Posted by: Observer
on Feb 17, 2010
What’s the real story on this crazy report from the from the rogues gallery that calls itself the inter-party working group.
From the look of the report (available here http://www.act.org.nz) not a lot of working went on and almost zero thinking.
That wouldn’t normally matter because usually MPs on working parties can mitigate their ignorance by drawing on the full resources of the State to provide information.
In this case though, the Ministry of Education wasn’t asked to provide any information to the group – probably because it would have raised some awkward questions about the huge cost of setting up a school anywhere that a parent wants, the expense involved in creating an unqualified bureaucracy to mediate between schools and parents, the difficulties of simply closing a school when there is a whole cohort of students still in it, the cost and traffic problems created by transporting kids all across town and the cost and difficulty of developing a “weighted funding formula based on student need”.
Cost neutral? Hardly.
The report avoids words we all know and understand replacing them with politically correct econospeak. Schools become “providers” or occasionally “institutions”; students are “learners” or “clients”; assessment is “context value added measure” and teachers are “learning brokers”. That’s what we need in the New Zealand education system – more jargon.
Posted by: blogger
on Feb 4, 2010
By Winged Avenger
2010 should be all about the NZ curriculum. Instead, the government is determined to railroad teachers into focusing on national standards.
Secondary teachers already know the downsides of too much summative assessment and league tables, both of which are key features of the national standards.
Teachers want to use the NZC as a platform for developing great teaching for diverse learners; parents want plain-English reporting of their kids’ progress. Neither group needs the national standards to achieve these goals.
Posted by: Cynic
on Feb 3, 2010
National standards for patients
The government intends to introduce national standards that will enable patients and concerned observers to compare medical practices online, and potentially identify poorly performing doctors.
This comes after political analysis of a new report revealed 30% of doctors have only a rudimentary understanding of human physiology and inappropriately low expectations, passing up opportunities to motivate and engage patients.
Posted by: Cynic
on Jan 21, 2010
Surface readings
Today my head hurts from trying to follow up on a NZ Herald story that quotes from the Unesco report Reaching the marginalised (Education For All global monitoring report 2010):
year 11 Maori students enrolled in kura kaupapa immersion schools did significantly better than Maori in English-language schools (p.206)
so I tried to follow up. I looked at Nga Haeata Matauranga (the Annual Reports on Maori Education)
