If not National Standards then what?? We need something in place to see what state the education levels of our children are! Quite frankly they are alarming and something needs to be done fast. I have a 5 and 8 year old with my 5 year old falling behind! I don’t take offence to the teacher telling me he’s this way, more what can i do as a parent to help him? the National standards are catching these children before they get too far down the track. I agree that a 5 year old shouldn’t be tested and yes some improvements need doing to the policy but I don’t see anyone else with any bright ideas on how to fix the problem. I am at university at present doing year two of my teacher training and believe that teachers also need to be accountable! Its our job! thats what we are getting paid for. Its the whole education system that needs to be looked at and I think with a little time the standards will show this and hopefully something will be done! Or is that what we are all afraid of??? Quite frankly i don”t think someone with a one-sided opinion like Martin Thrupp should be leading an investigation in the first place!
My response is.... firstly try to read the above out aloud to yourself then read on.
Are you really a university student training to be a teacher? If you are a teacher in training you are indeed a living example of the need for national standards. A quick reading of your post shows me that you are well below the expected standard for writing. Your strangulation of punctuation is well below the expected standard for a child leaving the primary system. Sections of your posting are very hard to comprehend because of your poor writing skills.
I am a school principal waiting for the extreme language on both sides of the debate to die down. There are some significant flaws in the standards and these flaws need some expert attention. Until the expert attention is applied to them my school will not be fully compliant with the national standards regime. This does not mean I am a rampant anti standards campaigner, it means that I am taking a considered professional stance.
My main concern is with the standards for mathematics. The rushed implementation has left teachers with some very inconsistent measures to use when making their standards judgments for reporting to parents. I long for a well reasoned professional debate about the content and detail of the standards. Sadly this will not happen while people are forced into camps for or against the standards.
Until the minster, the unions and NZPF get together and work these issues out I remain in state of limbo. I am a civil servant and I am required to implement the will of the current government. I am also a trained professional and I am ethically required to use my professional knowledge for the benefit of the students in my school. Cool heads need to prevail in this debate, sadly this has not happened yet.
Surprisingly, only the parents of the school concerned will know that one of the leaders of the ‘anti standards’ coalition of schools has a long history of giving his parents a written report which tells the hard truth about where their child is in relation to national expectations. My own school adopted his school's report format just as national standards arrived on the scene.
Let’s get this clear, the leader of the anti standards coalition reports, in writing, to parents in the way that national standards require (and has done so for many years). This shows that the problem is with the national standards not the concept of reporting to parents on how their child is progressing.
Until the debate on the real issues with the national standards starts to happen I remain uncertain about the outcome. The one certainty I do have is that rach88 has no chance of getting a teaching job unless he/she lifts his/her standard of literacy so that he/she can teach children to meet the required writing standard.
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