and school to school marked by their own judgement not by decades of comparable data.
“The issue is that parents can’t understand where their Child is at educationally because of the purposely bullshit report cards that are more focused on the Childs feelings than educational achievement.”
This is very close to the truth!
I’m informed by a teacher (I volunteer at a school) that they’re trained in uni to write school reports that don’t provide specifics. Ask yourself: How come we produce 18-year-olds that are functionally illiterate? They’ve been 13 years in school yet didn’t learn what most 7-year-olds should be able to do. I would bet that those poor kids never had a school report saying, “Rangi can’t read” followed by the necessary remedial classes. They pass through the education system like diarrhea and it’s a stain on the system.
Yes, you’re right again in saying this issue is in ‘at risk’ parenting situations: Welfare dependency, solo motherhood etc. Most middle-class helicopter parents are straight down to the school in their SUV to tear the principal a new one if their little brat wasn’t performing to expectations. A fair percentage are semi-literate before they even start school because they were coached both at home and in preschool.
The teachers’ unions are fighting like hell against testing because they’re terrified of being performance managed, you know, like just about everyone else in all other jobs is measured. LOL But it has to come. We have to catch the ones that fall through the cracks.
They mostly ‘fall through the cracks’ because they have an underlying learning problem which has never been sorted out. No amount of ‘necessary remedial classes’ or testing will solve those problems.
Be it sight, hearing, visual disturbances, dyslexia, Irlen syndrome (sensitivity to light), whatever the problem, no improvement in reading will occur until those problems are recognized and dealt with.
All this get-tough stuff will just be more wasted time because of the reluctance to acknowledge the real cause of the problem and deal with it.
That requires thinking which the right seems incapable of.
Creative thinking is needed
to deal with a gnarly problem. Not their thing. Punishment and squeezing square pegs into round holes is more their strategy.
100% Joy.
Not all students are the same and one size fits all thinking doesn’t help those with learning difficulties. Neoliberalism favours decision making based on statisical evidence, but it doesn’t capture the nuances. Rather than statistical evidence it would be better to consider different aspects to success: the support schools offer, what the relevance and value of the curriculum, what teachers bring, outside factors that schools or teachers, eg, home environments, and the area you identify, individual differences, especially those with some kind of learning difficulty. Despite good intentions, all too hard I suspect with Ministry officials. And now a ‘new’ Govt policy. More testing.
Excellence as a goal is frowned upon by the left,mediocrity at best is their goal.
BTF, your failure in life shows your mediocrity.
Please provide evidence to back up your comment btf, otherwise you are just another troll.
You cannot aspire to excellence unless you can read a page of writing BTF.
If you have a visual disturbance/problem it won’t happen. Your mediocrity shows in that you refuse to see anything but your own point of view and fail to attempt any research into why a problem exists.
Suggest first stop is to Google Irlen Syndrome, symptoms. Then come back and tell us if you think YOU would have been able to learn to read if you had been faced with a page of writing like these examples.
I doubt it.
I also doubt you will bother to look because you don’t want to be found wanting in your knowledge or experience of children and learning.
Your pompous pronouncements each day, expose mediocrity at its finest.
When I was at school, I was a piece of shit. I had good grades, but I wasn’t hugely interested in much of the study. I ended up in Physics, Biology and Calculus after 5th form through to 7th form. In those classes I had teachers who were PHD in that field and had been university professors. THEY are the pure reason I wasn’t a fucking loser dropout (still a loser though!).
At the moment we have “teachers” who are only taught how to teach, they aren’t passionate or knowledgeable about the subjects they teach. To a certain age, that is fine. Hit high school, we need passionate, educated teachers. How do we get those people into the front of a classroom. Money. Simple. Pay teachers. Lots. They are the foundation of society. Pay them their value.
“To a certain age, that is fine.”
They lost me in primary school. I spent high school just surviving. I was in my 30s before I realised you were supposed to actually enjoy things and want to learn.
Testing, testing, testing. Something reassuring in that. Something that conservatives feel comfortable with, as if testing in itself improves outcomes. After all, what can be counted ends up being what counts. Evidence does matter, of course. But evidence can come from multiple sources. And its what done with the evidence that matters, not the fact that its evidence based.
Testing is a shade of grey. In the trade: diagnostic, mastery, achievement, standardized. All used for different purposes. Leagues tables like PISA are standardized, and of little use other than to identify trends and justify policy decisions. No real benefit for learners, unless policy makers get it spot on. And that’s rare. Diagnostic testing looks very different and informs decisions about individual learners. I’d be very surprised if its not happening already, albeit in many cases, informally. Testing of achievement is the sort of assessment associated with competencies, so no stranger to the NZ context. A bit controversial but a useful tool. But avessment of achievement is not the sort of testing, testing, testing that current Coaltion have in mind.
I get the need for evidence and evidence-based decisions but simply testing, testing, testing won’t cut the mustard. What is being tested? Basic skills? Achievement of learning? And for what purpose? All needs clear articulation and transparency, not just rhetoric. Perhaps it has been thought out but misreported. Perhaps some of it has been lost in reactionary views.
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