Angela Roberts: Education is about more than measuring grades

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There was a good question in the Herald editorial yesterday about the National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA), amongst a fair bit of confusion and misinformation. The writer asks, "Without a national achievement target, how would the PPTA [Post Primary Teachers' Association] suggest the performance of the education system be checked?"

There is a simple answer and a more complicated one. The simple answer is by using the NCEA, but there's no need for an arbitrary target to do it. Just like the All Blacks don't set out to score a certain number of tries, penalties and conversions in each game, they want to get as many as possible, why do we need a nationally mandated target for how many students should be achieving the qualification?

Yes, we should use and report on NCEA achievement year by year, and look at where things are going well and where they aren't, but an arbitrary number picked out as a 'target' doesn't help with this.

And there are risks associated with the target, both for the students and the validity of the qualification. We're hearing from some schools that the Ministry of Education is encouraging a triage approach to getting students through NCEA, where the most effort and resource is poured into those on the cusp of getting it, as that's where the greatest 'return on investment' is made in terms of measurable gains. This can mean that students at the 'top' and 'bottom' of cohorts miss out.

While the editorial is right that the public should be able to trust teachers' professionalism in the courses they encourage students to do, and their integrity with assessment decisions, we've got a system where the incentives are pushing the other way. A qualification, like a currency, is a construct that only works as long as people agree that it's valuable. Constant grade inflation, which the current target promotes, can undermine this.

But the more complex answer to how we should measure the performance of the education system is more interesting. What the editorial writer, and seemingly to some extent the Government don't get, is that any qualification is a proxy measure, and the intent of an education system isn't just credentialing students and spitting them out with a piece of paper with some grades on it.

Some research based on the Dunedin longitudinal study looked at the participants' sense of happiness and wellbeing in their 30s and correlated it with various data on their teenage years. A strong finding was that good social-connectedness at high school was a much better predictor of future wellbeing than academic results. Yes, formal qualifications matter and create opportunities, but schools shouldn't be single mindedly delivering credentials to meet politically expedient targets, at the expense of the rest of their work, which the New Zealand Curriculum sets out so well.

The editorial ends by stating "meaningful learning surely produces measurable results". Perhaps we should be thinking about different sorts of measures to complement the ones we have now. Some of these could be national monitoring type measures that don't assess every student but use statistically valid samples (for overall system performance), student health and wellbeing data, portfolios of learning, or tracking students beyond school as they transition into adulthood.

This range of measures would recognise that education is not one dimensional, and that students are not well served by pretending it is.

If we had a de-politicised NCEA and more sophisticated and nuanced measures to judge the success of schools and the system, teachers would be able to get on with delivering the broad and meaningful education that parents and students want.

Angela Roberts is the president of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association.