From question time today – the woman is trying to argue that because the Chair of STA got clapped boards support her botched attempt at improving literacy and numeracy. Go figure.
Have a look at the OIA response here.
Update: Tolley didn’t read briefing letter.
Anne Tolley spoke to Roger Kerr and mates about education last night. I trotted along for a listen.
Roger Kerr raised the question of performance pay for teachers. Being the audience it was they all thought performance pay is a good thing. There was no discussion about why they thought it was a good thing, just general agreement that it should happen.
The question I have for those who support performance pay for teachers is – which part of a teacher’s performance will they get paid for?
Common sense says teachers should get paid more if they get students to achieve the National Standards.
So what happens in those schools and regions where students enter a classroom at the beginning of the year well below the national standard? Why would a teacher want to teach in a school like that where despite his/her best efforts the student makes heaps of progress but fails to get over the National Standard ‘line’.
It would simply be a business decision for a teacher to teach in a school in a ‘good’ area, where even mediocre teaching can get a student over the standard. This will result in a migration of teachers to ‘easy’ schools and disadvantaged schools would struggle exasperating underachievement.
Digging deeper, what happens if a teacher does get the struggling student over the line in reading and writing, but fails to in maths?
What happens if a teacher gets 24 out of thirty kids over the national standards line, but six students don’t make it? Is the teacher a good teacher or bad teacher? Eighty percent success isn’t too bad, or is it?
Trouble is that figure equates to 1 in 5 students failing.
Let’s dig deeper still, in the maths curriculum there are 5 strands – number, statistics, measurement, algebra and geometry. Is a teacher a good or bad teacher if the student meets an achievement benchmark in algebra, geometry, statistics and measurement – but not number?
Again that is an 80% success rate, achieving in 4 out of 5 strands in the one curriculum area. But we want kids to be able to achieve in numeracy and literacy, and failing in the ‘number’ strand means the student isn’t numerate.
Is a teacher good or bad if they focus on ‘number’ over statistics, algebra, measurement and geometry?
Are we saying these other strands aren’t important?
If my receipt of a performance pay bonus depended on me making sure kids were numerate over statist-erate, or measure-ate, or algeb-rate or geome-rate, I would focus on numeracy – statistics and everything else can go to hell.
And let’s look deeper again. A class of thirty, 5 strands in maths alone, 30 x 5 = 150 targets a teacher has to achieve to be deemed successful, just in maths. Maths is generally taught about 5 hours a week. Bugger that, if my performance pay bonus depends on the class achieving in maths, I’ll dedicate most of the week to that. A balanced curriculum can get stuffed.
That’s not even counting the 4 strands in science (or is science no longer important), 3 strands in technology (or is technology [R&D] no longer important), 5 different styles of writing, oral language, 4 health and PE strands, dance, drama, and other arts strands, languages etc.
How many strands does a teacher have to make sure each student achieves in before s/he deserves a performance bonus?
Multiply the number of students in a class by the number of strands across the curriculum and a single teacher has thousands of performance targets to meet a year.
Then there are all the other things that teachers do besides making kids learn.
Do they deserve performance pay for – 1) doing duty?, 2) coaching sports teams? 3) being associate teachers of student teachers? 4) being tutor teachers for beginning teachers? 5) liaising with parents, whanau and iwi? 6) taking after school music or art classes? 7) after school tutoring? 
leading professional development and appraisal of peers? 9) organising school discos? 10) fundraising? 11) organising the school play? 12) organising the school fair? 13) organising sports trips? 14) organising the school library? 15) organising the swimming sports, athletics day, 40 hour famine, breakfast club, buses, cross country, art exhibition, assemblies, class camps, community problems solving, peer mediators, restorative justice programme, assessment moderation sessions, interschool quality learning circles, professional development programme, etc, etc, etc.
Is the teacher who just teaches, a better or worse teacher than the one who runs around and gets involved in the corporate life of the school?
Common sense would say that the teacher who just focuses on the classroom would get better results, so teachers should just teach. To hell with everything else.
Roger Kerr made the comment, “How hard can it be? Surely schools aren’t that complex?”
I’m interested in the performance pay model Roger has in mind.
When primary and intermediate school age kids take drugs to school then I think CYFS and the Youth Aid section of the Police should be notified. They might choose to take no action but sometimes the information can provide the vital link that might turn a kid’s life around. Or bust a “P” ring.
Never sure how many of these to post but thought Tolley dismissing the parents who petitioned on her standards almost unbelievable.
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour-Hutt South) to the Minister of Education: When she said yesterday that “This is a bedding-in year for the Standards and feedback from parents is vital”, did she include the feedback from the more than 37,000 New Zealanders who have signed a petition expressing deep concern with the Government’s national standards policy?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) : Yes. I am always happy to receive feedback from parents about national standards. I note, however, that the union that organised that petition has a long history of opposition to the standards and of spreading misinformation. But I say to the member that I will take those 37,000 unionists and I will raise him the 1,050,000 New Zealanders who voted for a National Government to introduce national standards in reading, writing, and maths.
Hon Trevor Mallard: When she said that from the beginning of 2011 some additional funding would be available to support students at primary and intermediate schools who are not meeting national standards, did she mean that additional funding will go to all students who are not meeting national standards via their schools, or only to the schools that are not meeting the national standards overall?
I was at the NZPF Conference in Queenstown today to hear Anne Tolley speak.
The parliamentary library did a paper on National Standards.
Anne Tolley didn’t like it. She forced them to take it down.
That they did is a disgrace and a poor reflection on the speaker who is meant to provide them with protection.
But this millennium the internet works in wonderful ways and the old burn the copies of the papers you don’t like approach is no longer effective. In fact her intemperate outburst has given the analysis a much wider circulation.
The was a great opening of a new kindergarten which is effectively three language nests (Cook Is Maori, Nuiean and Tuvaluan) in Porirua last week. A wonderful concept five years in the making in which the local MP Luamanuvao Winnie Laban played a leading role was nearly spoiled by Anne Tolley.
First Tolley gave a speech from notes that she showed no sign of having glanced at before. And it was very badly drafted. The first half was just her reading out the history of the centre which was on the programme we had been given. And the second half was a cut and paste from the National Party pre election education brochure.
Making a speech for three hundred people is important – even if Tolley doesn’t relate rate Porirua or in particular the people who live there as important. I would have a discussion with staff and often a Ministry official a month or so before the speech to discuss themes. I would work on one or two drafts after my office had done some adjustments to help put the speech into the sort of language I would be more likely to be happy with. Didn’t always stay with the drafts and in fact many of my better speeches were well off script.
But struggling through the way Tolley did helps me understand how some people dislike politicians for being remote.
Second and even worse she took off before the speech from the Wellington Kindergarten’s CEO because she knew there would be an adverse comment on the budget funding announcements.( Btw if they had been made before there was a commitment to the new kindergarten it wouldn’t have happened.) By doing so she snubbed the Pacific leaders who had been invited to open the three sections of the new kindergarten.
Remember the education debate of the 1990s – bulk funding, Remember the solemn promise of Anne Tolley before the election not to go there again. Well she has.
In the budget detail we discover that schools are allowed to drop their staffing 10% below the staffing schedule minima and cash up the difference.
And they are allowed to cash up their property money instead of doing the capital works that the money is allocated for.
I don’t think that funding to either area is so generous that it is appropriate to divert it.
It isn’t just the thin end of the wedge – it is all the change the bulk funders want except the right to reduce teachers’ pay.
As is clear from the clip above there is some history. Labour members are unhappy with the casual approach to facts of some senior government ministers especially at question time. John Key in particular has an Abbott like approach to the truth.
Anne Tolley challenged Sue Moroney’s word when she was in fact quoting Tolley’s own figures. Tolley was just plain wrong but worse she implied that Sue had made up the figures or used them out of context.
The Speaker has been taking a careful but positive role in trying to get the situation sorted out.
His comments to Tolley led to her apology below. Pretty much ritual humiliation for a Minister. Hopefully she will not have a reckless disregard for for the truth again.
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There has been some nonsense from a secondary principal leader today – going as far are suggesting that the Bill of Rights prevents schools from searching when they suspect a student has a knife.
It follows the Hamilton Girls High case.
Lets get it clear – no court will ever find that the safety of students in school should be put at risk by teachers not searching when they believe a student has a weapon.
The real issue is why after having a big summit on the issue early last year Anne Tolley has not fulfilled her promise to resource schools to deal with these issues of violence and is threatening to remove the guidance counsellors who reduce the chances of troubled students becoming violent.
Anne Tolley is truely out of her depth and if people weren’t convinced before then this should do it. Question time yesterday. She gets plenty of support and encouragement early from the Speaker but in the end even he is finding it hard to cope with her stupidity.
She just doesn’t get the fact that measuring alone does not improve literacy and numeracy.
For those without broadband the transcript is below.
Yesterday I asked Anne Tolley about the trials she is having done on NCEA minor standards changes and why her national standards are not being trialled. You judge whether she understands her responsibilities.
Hansard below :-
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour-Hutt South) to the Minister of Education: Does she stand by her statement in regard to national standards that “There will be no concessions, there will be no trial period.”?
I thought Steven Joyce has a bit of a reputation for getting things done.
So I was pretty happy back at the beginning of December when I heard that the project doing school ICT upgrades was to led jointly by him and Anne Tolley, while a slap in the face for the Minister of Education and an early sign of Key’s lack of confidence in her, because I thought “action man” would get the job done.
A couple of weeks ago I wondered why I hadn’t got an invite to see any of the upgrades and lodged a few questions.
I discovered that he had received 18 reports or briefings on the subject since January 2009.
And that despite the very specific announcement – the contract for project management and design hasn’t even been signed yet. In fact no actually progress has happened. I would have thought that work would have been done before deciding how many and which schools were to be included.
So maybe he isn’t as good as his spin.
Anne Tolley has claimed that the fact 81% of schools have signed up for a workshop on her national standards as a success and an “excellent response.”
What it actually means is the material that has been sent to schools has been so inadequate that schools have been seeking out answers to the hundreds of questions they have had.
The workshops have apparently been a shambles with a group of facilitators who clearly do not believe in the processes they are being asked to implement.
What is really interesting is the total ban on any attempt to explain or discuss the policy.
Some of the questions that have been ruled to be policy and therefore not to be addressed in the workshops:-
It is time for Anne Tolley to cut out the spin – and admit that she isn’t properly prepared and either defer the requirement to introduce this shambles, or to trial it.
Prof Elley worked through a few case studies in some depth. This one :-
By the end of Year 4 students will read, respond to and think critically about texts in order to meet the reading demands of the NZ Reading Curriculum. Students will locate and evaluate information and ideas within texts appropriate to their level, as they generate and answer questions to meet specific learning purposes….”
So what does Prof Elley tell us is wrong with the standard:-
1. It does not state how well they should read the texts.
2. It does not state how difficult the texts need to be.
3. It does not tell how difficult the questions are that assess the student’s ability.
4. It does not tell how well they should evaluate the text.
To be fair there was some guidance for teachers:-
The texts used for assessing will often include: Some abstract ideas
Some implicit ideas, to be worked out by inference.
Straightforward text structures
Some compound and complex sentences
Some unfamiliar words and phrases
Other visual language features
Figurative language (similes, metaphors, etc)
He makes the point that each of these points requires further teacher judgement.
And the one of the world’s leading assessment experts uses pretty simple language to outline why moderation becomes necessary to have a national standard. He reminded us that the development of NCEA moderation took about a decade – and even after a few years refinement it is still not perfect. The idea that you could have a properly moderated national standard in a few months is just a nonsense because of a series of judgements which can compound the range of results:-
1) the difficulty of the text chosen
2) whether the child has seen it before.
3) whether they have time to read it before the test.
4) whether they read it aloud or silently.
5) whether they’re assessed by their teacher or a stranger
6) whether the questions are literal or inferential.
7) whether the questions are multi-choice or open-ended
8) whether they are arranged in the same order as in the text.
9) whether they are arranged from easy to hard.
10) whether they are answered orally or in writing.
11) how harshly the teacher marks the answers.
So getting national standards right isn’t easy. An there is no sign that Anne tolley understands this.
Prof Warwick Elley gave an example from an observation he had done when the English were introducing their standards based approach. :-
Miss Latham, Principal of Dymchurch Country School, UK.
Tested 58 Yr 2 pupils 3 times, for National from a prescribed list for Yr 2.
She selected passages from 3 different books.
She prepared comprehension questions on each and tested each child individually.
On Book 1, 90% of the pupils passed the standard.
On Book 2, 72% of the pupils passed the standard.
On Book 3, 38% of the pupils passed the standard.
Which result should she report to the Board?
I went to a meeting on Tolley’s standards on the North Shore on Wednesday night. Emeritus Prof Warwick Elley (yes the co-developer of the Elley-Irving scale) spoke. Must be in his eighties but is very very sharp and to the point. Here are his first twenty reasons not to introduce standards. I’m going to schedule more of the points he made over Easter.
1. The National Standards policy assumes “One Size Fits All”. BUT – each child should work to his/her own standard.
2. The Standards have been hastily prepared by committees, and untested for difficulty.
3. The wording of the Standards is vague and capable of many interpretations.
4. There is no research showing that NCEA Level 2 lines up with the progress levels indicated by the National Standards.
5. The sources that teachers make their judgements on will vary widely, making comparisons quite unfair.
6. The advice on moderating teacher judgements is naive, and ignores the problems which have dogged such policies.
7. When results are made public, league tables will follow, and many assessments will soon become “High Stakes”.
8. High Stakes testing for accountability in this way interferes with the formative value of assessment.
9. Teachers will feel pressured to waste time coaching their children on standardised tests, thus invalidating them.
10. Overseas experience shows that other key subjects in the curriculum will be downgraded.
11. Teaching will lose much of its spark and spontaneity, and children become bored.
12. Bright children and slow learners will be ignored, as gains in their achievements won’t be reflected in schools’ results.
13. Schools will be judged unfairly, as the assessments largely reflect the school’s socio-economic status, not progress made.
14.Overseas experience shows these policies do not reduce the size of the tail of under-achievement.
15.Many of the students who do not reach the standards will be judged and labelled as “failures”.
16. Dedicated teachers who work in low-decile schools will soon seek to move, rather than remain in a failing situation.
17. More teacher time will be spent on assessing, reporting and moderating, rather than teaching.
18. The “long tail” is dominated by ESOL pupils, Maori & Pasifika pupils, and others who are disabled or disturbed. Standards won’t change this.
19. This policy will require full cooperation of teachers. Most disapprove, so full cooperation is unlikely.
20.“Big Shake-Ups” always require a period of trial before implementation, as so many things can go wrong.
Having a quiet coffee after ride this morning when I was approached by a woman who I had never met before, originally from Canterbury but recently returned from UK.
She had watched Parliament the other day and specifically mentioned how Bennett, Brownlee and Tolley had struggled and as she put it – “just aren’t intelligent enough to do the job.”
Then the line which I’m sure will become a classic – “they reminded me more of members of the Pitcairn Island Council than the New Zealand Parliament.”
I suppose we have become used to it and are too accepting.
When Minister of Education, I launched a Literacy strategy. In 2004 we started doing extra training for primary and intermediate teachers. By the November 2008 briefing for the incoming Minister 44% of teachers had had the training.
The results were pretty impressive. On average, kids doubled their progress but the average was dragged up by the most at risk kids whose average progress quadrupled.
But when will this impressive work hit NCEA level 2? In 2015 for those kids who started in 2004 and have had substantial support since. And never for many kids if Anne Tolley continues her 25% cuts to professional development.
Lets get that 44% up to 100%.
Again I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry but it became clear in the house today that Anne Tolley had either not read, not understood or could not remember the briefing paper she received when she became Minister.
I was heading towards asking her why she didn’t boost the previous governments literacy strategy if her priority was improving reading and writing.
But it became clear that she did not know that where the strategy had been implemented (44% of primary schools) students gains in reading and writing were twice those that could be expected without the intervention and that schools accelerated the rate of progress for the majority of the at risk students by four times the expected rate.
Made it pretty hard to proceed to substantive question line.
Update Video now here
And for those without broadband the hansard:-
| NewsRoom.co.nz Agency Story at 6:16 pm, 17 Mar 2010 |
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) : We did consider the approach from the previous Labour Government, which saw our literacy and numeracy achievements stagnate, and almost one in five students leave schools without the skills they needed to succeed. We rejected that do-nothing approach in favour of national standards, which are overwhelmingly backed by parents around the country.
Hon Trevor Mallard: What reports has she received on the progress made by students under the previous Government’s literacy strategy?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The primary question was extremely broad. I do not have those results with me; I had no way of knowing that they would be required. But I am happy, if the member wishes to put that in a written question, to answer it.
