A national failure of school standards

Weighing a pig won’t make it fatter. Sounds obvious I know, but the sentiment is actually quite important, as a national debate about measuring the performance of government agencies gets under way. The central question is this: Given the government spends a lot of our money on education, and health and welfare and so on, how do we know the money has been well spent?

In a commercial undertaking, we might judge performance by profit, but in say, the education sector, how do we know whether all that money is actually making a difference? Are children getting better at reading, writing and maths for example, or are things going downhill?

It is not just the government that’s involved. Parents may reasonably want to know how their children are getting on at school, and whether they are measuring up. Government and parents may also be interested in how well or badly particular schools are performing. The last government was keen to answer these questions, and part of its answer was to introduce National Standards in reading, writing and maths for children in their first eight years of schooling.

Teachers were required to assess and measure the performance of all children against these standards at least twice a year. Parents were told whether their child was below the standard, well below the standard, at the standard, or above the standard. Schools were required to set National Standards targets each year, and their performance against these targets was made public. Poor performance was a signal for some sort of remedial action to be taken.

This target setting was not confined to National Standards, the same applied to NCEA performance in secondary schools. And of course the same idea was applied across the public service in health and social welfare for example. The underlying philosophy was clear: setting targets and measuring performance makes people accountable and gives them an incentive to improve their performance. Ok, but this is where the pig comes in.

Many teachers and principals think the focus on measuring a child’s performance, and the target setting that comes with it, has been a disaster, for at least three reasons.

First, teachers increasingly concentrated their teaching on ensuring that their children passed the required assessments. As a result, teaching became more and more narrowly focussed on the requirement of the assessment (measuring performance) to the exclusion of other equally important learning activities (science, art, music, technology, entrepreneurship, creativity, problem solving, to name a few).

Second, the focus on the target encouraged some teachers to cheat on the assessment because their ability to meet the target was seen to be a reflection of their competence.

This situation was made more complex because there were few systems put in place to ensure that teachers across the country were likely to be consistent in their judgments. The assessments in other words were not particularly credible. Third, some children who through no fault of their own were not meeting the targets were deemed to be failures at a very early age, maybe never to recover from that stigma.

Measuring the pig, in other words, did not make it fatter. In fact, it made it rather sick. Or putting it more plainly: assessing students against these National Standards probably did not make students better at reading, writing and maths. It just caused a lot of problems. Our new government has dispensed with National Standards (and all public sector target setting). The problem now is that no one is quite sure what happens next. Here’s a suggestion: let’s do nothing. Our teachers are talented professionals.

They already teach, assess, and grade their students as part of their normal monitoring of student progress against our world class national curriculum. They already take action to help children who are not doing so well because doing this it is an integral part of any teaching process. And parents are already normally kept informed.

National Standards didn’t really help them to any of that. Teachers should be trusted to get on with their jobs, feeding their children with good creative, exciting, and mind expanding teaching, without interference from bean counters who insist on trying to measure everything.

As Einstein told us: ‘‘Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.’’ If there are teachers and schools who are not doing their jobs they will be pulled up by their principals and Education Review Office (ERO), and dealt with. The health of the whole system can be checked by extending the current use of national sampling assessments which the Ministry of Education already has.

And just to be clear: to make a pig fatter you need to feed it, not weigh it.