National Standards

In Wednesday’s Press Freeville School was listed as one of 21 schools in Canterbury and 225 schools nationwide (now 240) whose Boards of Trustees had decided to defer setting targets against the national standards at the beginning of 2011.

As a principal, a board member and a parent at Freeville School I support the board’s decision. The Board is developing a letter to our community to explain in brief their thinking and why they have chosen to take this stance.

When considering their own viewpoint I hope that the parents and caregivers of Freeville School will think carefully about what they know about Freeville; our commitment to learning, our desire to do what is best for all the children at our school, and our willingness to take up new ideas and innovations if they are beneficial. If it was all good, we’d be in boots and all.

But it’s not all good, and I personally, as a principal and a parent, have a number of concerns about the standards. Here is just one.

We have been told that standards will address the reported 1 in 5 students who leave New Zealand schools unable to read and write. The bottom 20% of our student population.

We have also been told the standards were developed by working backwards from the performance expectations at NCEA level 2.

I have some questions about that:

1. If we are concerned about identifying the bottom 20%, why develop a reading standard that 40% of Year 8’s are expected to fail to meet?
2. Why have a math’s standard that 50% of Year 8’s are expected to fail to meet?
3. How does this work when 71% of New Zealand students pass NCEA level 2?

To me this doesn’t make sense.

The problem is that standards are set at a level where they are not in fact standards but goals that we would all love children to get to. There is a difference. To me a standard is a level that all children should reach, and if they don’t we should be concerned. This is not the case with the national standards.

We have been told that the standards will be reviewed and may be adjusted. Too late for those children and parents who may have been told incorrectly that their child is failing. At Freeville School we work very hard to get every child to believe that he/she can learn and that they can be successful. This is hard enough without telling them twice a year that they are below an untrialled national standard.