Today's pupils are beyond compare

PAT BASKETT asks whether students in Tomorrow's Schools are better off academically and discovers that no one knows.

But it is clear that the achievement gap between schools has grown.

Ask Bruce Adin, president of the Auckland Primary Principals' Association and principal of Fairburn School, Otahuhu, about education standards and he laughs.

"We don't know where they are but we all know they're falling. They've always been falling. But that's because of the facile nature of human memory."

The only serious part of his reply is the first phrase: no one knows whether the 1990s generation of students are better equipped academically. Statistics do not exist for achievement levels pre- and post-Tomorrow's Schools.

And if they did, would they be measuring the same things when so much has changed?

Cedric Croft, of the Council for Educational Research, says: "It sounds simple to measure standards but because of changes to the curriculum and classroom practice, it's impossible -- even over four years.

"The materials used are different, and different things are emphasised."

But there are indicators of progress, or its lack, both nationally and internationally which give clear cause for alarm. While Tomorrow's Schools has allowed the well-resourced to flourish, its promises remain meaningless for the less well-off.

One of these indicators is the relatively new National Education Monitoring Programme, which uses four years as the time-frame to measure how children's abilities improve. It was established in 1993 to assess and report on the achievement of primary school children in all areas of the curriculum and it carried out its first round of tests in 1995.

Each year, two groups of children totalling 2880, one from year four (ages 8 or 9) and another from year eight (the last year of primary school), are tested from 260 randomly selected schools. Last year three areas were tested: maths, social studies and information skills.

The programme's reports are designed to provide detailed information about what children can do -- a snapshot of their knowledge, skills and motivation.

This kind of testing is different from traditional examinations, as information sent out with last year's maths report shows: "National monitoring reports aim to reflect the richness, scope and comprehensiveness of the curriculum ... The reports do not present a summary mark for each learning area because that would give a very inadequate picture of student learning achievement."

If we also monitor how the tests change in order to reflect the changing curriculum, it ought to be possible in the long term to identify which aspects of children's learning are improving, staying constant or declining.

The familiar PAT (Positive Achievement Tests) scheme was never designed to provide that information. It ranks pupils by comparison with their peers in reading, maths and listening, and enables teachers to group pupils according to their abilities.

For many years New Zealand has taken part in international studies of achievement in literacy, maths and science.

Reports from the Third International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS), undertaken in 1994 and released last year, show that only 3 per cent of our students reached the top decile for maths.

These disappointing results are tempered by remarks from Mr Croft, the chief research officer in learning, curriculum and achievement at the research council.

He points out that our maths curriculum focuses more on problem-solving than on the rote learning of academic questions, which are the strengths of high maths achievers from Japan and Korea and which are more easily tested in the TIMSS.

But the key finding in the TIMSS report -- that home factors were strongly related to maths and science achievement in every country -- matches the statement in our own National Education Monitoring Programme maths report that students' performances show a clear correlation with socio-economic environment.

High-performing students are found in well-resourced schools which tend to be supported by well-resourced communities. Lower achievers are clustered in schools that serve less-affluent areas.

The polarisation of rich and poor that has increasingly characterised society since the economic reforms of the mid-1980s is reflected in our performance in international literacy surveys.

In a paper published in Reading Research Quarterly, Dr Ian Wilkinson, of Auckland University's School of Education, points out differences between surveys carried out in 1970-71 and in 1990-91 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

The earlier survey showed that variation in achievement among students in New Zealand was at about the median of all other countries. Twenty years later this had changed.

"At the 14-year-old level New Zealand had the widest spread of scores of all countries ... It had more good readers than any other country, but it also had a large number of poor readers. At the 9-year-old level the spread of scores was again very wide ...

"Clearly all is not well in New Zealand's highly literate and print-oriented society. Evidence from the IEA surveys points to a growing range of ability and large sub-groups of children whose reading needs are not being met."

This discrepancy, and the failure of Tomorrow's Schools to address it, was pointed out in the Ministry of Education's briefing paper for the incoming Government in 1996, which said: "There are students at many schools, especially those in low socio-economic areas, who are disproportionately affected by poor health, family disruption, and social factors ... The needs of these students must be addressed if learning is to be effective."

The paper estimated that 25,000 families might be caught in a serious cycle of disadvantage. "They need the best systems and the highest-quality staff in order to identify and respond to the factors which negatively influence students' learning."

A significant number of the 54 schools identified as having serious problems were in South Auckland and rural towns. In Manukau City, 24 per cent of students leave school with no formal qualifications, compared with only 14 per cent of North Shore students and a national average of 18 per cent.

The most profound examination of Tomorrow's Schools was carried out for the Council for Educational Research by senior researcher Dr Cathy Wylie. Her report, Self-Managing Schools Seven Years On, was published last year.

She writes: "Had the ... reforms worked as intended, then one should expect to have seen some positive changes in the schools that serve disadvantaged students. School-based resources have not increased at these schools: involving parents as trustees of the board does not of itself bring substantially more financial or human resources into these schools ... Competition is favouring the already favoured schools.

"It cannot be said that on the evidence we have available to us ... [that] decentralisation in its present form ... is likely to narrow these gaps."