Trial national standards, petition begs

Merania Karauria | 12th March 2010

 The taxpayer will be stumping up with $26million this year for the new national education standards, as  more people  air concern the standards are untested.

In just over two hours in Trafalgar Square yesterday, 500  people signed a petition calling for the Government to trial the new  standards before they are implemented nationwide.

Teachers, parents, teacher aides and members of NZEI held two public meetings in the city then swarmed through Trafalgar Square  explaining why they're worried about the new standards.

The concerned groups say the  standards will fail their children, not raise their achievements.

Parent Stephanie Mills said the new standards were totally untried  and had been developed in  three months without involvement from the community and teachers.

There were already nationalised norms for assessing children on which teachers already spent a lot of time, Ms Mills said, and now the Government was introducing a whole new system that did not consider the wide range of children who required specialist assistance.

More funding was required for  specialist teachers including more teacher aides, not new standards, because teachers already knew which children were struggling, she said.

The taxpayers' $26million did not account for the cost to schools  that took teachers out of the classroom to process the data for the new reporting, Ms Mills said.

Another concern voiced by the groups were  league tables  that were not created by the Government but reported by the media.

Ms Mills said that skewed the true performance of a school.  Quality of teaching was  important in schools, not across schools.

"Some children turn up at school with a reading level of a three-year-old because they may not have been at pre-school. The teachers worked hard at raising their level, but how it's reported against other schools is not the true measure of the school's success."

NZEI said not all children  arrived at school equal. Some had strengths and talents in parts of the curriculum, but might not in literacy and numeracy, and  labelling them as failures would damage their motivation to learn.

Ms Mills added that the standards narrowed the curriculum.  Funding had already been removed for science, physical education, social studies, drama and the arts.

EDITORIAL, P6