Posts by Russell Brown
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Sacha,
how little Jemima compares with Sally, Rangi or Usuf
I guess so. It goes from "How is my child doing?" to "Is my primary-school-age child beating other kids?"
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to BenWilson,
So what you’re discovering is pedagogical behaviour of the education system, the complete no-brainer that any 13 year old can see, that the slower kids need (and frequently get) more help. That this is not more strongly correlated is what is surprising, and that to me suggests teachers actually get results, which rather tallies with NZ’s performance against other nations on educational measures.
Our older boy was flagged as in need of Reading Recovery at primary school. He got it – and it was transformative. The system works pretty well at well-resourced schools. I have no idea what national standards would have told us as parents that we weren’t already told.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Keith Ng,
Truth to power. Public accountability with public money. Etc.
I think the point of contention here is that, instead of “truth to power”, this is just “some bullshit interpretation of meaningless numbers to power”.
You could also argue that that "truth to power" would have involved the press screaming blue murder about the national standards legislation being shoved through under urgency.
And then perhaps about the minister's refusal to countenance a trial of the standards scheme.
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OnPoint: Because Statistical Rigour, in reply to Angus Robertson,
People are smart enough to use this in conjunction with other sources of data.
And yet, not smart enough, apparently, to understand decile rankings.
Because publishing this data, no matter how flawed, allows readers to expand on their existing data sets and gain a better understanding of the school system.
I'm not sure how an unmoderated set of standards that aren't synchronised with the actual primary school curriculum will really increase anyone's understanding of the school system -- especially if people are reading the information in the newspaper.
If they read the front page of the Weekend Herald, they'd have been told that our children are "failing" at reading. But is that it? Or is it more likely that the big disparity in the numbers achieving over the standard in writing (17.19%) and reading (35.49%) is that the reading and writing standards are out whack? Even without the bung journalism, I'm struggling to see where it tells me five eighths of fuck all.
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OnPoint: Because Statistical Rigour, in reply to Sacha,
Keith has a post with a refresher lesson for us on correlation and significance.
I've just realised that Jonathan Milne is actually the author of both the story about the failure of national standards in Britain and the "big class sizes are awesome" news story.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So not only is the y axis full of shit but so is the x axis?!?!?
It appears so.
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OnPoint: Re: Education, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
National Standards don’t address a comprehensive education.
No – and they don’t measure performance against the primary school curriculum either. But the level of resourcing available at tiny rural schools is extremely likely to have an impact on national standards scores. A single-teacher country school will not, for example, have a reading recovery specialist on staff.
BTW, it seems to me that the HoS story isn't actually based on class size as such -- that information is not collected by the Ministry of Education -- but on pupil-teacher ratios across schools. Which isn't the same thing.
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Interesting commentary from the Herald on Sunday’s Jonathan Milne, who used to work for The Times Educational Supplement:
The English regime is beginning to fall apart amid revelations of grade inflation – schools and bureaucrats pushing up the numbers each year so politicians can boast about education successes on the hustings.
And, this year, the UK Government abandoned standardised writing tests for 11-year-olds.
England’s stringent assessment regime has been widely panned. Yet strangely it is actually better in some respects than New Zealand’s new and shonky national standards.
At least in England, the test results are checked and moderated before the inspectors print off the spreadsheets and decide which schools to close down.
English schools are ranked on value-added data – how much children improve from one year to the next – rather than having the raw test results of privileged kids from the leafy suburbs compared directly with those from the concrete council estates.
Value-added data has revealed some of the best teaching was being done in some of the poorest schools. It was in these schools that teachers were really making a difference.
Here, the raw, unmoderated results of 5- and 6-year-old kids in the poorest corners of Otara and Cannon’s Creek will be lined up alongside those from Parnell and Khandallah.
It’s odd how the papers are telling us national standards are misleading and destructive – but also drawing wild conclusions from the same standards data.
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Ben Gracewood has considered the Herald on Sunday's dumbarsed attempt to use the data to back a proposition that large schools and classes improve your child's education and demonstrated that the key to your school achieving well is for it to have a name starting with "i".
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The Herald on Sunday has tweeted this:
National Standards – marking the teachers. In tomorrow’s Herald on Sunday we crunch the numbers and find out how your primary school rates.
Well, no, these numbers won’t let you “measure the teachers” at all, HoS editors. You just concocted that angle to play on a popular prejudice.
This league table thing’s going swimmingly so far.