Posted by: PPTAweb
on 24, Aug, 2012
Tagged in:
teaching ,
teachers ,
student achievement ,
social disadvantage ,
schools ,
Office of the Auditor General ,
OAG ,
NCEA ,
Maori achievement ,
evidence ,
ERO ,
equity ,
Education Review Office ,
education politics ,
education policy
The Office of the Auditor General (OAG) has announced a 5 year foray into Māori education.
"School visits for education performance inquiry
Radio NZ, 22 August 2012
About 30 schools are to get a visit from from the Auditor-General's office, as part of a new drive to make regular checks on how well the education system is supporting Maori students." |
It seems the OAG has spare resources and is looking for work. The OAG document "Education for Maori: Context for our proposed audit work until 2017" is a document of somewhat selective references. It has a five year plan for this and a very very select group of advisors.
But why is the OAG duplicating work in an area that another statutory body is responsible for? It seems a wasteful duplication and use of the financial and human resources of government and schools.
The Education Review Office is set up specifically to evaluate and report on the education and care of students in schools and early childhood services.
Within the Education Review office the leadership team have extensive education experience and qualifications including in the area of Maori education.
"The Education Review Office (ERO) plays a valuable role as an agency for change in the education system. ERO has a quite specific legislative role – to review and report on the performance of schools and early childhood services. Increasingly, however, ERO regards its institutional reviews and national evaluation reports as levers for system change. ERO’s findings are used by services, schools, the Ministry of Education, and other policy agencies."
Posted by: Tom Haig
on 23, Aug, 2012
Public achievement information is the Minister of Education’s phrase of the moment, but the achievement information made public by Labour’s questioning about the youth guarantee won’t have her smiling.
In 2010 Tolley trumpeted that this initiative will increase the achievement of 16 and 17 year olds because many of them will be “more motivated to achieve qualifications in a tertiary setting.” Reading between the lines here, what the Minister means is that schools are boring and inflexible, and what many teenagers need is the freedom and ‘real world’ relevance of a tertiary setting.
There’s definitely an argument to be made for this, but there are legitimate questions about it too. We wrote to Minister Joyce at the time that “the evidence is clear, that students who do not achieve success at secondary school do not have any greater likelihood of succeeding at a more expensive tertiary institution.”
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: Observer
on 09, May, 2011
One thing that is as certain as death and taxes is that the New Zealand public will never be educated by reading articles on education in the New Zealand media. The latest poisonous effort by Rachel Grunwell in the Herald on Sunday was clearly designed to further stupefy the New Zealand public in respect of NCEA. It was followed by a tendentious poll in which 71% of respondents expressed a lack of confidence in the qualification. No surprises there really but was interesting was the selection of examples of practical areas that students could get credits in. (From the article)
“NCEA credits available include:
* Strip and make beds.
