By John Tamihere
The president of the Auckland Primary Principals Association told members on Friday to tell teachers to stop attending Ministry of Education training programmes on national standards.
President Iain Taylor said they were not standards and therefore not valid and reliable.
He believed the Government's policy would not provide a solution to Minister of Education Anne Tolley's issue of under-achievement.
He advised his members to continue to use robust assessment practices. National standards, he said, risked damaging the motivation and learning outcomes of many children.
There is no doubt we have a large number of children graduating from primary and secondary schools who cannot pass NCEA 2. This large group of under-achievers is masked by a small group of over-achievers.
Lecturers at our universities and polytechs bemoan the poor level of numeracy and literacy of their students. We have a major performance problem, particularly at our primary schools. They are tremendous caregiving sites but very poor education-providing sites.
They continue to fail large numbers of children in literacy, numeracy and comprehension.
Regretfully parents don't start to find out their children have significant difficulties until they become assessed at secondary school. For many this is too late.
We need a national assessment standard for the benefit of parents and children. Education can no longer be left in the hands of education providers called principals who believe they and they alone are the judges of their performance in educating our children.
The debate about national standards and the application of a standard is vitally important for parents and children.
National standards and our education system must continue to focus more fully on the rights of parents and children against principals who continue to believe they know better than everybody solely because they applaud themselves to the top of their little empire and their little world called their school.
All parents want their children to perform well at school. Unlike Taylor, we can no longer tolerate a mishmash of varying standards applied across the whole country.
We must lift the performance of schools rated decile 5 or less.
If these schools require greater resourcing and more capacity to lift the performance of these children, then let us have that conversation. Do not fraudulently raise all sorts of excuses as to why a national standard should not be rolled out.
We must keep coming back to the reasons schools and education systems exist. They do not exist as an employment agency for principals and teachers who have no performance indicators in their job. They don't exist for principals to not comply with the directions of their employer. In every other job they'd be down the road. If principals want to become politicians, they should resign from their job and stand for Parliament.
Sunday News, 27th June 2010