Non-standard
I confess I do not really understand the debate on national standards for education. This is a sad admission for an opinionated bloke like myself, but I really just don’t understand the teacher’s unions objections to them. I have tried to follow the debate but the union’s response makes no sense at all to me.
It seems their principle objections are:
- National Standards don’t work
- They will be used as a performance measure for teachers.
The first has me completely baffled. Every industry I have ever worked in has some sort of national standards to follow. The Medical centre in which I work has two sets of standards – “cornerstone” accreditation for the general practice side of things and ACC accreditation for the A&M side. Both accreditations require adherence to a national standard. In addition to the standard application to work premises and practices, there is also a less defined but still very real standard of conduct to which GPs in our practice are expected to adhere. All these standard means that our “product” (treated patients as opposed to healthy patients) is as uniform as you can make something as intrinsically non-uniform as medicine.
My layman’s thought is that applying a decent standard to education is as important as applying one to medicine. By “standard”, I do not mean rigid protocols, but a system that measures reproducibility of process and output. For those of you who can’t speak bureaucrat (I have, unfortunately, had to learn the language), that last sentence means staying within reasonable boundaries in what you do, so that the result is up to a minimum standard.
And that is really the point here. The proposed standards are minimums and, as such, should be easy to achieve with the (standard) resources by any half-way competent teacher. How they can be said to not “work” is a mystery. Surely if I set a standard that 95% of children have a functional reading vocabulary of at least a thousand words and that they understand the tools to improve that vocabulary by the end of primary school, then that is a worthy goal (obviously the number of words and the tools available may be different, I am using this as an illustration, not a suggestion). As long as it is reasonably acheivable by all teachers (except those who teach the intellectually handicapped), I can’t see a problem.
What, exactly, is wrong with a set of performance measures for teachers?
”Which brings me to the second point. What, exactly, is wrong with a set of performance measures for teachers? Is it acceptable to have teachers in our schools who may not be able to achieve reasonable standards? My children have been taught be gifted teachers and by lazy, good for nothing teachers and I greatly prefer the former. Currently, the only way I managed to find out that my daughter’s teacher was one of the latter was when it became obvious during the year that she had learned nothing (and the youngest MacDaughter is the antithesis of lazy). That was the year we took our children out of school and home-schooled them for their entire secondary education. I would have appreciated a better early warning system, like the proposed national standards. I might have been less inclined to pull my children out of school.
Parents have a right to know what is being pumped into their children and they have a right to know that it meets the standards proposed by people who hopefully have some understanding of what a good education is. After all, your children’s education is your responsibility, not the government and not some strange person armed with the latest educational theory to test out on your kids. We need to know objectively what is happening with our children’s education and no amount of protest by the teachers union should interfere with that.
It is our right and our duty.
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Feb 3 10 10:29 pm
Hear hear (notwithstanding the minor spelling errors which would have you fail the proposed standards…but then I’m nothing if not a pedant).
Feb 3 10 10:38 pm
MacDoctor
I have 2 views on this.
1) Standards are needed as you say, parents need info to make decisions about their children, and will do so with great intelligence
2) We only need these standards as we have a state controlled education sector. My wife comes from a country with an extremely basic State education system. Good but basic. There is therefore a thriving private education sector, ranging in price from basic improvements to the State system to schools that would rival the best in NZ. The ‘Standard’ there is the market. Parents know exactly what the school will and will not do, and the schools deliver as parents will soon move their children else where if they do not.
Feb 3 10 10:51 pm
The whole thing reminds me of a fellow I used to work with who always rubbished the measure our productivity was measured by.
Thing was, according to that I was twice as productive as he was. Partially he was right – but as time went on, it became clear that he was simply an asshole.
Dimpost had an article about good schools. Glancing through the article (which seemed very good) a familiar story came out.
1. Measure what you’re doing
2. Look for ways to improve that measurement
3. Repeat and see if those ideas do in fact improve
4. Keep looking and measuring
Which is funny, because the line “the best are the ones always looking for better ideas” is a pretty much what I read in a “what makes small business work” book some years ago – the lessons are universal.
scrubone´s last blog ..I assume Jerry’s dog is ok
Feb 4 10 8:29 am
Danyl’s article rang a bell with me..
Many years ago there was a time and motion study of loggers in the US Northwest. It found that some gangs performed well ahead of the contracted targets set, and that happened *regardless* of how good or poor the block was. Danyl’s article came to an identical conclusion.. no matter the child’s background, parental quality, poverty, class size or whatever the best teachers moved their kids 18 months ahead for every 12 months of teaching.
When we are talking about our kids in low decile schools, thats exactly what we need to see and dare I say it.. expect.
JC
Feb 4 10 5:07 pm
I agree with your comments. My daughter has auditory processing disorder and dyslexia, neither of which were picked up by her school. Her school reports did not indicate that she was not meeting expected levels of achievement. I had raised concerns with every teacher in Years 1-4, and they all told me “she is doing fine”. After 5 years of schooling she is 3 years behind in English – how is that “fine”? (By the way English is our first language.) It was only a change of principal and a change in report format that showed me that she was falling behind. Now that I know she has difficulties I have put in place assistance for her, which I could have done several years ago if her teachers had just addressed my concerns honestly.