Some posts don’ t make me popular with either friends or opponents but I think it is about time to have a go at a couple of myths around the employment and payment of teachers.
First, John Roughan who bases his column on his father’s experience as a principal and thinks it is too hard to dismiss a teacher.
Competition for pupils would force principals to get rid of the odd staff member who should be doing something else and reward the rest at last with decent pay.”
Times have changed since then. I introduced training for first time principals and then principals more generally; expanded the Ministry contracts for principal advice; and funded the School Trustees Association’s employment advice stream for employers. Tolley has cut the vast majority of this.
Employment matters were an important part of all those streams of advice. Boards and principals have a much better understanding of their options with poor performers, including dismissal, than when John’s father was a principal and struggled with what they considered a hopeless task.
Modern assessment systems including NEMP and asTTle give clear evidence when students don’t make progress. Useful in the rare, contested cases.
And the NZEI has played a very positive role. They have for years wanted the regard in which teachers are held in society to be improved. They know that moving poorly performing teachers on is important to their professional and pay ambitions. They have paid a very positive role in the Teachers’ Council. They insist on proper process but have often been harder than others because of their knowledge of the harm a bad teacher can do – especially in a small primary school.
Because the process is so effective, bad teachers are now more likely to resign than be sacked. A small proportion do make it to other schools but that will stop when Tolley gets round to progressing the legislation requiring early notification that she stalled in the house in the middle of last year.
Secondly, there is a widespread impression that it is not possible to reward teachers based on their performance rather than merely on experience and qualifications.
As an aside, the best performing schooling system in the world (Finland) pay very, very well, require a Masters degree and only accept one in eight applicants. They don’t have a performance component but use a high trust professional model.
In New Zealand, we have a system called units, used in primary and secondary schools. They are worth $3k+ each. Added on a temporary or permanent basis to salary. From memory, the last pay round put 10k more units into primary schools. There aren’t any limits to the number a teacher can be allocated and the principal has discretion in their use. In good schools, good teachers get them.
So sorry to destroy a couple of myths. Bad teachers can be and are being fired. Good teachers are paid more.
Doesn’t stop Key and Tolley trying to use the arguments to promote their so-called standards. I think they probably should be in the group of 88% of parents who admit they don’t understand the standards system and how it is proposed to work according to yesterday’s Herald.
Well-destroyed. But you’ll have to nail these messages to people’s foreheads to make them stick. The current debate exposes a deep misunderstanding of who teachers area and what they do, right through to ministers in the present government. If I were a recent graduate with an interest in teaching, I would read Ms Tolley’s and MR Key;s comments and wonder if I should move on to another career option. It must be deeply distressing for many teachers to be the butt of ill-informed government comment, in defence of the indefenceable.
Danyl makes a good comparison (http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/national-standards-raw-anecdata/):
“By way of analogy, imagine if Sue Kedgley somehow became Minister of Health and cheerfully told all the doctors in the country that they had to treat their patients with crystals and homeopathy, refusing point-blank to negotiate.
The doctors would ‘object’, and the debate would quickly be politicised, with the opposition lining up to support the doctors and Kedgley declaring that the health system was about what’s best for patients not best for doctors, blaming resistance on an evil conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies – while the doctors threatened to strike and the government’s supporters demanded to know who really ran the health system, the Minister or the right-wing senior doctors union?
So just like the national standards issue, this would look like a politicised, ideological struggle with the usual idiots lining up to take the usual sides – but the core of the debate has nothing to do with politics.”
>A small proportion do make it to other schools but that will stop when Tolley gets round to progressing the legislation requiring early notification that she stalled in the house in the middle of last year
Can you elaborate about the stalled legislation?
There is a bill partly developed under Labour with a number of amendments including some that go to the way the Teachers’ Council works. Gives them a bit more power to be effective including tightening up when schools are required to notify issues with teachers.
Bill probably held up because National lost a vote in committee which would have allowed corporate takeover of boards of trustees. Even Roger Douglas was against the loss of accountability.
How about this for a idea.
Go along with the standards, don’t make a fuss and if after a couple of years they are total flop, you guys will then be able to sit there smugly giving National the big I told you so.
The voters will go WOW those Labour politicians really know what they are talking about, unlike those National clowns, ” I am voting for those guys etc”.
At the moment to the average parent it just looks like your more interested in protecting your union mates than creating a better learning environment for their kids.
Not a vote winner.
Thank you Trevor for this post. My colleagues and I are getting tired of the teacher bashing that is currently occurring (spurred on largely by Key and Tolley) and this assumption that we are all incompetent. This notion that there are no standards for teachers or reprisals for those that are performing badly is a real myth that continues to be perpetuated by the National party.
If a principal feels that a teacher is performing poorly they have options to get rid of the teacher, restrict their movement up the payscale or put them under performance management.
Any good principal will be ensuring that the staff that they manage are scrutinised in terms of their performance. National Standards are not needed to do this. The majority of schools around the country have very clear assessment information on the teachers that they employ.
I just wish that the media would actually act like the fourth estate and start scrutinising National’s press releases, instead of just printing them verbatim.
Corporate takeover of bots? Immm – that does raise some interesting thoughts.
I was a bit disappointed with Ernie on Q & A this morning – Trolley made a mince meat of him and came out looking almost reasonable. I wondered if she had had a quiet word with him backstage and threatened to close his school (like Aorangi) if he was too rough – or some other such threat. Would not surprise me. I have heard him speak on the subject before and he seemed quite low key this morning – much should have been said but was left unsaid – in fact, the most sense come from the parent who wrote in at the end stating that it was all very good for the teacher to tell her her child was failing, and that would be sad, but there was no further resources to support the child. But hey, at least we know they are failing – right? Sorry we dont have the resourcing to help fix the problem.
That for me, is far more important when we look at the processes of Nat Stds. We can be given all the stds in the world to chase after to ‘measure the child’ but unless the resources are actually targeted to where they are needed, it wont stop the child failing and it wont mean they will get the support they need. We can tell already if a child is failing – nat stds will simply reinforce this knowledge – but it does not give schools the support they need to address it. Just more tools to measure it. Super – not.
If schools were told that they could have an increase in the following:
- more reading recovery hours
- more ORRS spaces that are funded correctly
- more speech language therapists (heck, in some parts of NZ a speech lang therapist full stop would be helpful)
- more GSE staff (ed pschs are scarce as hens teeth in some parts of the country – and in others – none availiable)
- resources based on need NOT population – does the public have any idea how many ‘people’ resources the sth island lost to Ack – it was population based and not need based – I acknowledge more people live north of the bombays, but taking resouces off kids who need them on population alone is not going to make the need less…better to fund per need not population)
- etc…
This would win over the ed sector.
I have said it before, no one has an issue with the theory – and its true – we do have a tail, and we do need some schools to pull up their reporting practices – no argument there. But nat stds wont achieve this – and this is what Ernie needed to say this morning.
Trev, it is good to expose some of the misinformation – that is what is needed for the public to realise that this issue is huge – and there is still a heck of a lot of misinformation about the reality of what schools are faced with. Where has the commitment for more resources been? In fact, what is not being said is that some of the resources above have been cut – GSE is a case in point. What is either the nats or lab going to do about that?
Danyls analogy is a load of bollocks.
To put it into health terms, it is not about how patients are treated, it is about measuring outcomes. For example, If 20% of patients being brought into an emergency department were not being treated in a timely fashion, then a health minister would be more than justified in setting a desired standard and asking medical professionals to strive to meet them.
All the government is doing is saying this is a standard that we, as the elected government of the people who own the education system that you are working in, have set. We won’t tell you how to get a student to that standard, that is for you as teachers to determine.
To put it bluntly, as employees, teachers are being told what their job is, but not how to do it.
Also there seems to be a theme to the debate coming from the NZEI and teachers opposed to standards that parents don’t understand the information. Yeah, That’s the way to win parents over! Tell ‘em they’re thick!
@ veryrighty The indication that parents don’t understand comes from a Herald survey in 88% of parents say they don’t.
@Paul. There is special ed review underway now – Grant Robertson is monitoring and likely to do wider consultation on options later in the year.
@ paul.
Agree. Ernie (is it Buutveldt? – not sure) gave a rather poor performance this morning on Q&A. As you say, he almost seemed too scared to stand up to ‘Trolley’. I heard him on Radio NZ last week and he came across strong and confident. It was a pity, but who knows what may be going on behind the scenes.
@Trev – you watch the Nats come and screw over special ed provision – what we wont see is a better system – I suspect that (given the not so favourable ero report on RTLBs) that Trolley will go and put them all out to pasture – which will be an absolute crime for those clusters who are high quality – she did make a flippant comment about using RTLB to put back into classes. And there have already been cuts within GSE – so I suspect this review will not strengthen provision but be a way to cut more funding. Add that mess to Nat Stds and our failing kids are screwed. I am not against a review of spec ed (long overdue) but mistrust the ability of the nats to use if to inform and reform, but to cut, slash and burn. (can’t wait to hear the trite statements and misinformation she feeds the public when she justifies more cutting of resources)
Trevor Mallard says: “@ veryrighty The indication that parents don’t understand comes from a Herald survey in 88% of parents say they don’t.”
Hmmm! Trev! The results to the question ‘Do you understand how the new system works’ are:
Fully : 11.9%
Partially : 61.8%
Not at all : 26.2%
The big question, of course, is how ‘partially’ ‘partially’ is. But to lump all of the respondents in this category with the “Not at all”s does seem to stretch things a bit.
I’m not batting for either side, but these numbers could equally be spun as “almost threequarters claimed at least partial understanding of the way things will work”.
@various – to an outsider it seems very dodgy to suggest that the education minister has threatened someone with whom she was to debate on national TV that if she wasn’t given an easy ride there would be consequences. If this IS the case then it is a scandal and needs to be pursued. If there’s nothing in it then making such an outrageous suggestion just weakens your case in the eyes on the non-partisan observer.
@george – you mean me not various – and have you met her? Not the nice and sweet thing you might expect – and its my hunch not any full on evidence. It just seems odd to me that an articulate and fairly staunch person such as Ernie would let her get away with the smugness and statements she made – as I said, its odd. He, when you hear him, is not easily phased – and Holmes gave him plenty of opps to chase certain issues – it just did not sit well with me. Add to it her references to the things he has ’sat’ on with her, and contributed to, complete with the self rightous and smug way she started, just odd.
These are the lyrics from a song in the states where cleary a form of national standards have happend. This is why im so against National standards as these lyrics seem to point to exactly what is going to happen here.
Not On The Test
by John Forster & Tom Chapin
© 2008 Limousine Music Co. & The Last Music Co. (ASCAP)
Go on to sleep now, third grader of mine.
The test is tomorrow but you’ll do just fine.
It’s reading and math, forget all the rest.
You don’t need to know what is not on the test.
Each box that you mark on each test that you take,
Remember your teachers, their jobs are at stake.
Your score is their score, but don’t get all stressed.
They’d never teach anything not on the test.
The School Board is faced with no child left behind
With rules but no funding, they’re caught in a bind.
So music and art and the things you love best
Are not in your school ‘cause they’re not on the test.
Sleep, sleep, and as you progress
You’ll learn there’s a lot that is not on the test.
Debate is a skill that is useful to know,
Unless you’re in Congress or talk radio,
Where shouting and spouting and spewing are blessed
‘Cause rational discourse was not on the test.
Thinking’s important. It’s good to know how.
And someday you’ll learn to but someday’s not now.
Go on to sleep, now. You need your rest.
Don’t think about thinking. It’s not on the test.
Not On The Test
Sung by Tom Chapin
Written by John Forster & Tom Chapin
© 2008 Limousine Music Co. & The Last Music Co. (ASCAP)
Not on the Test video: Directed by Yuichi Hibi
Edited by Timothy Gregoire
Art Direction: Marie Christine Katz
Production Coordinator: Mary Croke
Paul – no never met her. The nearest I get to the good and great is this blog
By “various” I was including Anne’s comment that he seemed scared to stand up to Anne Tolley. It just seems a fantastic idea (in the true sense of the word). Absolutely outrageous if there’s any substance in it.
Perhaps Ernie was just having an off day. It happens to everyone once in a while.
RE Labour and union bedmates. PPTA put out a CTU ‘how to vote’ pamphlet at the last election which went down badly. PPTA operatives have ‘Labour fundraising’ icons on their desktops when they run curriculum powerpoints for all (ie members and non-members) mmm derr!! And bad teachers also get units.
Pedro – name one PPTA official who runs curriculum powerpoints with Labour fundraising icons. I just don’t believe you.
Bad teachers only get units in schools that allow bad teachers. You sound like one.
The CTU put out a summary of parties’ policies. It did not say vote Labour. From m.emory it said green, maori and labour policies were closest to those of CTU. Hardly a major crime. But from now on you are to either follow the thread or have a break. You are especially warned to stop lying
@ George
I wasn’t meaning anything particularly sinister with my comment. That is your interpretation. But it has been evident for a long time now that Anne Tolley is a bully. Her handling of this whole National Standards debate is more than testament to that!
@pedro… – PPTA are secondary union- and I can’t imagine them doing that – and NZEI make it very clear that they do not say which party they like over anther – but they did put out a leaflet that outlined what each party was planning – and from memory, the pros and cons of each policy – and every party had plenty of pros and cons. It was to inform, not persuade or direct.
I am sure many in the Union are lab supporters, as are at any jobsite in nz – bet some support Nat as well – its not an issue.
In this morning’s Q+A Ernie made some good points that seemed to get lost in the fray as Tolley used her politician’s experience to control the debate.
It was essentially a debate between a supercharged control freak and someone who had a deep understanding of the issues involved, including the uncertainties, but was resigned to enduring the stridency that goes with profound ignorance.
As I posted on Kiwiblog, the NZEI has actually racked up some serious wins so far.
1. Tolley had her ministerial role truncated – never a good look.
2. Key has set up an expert advisory panel – surely that should have been done before imposing new policy.
3 Tolley said she was now taking advice from the NZCER which is on record as holding the view that the proposed standards could (read, will) have deleterious effects for many kids and schools.
It’s interesting that both John Roughan and Matt MCarten, columnists for the Herald, both mention privatisation as part of the agenda. I asked Roughan via comments about doing some real journalism and examining the costs and results of the US voucher system compared to ours, but the Herald obviously doeasn’t run to comment moderation on the weekends.
Hell, I’d do it for free!
Thanks for the reassurance the bad teachers can be fired. It will be great to see the 50% waste of corpuscle teachers gone from my kid’s secondary school. Though, in spite of your confidence, I think that the Peter Principle has been well applied, and the current Principal has risen beyond her level of competence and is aiding and abetting the continuation of incompetent teaching.
Luc – if you’re asking people to do research into voucher schemes can you ensure that it doesn’t focus on examples which will merely support one side of the argument or another?
Doesn’t one of the Scandinavian countries (Sweden?) have a voucher system which appears to work well?
(I don’t know a great deal about this, but I’ve read a couple of throw away comments on other blogs which suggest this is the case and I’d like to know more as the Scandinavian states are frequently held up as good examples for us to follow in a myriad of areas).
It’s an unusual system. The voucher is the only money that is able to be used – there are no top-up fees – so while adopting in New Zealand would mean state dollars could directly fund a King’s education, King’s funding would halve*.
I suspect Roger Douglas would still go for it, but I’m not sure that even the rest of the ACT Party would be on board for that voucher scheme.
*just a guess.
Another significant point that no one seems to have mentioned in this standards discussion is that the software for aggregating and reporting has not yet been developed, and is not likely to be ready for several months. So teachers are going to be drawing nice plunket graphs for each student, plotting points and drawing lines.
Perhaps that is one way for schools to deploy teachers who are less effective in the classroom?
I get the sense that Labour has got its response to the national standards debate completely wrong. I guess it is because those running the response are teachers or quasi-teachers themselves. Classic example of provider capture. It seems to me that parents are saying they want to know how their kids are doing at reading and maths and some assurance that if they are not making the grade some effort is going into fixing it. Fair enough. Key and Tolley have heard this and come up with a plan to give the parents what they want. All we get from Labour is a strident protection of the status quo. They seem to thing their audience are the teacher unions, not the parents. Maybe that’s why National is on 60 percent and Labour on 25 percent in the polls?
Jennifer – teachers and school have really good tools to report to parents. Most use them well. A few might not know how to use them. Lets focus on that group not stuff the system that consistantly one of the best in the world in OECD and like carefully measured studies.
Grant @ 8.33am Hope you run for your board this year. Remember we have more localised control of schools than other similar countries. Exercise it don’t just throw stones.
Trevor, you have confirmed my view. All that talk about “tools” and “OECD” and “measured studies” is meaningless drivel to a parent who wants their kid to get better grades. Rethink your approach and your langauge, or concede defeat.
But the dials on asTTle are great – many parents love them, very easy to understand and I’m not sure tolley has ever looked at them.
Trevor, I guess the 73 percent of parents in favour of national standards are wrong, and you and the teachers and the 14 percent of parents against it are right? Looks like those “dials on the asTTle” are doing the trick, alright?
In IT the most successful support people are those who can tell people what’s wrong and how to correct it in simple language that non-geeks can understand.
Propeller heads who understand computers inside out but who can only communicate in tech-speak, leaving their clients totally bewildered, are normally hopeless in a user-facing role.
The teaching profession needs to consider this analogy. They’re the specialists. They can delve deeply into a very complex issue (a child’s performance) and provide you with a whole essay on each individual pupil given the time. But that would be just like trying to explain to a user who’s lost their broadband connection everything there is to know about TCP/IP. It might be absolutely correct, and provide every bit of information necessary to answer every aspect of the problem, but from a practical point of view it would be useless.
In my experience (and I’ve worked in IT for almost 30 years) when someone starts addressing the users in jargon they’re often trying to raise a smokescreen to cover up something that’s gone wrong somewhere along the line.
It’s not dissing teachers, or showing a lack of interest in your child, to expect sythesis of all the complex info a teacher has gathered into a small number of easy to understand metrices. That’s the real world.
@george – “It’s not dissing teachers,” Really? It seems that way to me sometimes – Your comment about smokescreens suggests that you are saying teachers are hiding something and in my book, thats a diss. (if I took it out of context George – I am sorry)
Lets look at your analogy – you are correct, but sometimes in IT, you need to use some of the jargon – teachings the same. Water it down too much and you lose the gist. By all means make it user friendly, but don’t insult someone by talking down either.
Teachers who are good at what they do know how to explain to the pareht that the child in question is having difficulties in a, b or c – and will go on to say someting along the lines of “this is what I think we should do about it together, these are the resources or programmes I will be using or accessing in order to ensure your child has success, and these are some ways you can assist at home.’
Where the problems come in for the above situation, is when the teacher knows there is an issue, outlines and suggests a course of action, but is then hampered by the complete lack of resources to address – eg: no Reading Recovery allocations, or if older, the resource teacher of literacy can not pick them up (rolls already overloaded and there are no spaces or another child is a reading score lower and the other child is knocked off), RTLB team is full up, etc…
Trust me, if teachers could snap their fingers and get the specialised resources and help they need to address these issues, they would. It just is not as easy as the PM and Trolley would like to make out – I hope I have simplified this senario enough for you to understand without going into an essay using jargon. (Because it is complex – and if I was being hopeful, I would suggest that one of the silver linings from this whole debate is that the public will have some of the realities schools face every day, highlighted, and the lack of resources that will actually address our failing kids, will be highlighted as well and then maybe, in an ideal world, the public would be calling for this to be fixed – For ALL of our kids)
My concern over standards is how they are measure. I have a dear friend, a teacher of 21 years who teachers what we once called “new entrants”. She has great success and has most of them reading and writing well above their age by the time the year ends. This year she has 4 non english speaking students. They speak none. Nada. Zero. We can probably assume at home no English is spoken. If these four fall below the national Standards at year end, are not “where they should be” does that make my friend a failed teacher? I marvel at how everyone is an expert of teaching. Joe and Josephine public are not polled about where to proceed next in research in business or universities, none of us were polled or even asked about ideas for new tax structures… yet so many think that by virtue of having a child in a school they are experts on how teaching works.
slightly righty wrote
“All the government is doing is saying this is a standard that we, as the elected government of the people who own the education system that you are working in, have set. We won’t tell you how to get a student to that standard, that is for you as teachers to determine.”
I think we all agree that there are children failing. Can’t we just jump to national’s solution, whatever it is, rather than pouring money, time etc into determining whether 10% or 20% or 80% of children are failing. In my book if 10% are “failing”, and they clearly are (at least) what will we do to make it better.
The Standards seem to be more populist policy from national to make parents feel like something is being done when in reality any addressing of the “results” of the testing will be years away and will cost so much more than anyone wants to pay. parents ought to be up in arms that their children are being tested (again, because teachers do test and monitor the progress of children now) again rather than given the resources to make them world beaters.
Tracey I agree. I read somewhere that the 20% that are failing are the one’s that have english as their second language, ones with learning problems and ones where education is not valued at home. More testing instead of teaching is not going to help.
But what about how its going to narrow the curriculum? Everyone that is all for this will not make a comment on what they think of the fact that it is going to narrow the curricuulum. Except for the scary poem posted above. Loved it but very spine chilling.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/3284174/Back-to-basics-spells-lost-jobs-at-Massey
This link shows how its going to narrow curriculum.