Guest blog: Kelvin Smythe

In National’s education policy, I was taken aback by how Christchurch schools are getting nothing but bumf. We should all get in behind calls for extra support for the schools of that stricken area.

 And all the rest of the document is bumf, except for the section headed ‘Strengthen accountability and performance measurement’.

 And therein lies the battleground for the next few years.

 Our schools are going to be up to their gunwales with measurement.

 Schools will be required to have online, a linear ‘progress’ charting each child’s school career performance. Leaving aside the desirability of such an ostentatious focus on testing, a key question will be whether that linear progress will include overall teacher judgement, and how dominant asTTLe will be in the linear progress. Given the high stakes’ involved, it will either be a shambles or a straitjacket.

 But note the next paragraph: ‘This will allow us to measure the value a school is adding to a student’s education …’

 Especially note the ‘us’ and the vagaries inherent in the notion of value added.

 This charming policy section then moves right along to declarations of improving ‘the use of data by education agencies to support investment and accountability processes’.

 Note the use of the plural, meaning that direct online information will be fed to both the ministry and the review office.

 Then the key statement that the ministry will: ‘Use the Network for Learning as a technological platform to support collection and dissemination of data and knowledge’.

 It is this Network for Learning platform, I predict, which will be the collection point for data, and the means for reformulating this into cohorts according to a machine’s programmed notions of national standards, and disseminating this to enable league tables to be formed.

 After a number of networkonnet postings exploring online platforms and what the ministry is up to, I think I have cracked it. The Network for Learning Platform is to be based on the pernicious online platform set up by the England Department of Education and Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).

 The name of the platform is RAISEonline and its purpose is as a ‘Data management facility to import and edit pupil level data and create school-defined fields and teaching groups.’

 To provide a further national testing element (in other words reducing overall teacher judgement to near nothingness) asTTle is being re-normed, supported by asTTle-based rubrics, to provide near assumptive asTTle finality – any school variations from asTTle judgements will be pinpointed for schools' urgent reconsideration.

 So here we have our new secretary for education, imported from England, a no doubt delightful middle-class person, but with no classroom background – to re-colonise our education system with practices from the class-ridden, white-dominated and, especially given its generous funding, wallowing English education system. Ofsted and RAISEonline, it should be noted, have been singularly unsuccessful in achieving any marked or sustained success.

 Some extra information about the online platform, just received:

 The process of a server-based centralisation of student achievement information, I am now informed, began three years ago. The main problem holding up this centralisation has been difficulties arising from interoperability between the various student management systems; also confusion by the ministry about what it really wanted done.

 A huge budget has been allocated to it – a budget that seems to have been disguised and not properly contracted. Salaries of over $300,000 are being paid to the leading IT people.

 But in a world gone mad, how about the following information:

 There is also a project underway to develop a system for measuring – now wait for it – the progress against IEP goals for ORS children. They are calling it: ‘grading and linearising’.

 Then two nasty little items:

 ‘We’ll also shift the resourcing model, so it incentivises performance.’

 This introduces a motivation that isn’t needed. A few schools will be put on pedestals on the basis of goodness knows how reliable evidence, on goodness knows how reliable decile ratings, to shame other schools.

 And in initial teaching education, what does ‘a formal assessment of a ‘disposition to teach’ mean?

It is all so Orwellian, as Ovid said, ‘Principiis obsta!

Note how all this comes under the heading of that invidious word ‘accountability’.

Please excuse me if I repeat a part of the previous posting, indicating what National really has in store for us in the years ahead.

In last night’s debate John Key came out with a shocker about schools, a shocker we should make sure haunts him throughout his remaining years in office: He said (and I need help here with the exact wording) that ‘[Schools, teachers] are letting down [society, New Zealand, children, us].’ The comment was made in the context of 33% of Maori children leaving secondary school with low level qualifications.

 After all I’ve written on the National government and education, it might surprise some that I was shocked, but I have been. For the elected head of a government to come out and say such a thing, to say such a thing so baldly, is without parallel in our political history and, I suspect, the political history of comparable countries.

 No ifs no buts – New Zealand schools are letting New Zealand down.

 All this because the government wants a scapegoat for its failing economic, social, and employment policies.

 At the nub of all this is the word ‘accountability’ and its use in the context of education. In no other area of state activity is this word so widely used and so central to the arguments of its critics.

 If, however, the word ‘responsibility’ is used instead, a far more appropriate and humanistic expression than accountability with its numbers-based metaphorical allusions then, for the open-minded observer, the many ways schools demonstrate their responsibility to the children who attend them, becomes immediately apparent.

 The word ‘accountability’ is used to alienate for a purpose: generally to disadvantage teachers to the advantage of others; specifically to establish a situation that means whatever achievement public education delivers won’t be sufficient.

 In the last thirty years in Western countries, accountability has mainly been used against schools for their ‘failure’ to achieve the utopian impossibility of having children from straitened circumstances achieve as well as children from privileged ones. The fantastical pressing for ever rising accountability is used to justify ever greater political and bureaucratic intervention, and a breakdown in the trust in public schools.

 John Key you are, in the context of being a New Zealand prime minister, the ultimate scumbag

 Which part of this expression of Key’s attitude does anyone not understand?

 He identified an edge in the market some time ago and is wringing every cent he can from it.