Posted by: Flying Pig
on 21, Dec, 2011
Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane.
A majestic tree has fallen in the great forest of Tane.
Posted by: Flying Pig
on 05, Dec, 2011
Some teachers seem to have got their knickers in a twist about the circular from NZQA about the changes to external moderation for next year. They seem to think that it's going to add to their workload.
How wrong could they be? How could a few teachers in a school having to collect a sample of every piece of assessment work for one or two students chosen by NZQA possibly be more work than every subject having to randomly choose eight students and collect their work for maybe two or three standards at each level and send it off? 500 students across about 400 secondary schools will mean that some schools don't even get sampled!
PPTA fought for a reduction in the 10% random sample for an agreement rate because it made no sense. Political polls don't sample 10% of the population to find out what people think! NZQA has delivered on this, so let's celebrate that.
Posted by: Flying Pig
on 15, Jun, 2011
Deborah Coddington's spew against NCEA in the latest North and South does not remotely deserve the title of journalism. Fancy hanging a whole article on the unsubstantiated opinions of one source who hasn't got the guts to be named, another source who has no recent experience and little credibility in his subject area, and John Morris of Auckland Grammar who on NCEA is more like a mechanical toy: wind him up and away he goes with the same old nonsense. No comment sought from teachers who might have more balanced views, no comment sought from NZQA or the Ministry of Education, and no comment sought from PPTA. Journalism? Not a chance!
If it didn't matter, would we care? But it does matter. The qualification that the Coddingtons of this world are so desperate to demolish is something that secondary school students work hard to achieve and their teachers burn the midnight oil to deliver. When wild and unsubstantiated claims like"cheating, fudging figures, manipulating marks" and "corrupting everyone it touches" are made, it hurts our kids and it hurts our teachers.
This kind of bigotry is the last gasps of the largely Auckland-based neo-conservatives who always fought New Zealand's moves to a standards-based assessment system. This was because instead of providing a series of drafting gates with built-in failure rates so that the middle- and upper-classes' kids could race through to positions of privilege leaving the working-class kids heading for the abattoir, it values many more types of knowledge and skills and provides opportunities for success for a far wider range of students.
Deborah Coddington should pack up her tent and slink away. She has long since ceased to deserve the title "journalist".
Posted by: Flying Pig
on 07, May, 2010
Tagged in: Untagged
NZQA should not think that they can load teachers with the consequences of NZQA staff cock-ups. The worst thing about NZQA's management of this business of their under-shooting in schools' moderation plans this year is that when they found their mistake and asked schools from the June moderation round on to send in extra work, they didn't admit that this was as a result of their error. They just put it to schools as if it was a routine request.
NZQA fessed up only because PPTA followed up the issue after being alerted by a school. And if PPTA hadn't done a press release about it, the government wouldn't know about this cock-up by NZQA.
And why should the schools in the second half of the year send in more moderation because schools in the first half of the year sent in less? Whose fault was that? NZQA's.
When are NZQA, MOE and ERO going to learn that loading more and more work onto schools simply ties teachers up in pointless administration, and gets in the way of schools focusing on what the government keeps saying they want them to focus on, i.e. improving student achievement?
I think schools who are being asked to send in extra standards for moderation should simply refuse, and say that they will happily send in the standards that were listed in their original Moderation Plan but no more. So NZQA doesn't meet its 10% target this year? Who cares? Not teachers.
Posted by: Flying Pig
on 11, Jan, 2010
I have a powerful feeling of deja vu right now. Has anyone else noticed the Request for Proposals published by the Ministry of Education in late December? Sneaky time to do things like that, eh? It called for a contractor to “support the development of a range of senior secondary curriculum and assessment resource production projects". In other words, work which in the past would have been done by Ministry staff is now being contracted out to someone who be 'overseen' by a project manager in the MOE. It's the usual right-wing approach - slash the numbers of public servants, then contract work out, often at a higher cost than employing a staff member. What will be contracted out next? Negotiating the STCA? Who will be left in the Ministry of Education by the time a left-wing government takes the reins again? A CEO and a few 'project managers'? Watch this space!
