Erica’s SMART Assessment System Isn’t Smart After All

Erica Stanford says SMART will bring clarity and consistency to classrooms. Teachers say it’s another rushed, ideologically driven assessment system that mistakes paperwork for progress and standardisation for learning.

Have you heard or read about Erica’s SMART programme? No, calm down, this doesn’t mean she is becoming more intelligent by educating herself, that is, getting more smart.

SMART is this government’s attempt to standardise learning assessment. A decade or so ago the then National led government’s attempt was called PaCT, different system with similar aims. I know a lot of effort and expense was put in, from about 2012 onwards, to develop PaCT as way of monitoring children’s ‘achievement’ against National Standards. Naturally this failed.

A decade and a bit later, here we go again, begging a very obvious question – what happened to PaCT, why did it fail and get dropped, and why are we here again?

Haven’t we already failed this experiment?

My educated guess, seeing as I was out of the crazy house of educational ‘reform’ by then, was that in spite of all the efforts to try and fit a square peg into a round hole, it proved unworkable.

However ‘she who knows best’ hasn’t been deterred by this and is trying again. My crystal ball tells me that this is doomed to fail, an opinion shared by far more knowledgeable people than me and I will reference a number of articles in coming days that explain the issues in far more depth than I will able to do.

Let’s start with this one by Masterton principal Gareth Sinton:

Under Pressure: Is the New Reporting System Already Cracking Under the Pressure?

‘TL;DR

Narrowed Focus: The shift from a vast “knowledge-rich” curriculum to limited “Progress Markers” forces teachers to overlook the depth of student learning.

Metric Mismatch: New rubrics prioritise student independence and teacher support levels over actual academic mastery and skill complexity.

Artificial Clarity: Despite promises of “ease,” the system is bogged down by excessive documentation and measures that fail to provide parents with a clear picture.

A Reset Needed: The current reporting system feels rushed and flawed, requiring a pause to ensure it accurately measures both knowledge and learner growth.’

More detail:

‘The New Zealand education system is currently attempting to dance to the tune of a massive shift. We started with a vision of a “knowledge-rich” curriculum—a massive, detailed map of everything a child should know. But before the ink was even dry, the transmission started to flicker.

The Curriculum: The heavy, dense “what.”

The Progress Markers: A sudden narrowing. We were told the whole forest mattered, but then they told us to only count these five specific trees.

The Rubric: The ultimate pivot. After being told knowledge is king, we are handed a rubric that asks us to judge “confidence” and “independence.”’

Note the bolded section and what it implies – the so-called knowledge rich curriculum seems to not matter so much when it comes to assessing student achievement. That immediately brings up the question of what knowledge actual matters, why does this knowledge count and that knowledge doesn’t count, who decides either way, and on what criteria?

‘We have been sold that a knowledge-rich curriculum is built on the idea that knowledge is the prerequisite for critical thinking; you can’t “think” about something if you don’t know anything about it. I don’t agree…the world isn’t so binary as that. I value inquiry, student input and creation…alongside explicit instruction around knowledge.

However, the Ministry’s attempt to help measure the knowledge rich curriculum has resulted in the Progress Markers. These markers represent the “knowledge or practices students are expected to be proficient in by the end of a year level”. The issue? They majorly narrow the field. While the curriculum is a vast ocean, the Progress Markers are a few specific buckets of water. If a student is “Proficient,” they are simply meeting these specific markers…able to show a slice of the knowledge and practices for their year level. The issue? What about the rest? The rich, nuanced academic learning in the ‘core areas’ that happens outside these narrow markers is effectively silenced or sidelined. What is measured, matters…and in this case I worry that the markers will become the new default curriculum.”

Gareth raises some very important points here. The attempt to provide a workable number of assessment points means distilling the curriculum down to a minimal number of criteria, with a very questionable ideology undermining this. 

Is the Ministry of Education saying (and we must remember that the Ministry serves the Minister- therefore this is Erica Stanford’s policy) that the identified progress markers will provide an accurate indication of whether each child has made progress in their learning over the year? If so, that is arrant nonsense. Why is the knowledge assessed more important than that which was not assessed? What about their learning skills? The ability to apply their learning?

Overseas countries which have jumped on the global education reform bandwagon have gone far further than this government (which is to their credit) and introduced nationwide standardised testing systems, twice per year in many cases, such as the NAPLAN system in Australia. The same criticism of selecting criteria to be tested can be made, and further, it has been found that schools are forced to forget about ‘education’ and instead ‘teach to the test’. 

When teachers and schools are judged on test outcomes, then they are of necessity forced to do this in order to escape negative consequences.  The SMART system is setting up New Zealand schools and teachers to do exactly the same thing, especially when the new ERO procedures will base their school reviews on these results. And so the educational opportunities of our children go round and round and down the plughole.

The SMART assessment criteria is based on the use of rubrics that describe differing levels of ‘achievement’. Gareth provides, and comments, on this example:

‘The Rubrics dropped last week…since the guidance initially released in December we have been promised rubrics, rubrics that would help translate the Progress Markers into an ‘informed decision’ against the new curriculum. To help us define the difference between ‘consolidating’ and ‘proficient’. When you look at the new rubrics for Reading, Writing, and Maths, the “pressure” reveals a structural flaw. On the left, you have the progress markers (e.g., “form lowercase letters correctly”). But move to the right—where the actual labelling/grading/judging happens, and the skills vanish.

Instead of providing nuance on how well a student is performing those specific markers, the rubric shifts entirely…it becomes disconnected from the knowledge children ‘should’ be mastering, and instead is around how the learner is operating. How much support they need, how well they recall information, how they reflect, and how they apply learning in new contexts.’

You’ll note the how the criteria for each level builds on the previous one – this identical to the system used in the New Zealand Curriculum of 30 years ago – this failed then so why is this being repeated. Back then I described this system as educational paint by numbers, you end up with some kind of end point but it’s not true education, in the same way as completing a paint by numbers project results in a picture, but it’s not art.

Gareth’s next comment is important.

‘Let’s be clear…reporting on a learner’s way of working is not the enemy. In fact, it’s the part of the song where the melody soars. “Why can’t we give love that one more chance?” As teachers, we want to report on a child’s growing independence. We want parents to know their child is becoming a brave problem-solver in Maths and a self-correcting editor in Writing. The dispositional side is the soul of learning. The problem isn’t that we are measuring it; the problem is that the Ministry appears to have tried to align it to curriculum success.’

And so is this:

‘Parents are being promised “clarity.” They are told that “Proficient” means their child is meeting curriculum expectations, but there will be no consistency or clarity when the rubrics have muddied the waters so much. If schools start to interpret the rubrics differently…is this the promised clarity? Teachers are being promised “ease”. They are told that they have the tools and resources to do the job, but there is no ease in using these new documents…just downloading what you need from Tāhurangi means sifting through 23 documents, one of which is over 30 pages long!’

Poor teachers. Their time is limited, they work so hard as it is. Of the time they have available, they have to divide it between focussing on the teaching side (which is the one that really matters) and the paperwork side. From my perspective this new SMART system will eat up far too much of the paperwork side  – guess who suffers from that.

‘We want consistent reporting across the country. We want parents to understand where their children sit. We should celebrate academic progress and we should celebrate the learner. But by narrowing the enormous knowledge rich curriculum to a few markers and then judging progress based on “support levels” rather than “skill mastery,” we are putting the whole system under pressure. This all feels so rushed, so disconnected and all a bit too much. The reporting aspect of this curriculum should be paused, re-evaluated and given “one more chance”. Otherwise, clarity and consistency across schools will be out the window.’

More paperwork, less teaching

As you will have seen in the media, a large number of educators have written to the Minister expressing their concerns about the speed of implementation of the new curriculum. Erica, as you’d expect, is disregarding their concerns. We’ve been here before again 30 or so years ago – the common factor being an ideologically driven National government.

The outcome of all past and current National led government education policies is an educational strait jacket.

Poor schools, poor teachers, poor kids.

I will write more about SMART in coming articles.