Tapu Misa: No easy answer on national standards

Overseas evidence suggests the national standards regime will fall short of the benefits promised. Photo / Hawkes Bay Today

Confused about the national standards debate? Perplexed about why there's even a debate about something so sensible? You're not alone.

Having waded through arguments from teachers, academics, unionists and politicians, it's clear there are no plain English, "Plunket" type answers, of the kind Education Minister Anne Tolley promises her new policy will deliver for parents.

Just somewhat complicated ones that take up more space than I have.

It might help to say upfront that I don't think Tolley and John Key are out to destroy the New Zealand education system and mess with our kids' minds.

There's no doubting their absolute conviction that the national standards - which set out benchmarks in reading, writing and mathematics for all children in primary and intermediate schools (but not private schools, which apparently don't need them, or kura kaupapa schools, which have been given time to get up to speed), and require schools to clearly report children's progress to their parents - will lift educational achievement, particularly for the "long tail of underachievement": that 20 per cent of kids said to be failing in our education system.

Those are the kids Tolley and Key invoke when a posse of teachers, principals and academics ask why the national standards aren't being trialled.

Tolley is adamant that a trial isn't necessary; she says she doesn't want another year to go by with more children failing.

That's entirely laudable. But will the national standards regime make the difference she's promising? The evidence isn't on her side.

As educators in the United States and Britain have discovered, standardised tests and benchmarks haven't been the hoped-for silver bullet in education. Not only have they failed to raise achievement levels but they've led to negative unintended consequences.

A major review of Britain's national standards policy released last year was critical of the way the regime had distorted children's primary schooling for questionable returns, the questionable evidence on which key educational policy was based, and the narrow focus on literacy and numeracy.

And just last week, the Washington Post reported that the Obama Administration was proposing to toss out what some educators describe as an arbitrary, high-stakes test score, which under the No Child Left Behind law introduced eight years ago by George W. Bush, punishes schools that don't pass "adequate yearly progress" tests.

As the influential education guru Professor John Hattie has written, national standards are a well-trodden path.

First, there's the identification of an educational crisis, followed by the pronouncement of "lofty goals", and then the creation of standards to identify the failures, and make teachers and schools accountable.

It's always, of course, teachers and schools who must be made accountable.

Hattie says that when it becomes apparent that "the national standards and their associated tests may improve the worst in the system, distort the best, but barely change the average score of the nation", more drastic measures are introduced: more prescriptive testing, for example, and the removal of principals.

Then there's the inevitable league tables comparing schools, and their effect on teachers who teach to the test or standard to try to boost their pass rates, ignoring those at the very top and those at the bottom.

The curriculum narrows, more children are turned off education, but achievement doesn't go up. Of course, forewarned is forearmed and the worst-case scenario that many New Zealand teachers and principals fear may never happen.

Tolley has argued that we've learned from the British and American experience. We're not introducing a national test, for example, and schools are free to use the assessment tools they already use.

But scratch a national standard, says Hattie, and you soon find a test.

Many teachers and schools see the new standards as just another assessment tool in their armoury. Hattie has promised to develop a fairer league table that takes account of the value a school adds to its children, rather than one which just reflects the socio-economic status of the school community.

The Government is also committing extra money to teacher development and to help those students identified as failing, though as one academic has already pointed out, at about $140 a student, it's hardly going to make a difference.

The biggest problem with the standards, as Professor Terry Crooks told National Radio last week, is that they may well undermine our world-class education system and teachers.

(Hattie says we have probably the world's best teaching workforce. In the same ERO report from which Key gets the figure that 30 per cent of our teachers are failing, is a breakdown that assesses the quality of reading teaching for 26 per cent of teachers as "high", 43 per cent as "good", 21 per cent as "adequate", and 10 per cent as "limited".)

No one disputes the need to narrow the achievement gap, but if that's the problem national standards are intended to solve, then I'm inclined to agree with Hattie that the policy is doomed to failure.

He says national standards could either offer "the most wonderful opportunities for refreshing and reinvigorating an already top-of-the-world system", or could be "the most disastrous policy formulated".

Right now, it's hard to tell which.