The secondary teachers' union has welcomed one Auckland school's decision to abandon international examinations and offer only the NCEA. The Post Primary Teachers' Association would like to ban schools using the International Baccalaureate and the Cambridge exams entirely, believing they undermine our homegrown educational credentials for school leavers.
It is concerned that schools offering the alternatives tend to imply the national qualification as not sufficiently challenging and lacking credibility. But it also blames the Government for using the NCEA to set national achievement targets as a measure of the return on educational investment. The union says the targets encourage "credit farming", by which it means schools siphon students into courses that offer the most credits, though they might not be the courses the students need most. A paper circulated by the PPTA claims students "seek out courses which are perceived to deliver the most credits for the least effort".
This is a concern if true. But it seems not to have occurred to the union that its portrayal of "credit farming" in the NCEA also reinforces the very perceptions it resents. The public should be insisting the PPTA's members - who are professionals, as it often reminds us - do their utmost to encourage students to take courses that let them reach their educational potential.
Perhaps the union's dislike of Government targets may have more to do with the fact the Government is National and the union has no desire to help it get credit when students hit its targets.
In fact, the Government gets little credit in this regard. The targets do not attract much public attention. Most people will not know its main educational target is an 85 per cent pass rate at NCEA Level 2, let alone whether it has been achieved.
