My response on Stuff to the negative Principals David Farrar highlighted yesterday.

As David pointed out:

School principals around the country warn new literacy and numeracy standards could “provoke a crisis” and “undermine the credibility” of the NCEA assessment system. …

During the pilot, principals spoke out about their concerns the tests would leave behind Māori and Pasifika students, worsening “institutional racism” in the education sector.

Stuff facilitated an opinion piece from me:

Two key sections from me are:

“[The Principals] are wrong in significant ways. The crisis already exists but has been covered up for a long time. It is now widely known that our education system is a mess and many schools are simply not fit for purpose.

Some key indicators are that: Even our Level 2 NCEA graduates often lack functional numeracy and literacy. We have in excess of 8500 students not enrolled in any school as of July. Our full attendance for Term 2 was less than 40% across all deciles and just 23% for decile 1 students. We have 12% of our students graduating with less than Level 1 NCEA (33% for Māori students in South Auckland). The gaps across socio-economic levels are the worst in the developed world. Our ethnic gaps are also horrendous with Asian students getting University Entrance for leavers at 67%, back to Māori at 18%.”

And:

When principals complain about the new credits for functional literacy and numeracy they need to remember that they can be achieved at any time from Year 10 to Year 13. Are they really saying they can’t help students achieve functional literacy and numeracy in five years? The sitting students will have had [at least] 12,000 hours of funded schooling each by then. The complaining schools have also had three years to prepare their programmes for this, and the new standards do not come in until 2024.”

I shudder to think what these Principals think of their teaching staff, programmes and students.

Alwyn Poole
alwyn.poole@gmail.com