Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust
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Your point about the way schools are likely to handle disabled students is brought into sharper focus by the current moves to close remaining specialist residential units that provide an option for some students. Ian Leckie is unamused.
Didn't the last Labour government lose a major court case against forcing all disabled students into mainstream classes regardless of the actual level of support available in them?
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I've heard from one primary school that the data gathered for the ministry is now being assessed on a much lesser scale than the curriculum demands. The reason I presume is to make sure the kids all "pass" in numbers such that National Standards can be declared a success.
I know that as a parent I have seen a degrading in the information the school is handing out, as we move from a comprehensive report that details how each child is doing to a "failing/coping/excelling" model.
Incidentally, how much trouble is it going to cause a child to have "failing" stamped on their forehead in their very first report aged five or six? Simply unacceptable.
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Paul Brislen, in reply to
Very good point - initially we were told that kids with various disabilities would be excluded from the school's assessment - now they're back in.
This means my own primary school, which has a large ESOL contingent (still can't say cohort without thinking of pirates) and an equally large disability unit with a number of kids who aren't measurable in NS terms will be disadvantaged and potentially labelled as failing when in fact they're doing a fantastic job by all accounts.
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Thanks for the analysis, Russell. This government's legacy in the education sector will be a mess that will take years of rebuilding. Consultation? Just another form of red tape, really, that gets in the way of business. Sorry, education.
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Sacha, in reply to
Human Rights Commission provides a useful paper about disabled students' access to education (pdf, 241KB), including reference to the 2002 'Daniels' case.
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Oh I am really, really fucking angry now. Later I'll write a polemic about teaching to the test, and another vitriolic spew about this government's blind arrogance and insensibility, but for now I'm going to go and be very very fucking angry for a few minutes. And once I calm down even slightly I'll probably make some more phone calls about leaving the country, too.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Oh I am really, really fucking angry now.
I'm honestly having trouble calming down. It's just a basic failure in the duty of care we expect of any government of any stripe. And it will have consequences for years to come.
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Great post, couldn't agree more. We will look back at this Government and wonder how they managed to trample all over process and make decisions without consulation, abuse Urgency, and ignore harmful results on New Zealander's.
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merc,
Certainly as a parent I know I've always been very keen to have information about the performance of schools my children have been at...
Dudes either got his tense screwed up or he's been post evaluating his kids school performance after they left.
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Did it strike anyone else as a sort of ‘up yours, we’re still the boss’ to teachers- who were seen to have won a very public victory over class sizes?
ETA: on a ‘meta’ analysis (and related to Josh Marshall’s ‘bitch-slap’ theory of politics) if you can forget about the content (which is destructive etc etc) there’s an underlying message of ‘we’re still in charge’ that might play well to the ID of some core National voters. Less about policy than a message about power and ’control’ after a perceived set-back?
Stupid, off-the-cuff, and deeply counter-productive to NZ education- but also the inevitable result of the ‘national standards’ idiocy, which has thrown away a great deal of our education money (and good-will) into a system that has failed world-wide, where-ever it’s been tried…
Angry, yes, surprised, sadly no :( -
I've just added this to the main post, but for an insight into the implications of "teaching to the test", please read Jolisa Gracewood's account of her experience as a parent in the US.
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This is so infuriating. My eldest is a new entrant and I've heard from the school about it's view of NS and the latest changes. The teachers are warning us of the potential problems, especially for kids with learning difficulties. I wish they could just get on with teaching.
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Sacha, in reply to
Less about policy than a message about power and ’control’ after a perceived set-back?
+1
Handy distraction from the heat on asset sales too. Political game-playing with real people's lives makes me sick.
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A summary of the issues regarding National Standards and autistic students, including a report from the Education and Science select committee which considered this problem several times, 2009-2011.
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I particularly liked the way John Key tried to frame the whole thing as the fault of the media.
It wasn't National's fault for introducing standardized tests, it wasn't National's fault for collecting the data ... it was the media's fault for using OIAs to get at that data!!
OMFG
Policy by ideology not evidence then blame the media for exposing the problems.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Mark it farces...
And it will have consequences for years to come.
I fear they are betting that Charter Schools will save the day,
and we'll see a drop off in the fully formed and informed adults quota for a generation or two... -
Thank you for this Russell.
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Carol Stewart, in reply to
I think it's worse the way in which he justifies it in terms of being parent driven. It is beyond appalling that he seems more worried about what parents think than about having a constructive relationship with the education sector.
With parents "desperate" to measure school quality, league tables created by the Ministry of Education could be the best solution, Prime Minister John Key says.
FFS! What is wrong with ERO reports as a measure of school quality?
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I almost feel a kind of parental survivor's guilt about this as my youngest is now in her final year of school.
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A year is a long time in politics. But Prof Gluckman politely suggested to the govt back in April 2011 that better Evidence Based Policies would be a really really good idea.
From the report:Foreword
The public good is undoubtedly advanced by knowledge-informed policy formation, evaluation and implementation. The challenge is how to do better in two related domains: the generation and application of knowledge to inform policy making, and the use of scientific approaches to the monitoring and evaluation of policy initiatives.And just to make sure this geezer was not speaking above his station:
As Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister I have the brief to promote discourse that will lead New Zealand to better apply evidence-based knowledge and research across all domains of public endeavour.
The crux:
1. Preamble
Democratic societies make decisions and policy based on many inputs, including fiscal considerations, societal values, prevailing public views, and the ideals and vision of the government of the day. But democratic governments want to make good decisions and at the base of such decision making should be the use of high quality information and evidence, both in developing new policies and in evaluating current policies. Decisions made in the absence of such informed background material are, by definition, less likely to be effective or efficient and can entrench policies which may be of little value. Thus governments can become constrained by earlier policy decisions that are not easily reversible because there may be a popular or political perception that they are effective when in fact they are not.(My emphasis)
Please Prime Minister, it is time you refreshed your memory and organised a fireside chat with Sir Pete. After all, you hired him to tell you like it should be. -
That's not all...
'white flight' from low decile schoolsSecondary Principals' Association president Patrick Walsh said...
"The only credible reason would appear to be 'white flight' from low decile schools and that would indicate that, in the school sector at least, there is a growing division on ethnic and socio-economic lines, which I would suggest is not a good thing for New Zealand society.''
And...
School leak list growsDocuments released to the Herald under the Official Information Act show a total of 273 primary, intermediate and secondary schools - dozens of them in Auckland - are now listed in ministry documents as having a "defective" or leaky building.
Now remind me, who was in charge when our building standards were reduced to increase profits for big business?.
These Guys.
Budget 2012: Government cuts back housing schemeMr Heatley said every dollar invested with non-government providers delivered two to three times as much social housing as the Government could provide.
I have to agree, this Government is not as efficient as a bunch of money grubbing property developers at fleecing the poor and they seem to be proud of the fact.
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Did it strike anyone else as a sort of ‘up yours, we’re still the boss’ to teachers- who were seen to have won a very public victory over class sizes?
That was my immediate reaction when I heard it this morning. The cynicism would be astonishing if it wasn't so dispiriting.
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merc,
"Some parents assume the decile ranking is a proxy for the quality of the school and that can be very unfair ... I have gone to a number of decile one to two schools that I would more than happily send my own children to, and decile 10 schools I wouldn't send them to."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10813891
I just love the way this guy frames things, so folksy and non-academic...oh wait. -
Anyone else get the creeps when the "New Zealand Initiative" is allowed (eg on RNZ this morning) its self-described role as ‘an independent think-tank’.
We know it’s taken something from the New Zealand Institute. But probably not, for example, its funding. that’s more likely to come from its other parent- the Business Round Table.
BRT are quite entitled to have an opinion on education- or anything else- but they need to own it. They are undoubtedly aware that much of the public perceive the BRT ‘brand’ as toxic. Shopping their ideas around as the ideas of ‘an independent think-tank’ is dishonest.
We haven’t forgotten what an ‘independent social policy think-tank’ the Maxim Institute was …
(Joined the mailing list for the ‘NZ Initiative’- which seems to have lead, almost inadvertently, to my first ‘tweet’- asking them where their funding comes from. If anyone else wants to join in, an small tsunami of such requests on twitter might be interesting :) -
Sacha, in reply to
he seems more worried about what parents think than about having a constructive relationship with the education sector
Govt is cynically trying to re-establish a wedge between parents and professionals.
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