feedback, feedforward, Feedup, feeddown lester.flockton@otago.ac.nz
It is the fashion in our now highly politicised and bureacratised education system to regularly and repeatedly instil buzz words into the oft ill-informed minds of the public and practitioner alike. These words resound like penetrating gongs in a hollow can emptied of educational depth, wisdom, experience and a bright-minded vision. They are words intended to persuade, seduce and infect the multitude of impressionable minds that haven’t the time or inclination to objectively examine and critique the embellishments and intentions that lurk beneath them. They are words that sit on a glossy surface that belies deeper policy intent and mechanism. They are catchcries. They are labels for shiny new silver-coated bullets to be fired at principals, teachers and their students. Take the words national standards, raising achievement, improvement, success for all, quality teaching and investment for example. On their own they sound good. Nothing wrong with them. But dig beneath the surface to see what they really mean in policy-prescribed practice and we find a lot of manufactured myth-based assumption and assertion. Take national standards, a political party panacea intended to fix all sorts of things, including poverty according to the Prime Minister. Without question they have amounted to a huge overinvestment in time, energy, workspace and money, and a commensurate underinvestment in all things concerned with
the furtherance of The New Zealand Curriculum. We’ve had national standards now for nearly five years, and the evidence from the past three of those years is clearly proving them to be a huge disinvestment. Regardless, we know
that central command is pressuring for a good show of results (voters have to be kept onside). We also know that the data used to display those results is widely recognised as error laden, flimsy, of weak reliability, and unvalidated. If proper account were taken of these serious fragilities, then a series of flat graphs would be closer to the truth rather than the illusionary upward creep they are showing.
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So, after five years, more than one in five students continue to achieve below or well below the line despite all of the promise and trumpeting that heralded the introduction of national standards. Clearly the recipe is not working, as numerous insightful professionals predicted from the outset, and with good reason. One reader of this column recently wrote, “Just thought I would drop you a line about our favourite education policy. I was looking back through my archives file yesterday, after our beloved Minister issued her latest set of aggregated nonsense figures. I came across your piece in the NZ Principal of June 2009. As it’s now 5 years since you wrote this, I thought it timely to quote from it: Well, to be fair, we’ll keep an open mind – but expect a full and public apology, restitution of damage, and a full refund if, in say 5 years, despite standards and all that, our disadvantaged children are still below the line on measures of the kind currently used to make judgments. However, should we succeed, the Minister should be made a dame and we should all celebrate with her.” This policy disinvestment is certainly giving no cause for any such accolades or celebration, but don’t hold out for a refund! And don’t expect it to change, because it has grown into a highly overinvested data manufacturing industry built around the manufacture and sale of equally disputable learning progressions. Education Minister Parata insists that National Standards are a “profoundly democractising” tool. For education she has likened
the standards to “what pulse and blood pressure are to a GP”. Both of these laughable displays of excitable rhetoric give nothing but cause for ridicule of their distortions and flawed analogy. Yes, literacy and numeracy are the bread and spread of primary education, but bread and spread on their own do not make for a balanced, nutritious, and health-giving diet. Moreover, bread and spread can be very successfully delivered without the need for expensive wrapping and packaging in the form of national standards. Fortunately, education in our primary schools is not all doom and gloom. Yes, there are a few too many schools that have sorely strangulated the idea and practice of a rich, broad and authentic curriculum by overinvesting time and resources on national standards, while underinvesting in programme and professional development beyond bread and spread. But happily there are many schools that are providing their teachers and children with wonderful learning opportunities that show great understanding of what education for life in a bedazzling and befuddling 21st century is all about. Many are giving national standards the perfunctory attention they properly deserve by deliberately avoiding a preoccupation with disproportionate measuring and weighing of bread and spread. Many have come to see the importance of reinvesting in staff and programme development across the fullness of The New Zealand Curriculum. They are investing in practice that gives the right measure of educational success!
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