It is easy to dislike schoolteachers. They are reviled for many reasons – fair and unfair – but the principal rationale seems to be that they are our first contact with external authority. We accept our parents having a right to tell us what to do: we blanch at such stricture from teachers.Especially teachers with the dress sense of SaveMart and the sensibilities of 1970s' socialists. That may describe secondary school teachers accurately enough, but the primary world is different again. It is now almost a male-free zone gushing Gaia and bran muffins. No wonder boys fall behind and stay behind.
And so into this surreal realm has been injected the future discipline of national standards. An idea so sensible and overdue that one wonders what took so long. The logic is self evident. Except, it appears, to the teaching profession.
In steeling themselves against such external discipline, teacher unions – and their membership – have made themselves utterly risible. They are opposed to defining standards of age-group achievement, opposed to parents knowing their children's level of competence against those standards, and opposed to schools providing such information to the Ministry of Education.
Why? Because they are scared witless by the concept of accountability. That a national tool might soon exist that identifies under-performing schools, under-performing teachers and under-performing kids.
Meanwhile, they promote the lie that they are opposed because decile-one schools are going to get a harder go when the media inevitably collate the results into school league standards. These tables will apparently show – shock/horror – that kids from poorer backgrounds achieve less than kids from wealthier households.
Who would have guessed? I suppose a revelation like that will motivate decile-one students' parents to abandon welfare, get a job, upgrade their skills and aspire to something more for their kids. Even buy the occasional book.
I wish. The fact is the national standards won't make a blind bit of difference to how schools are locally, regionally or nationally perceived. No one expects a decile-one school to produce multitudes of geniuses. Not even genii. There will always be exceptions but the better one's family background, the better one's chances at education and life.
We know this. The teacher unions seem to think we don't. And that we will condemn schools with poorer kids because they are not attaining the same standards as the richer kids.
But it will tell parents, the ministry and the wider public about the difference schools and schoolteachers can impart. Or not. It will be a unique measure of a child's learning progress through primary school. And whether they respond to their teacher. Or not.
More importantly it will tell schools – and parents. Twice a year. And schools have only themselves to blame for the politicians taking control of that agenda.
For years, decades even, they have refused to provide parents with proper qualitative reports as to their child's learning. Most school reports are utterly unintelligible and the face-to-face parent-teacher evenings an exercise in frustration. Mostly because teachers rarely communicate where a child's achievement lies, in comparison to either the class or national norm.
It was not always so. My primary school reports were exercises in brutalism. They gave me clear grades and directly measured me against my peers. Albeit the kids at my school. But teachers refused to praise without good cause or find distractions from learning failure. Being well behaved in class – or kind to animals – did not constitute a glittering future.
Somewhere since then, teachers decided that effort was as worthy as achievement. That struggling was as important as striving. Even if a child was failing. And then it came to be that all comparisons were deemed odious.
To make matters worse every school seemed to adopt its own reporting standard. But most still couldn't tell a parent what they really wanted to know. Where is my child's ability against their peer group? Better or worse? And if worse, what are you doing about it?
That last question seems to have prompted teacher unions into paroxysms. But this country is full of parents who will tell you their child was diagnosed with significant learning difficulties, but far too late.
There is another subterranean theme running through the union dissent. That not all their membership is opposed. Many teachers see national standards as their chance to shine. They perceive them as an opportunity to test their imprint upon their charges. To establish a baseline for the norm of achievement for their age and socio-economic charges, and then beat it.
Better still, to be able to communicate the truth to the individual parent without having to find distracting commentary. And confirm bad teachers in their midst.
Little wonder that the School Trustees Association has thrown its public support behind Education Minister Anne Tolley, and dismissed the objections of teacher unions as illogical. The opportunity to be open, honest and transparent around what a child knows and what they do not, has the capacity to revolutionise teaching standards.
It is only the Luddites who are opposed. They, rightly, fear change. Because it will require them to justify their existence and their methods. And that is no bad thing.