Because she's already concerned enough to order a review - and the review has come back slamming it, so she's got all the ammo she needs to pull the trigger if she wants to.
And I hope she does, because it has become apparent, especially in the last three years, that NCEA is a massively flawed system. And I don't think this is just a level one problem, I think there's problems across all three levels.
What's going on is that schools have had a gutsful and they're dropping it - fast. This year, only 87 percent of schools offered NCEA level one, next year only 75 percent will offer it.
You can see this massive drop- and the problem is that the ones predominantly dropping it are the ones in the highest socio-economic areas.
That is a problem, because if it carries on like this, what we’re gonna end up with is rich kids and kids living in nice suburbs and going to to high decile schools coming out with decent qualifications like IB and Cambridge and everyone else coming out with junk NCEA.
And all that’s gonna do is create an education gap where only wealthier kids get the premium education qualification, and we don’t want that. That's not what this country is about, it's always been about everyone having the same opportunities.
If you’re a parent of an NCEA pupil, you don't need me to tell you this. The problem is that there’s no consistency. Your child can hand in an internal assessment to one teacher and give it an awesome grade - and another teacher can look at the same assessment, think it's mediocre and give it a mediocre grade.
It says a lot that employers don’t rate NCEA level one, increasing numbers of schools don't rate NCEA level one, the Education Review Office doesn't rate NCEA level one - and judging by the noises coming from the Education Minister, she doesn't rate NCEA level one.
I think it's time to scrap it - scrap the whole lot. From where I'm sitting, it looks like a failed experiment.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
8 comments:
For me as a dedicated education historian , I believe the rot started back in the 1950s with the introduction of so called Progressive education which through lovely rhetoric implemented so called more equity in education by allowing more children access to higher learning.
What actually happened was a decline in the basics and consequently sharp decline in academic standards at all levels. We are now witnessing the absurd consequence of carrying this foolish
ideology to its logical conclusion.
The result is a large and unacceptable numbers of students at higher levels who are not proficient in literacy , numeracy or written work . NCEA , in order to cater for these poorly educated students introduced ridiculous credits in , for example, cardboard origami folding and being a barista which have the same standing as maths and physics.
The problem was in the 1950 s, socialism was surreptitiously injected into education which for some reason justified wrecking academic standards in order to reach its ideal of a some sort of socialist utopia and devoid of the' wrongs ' of the past in traditional education.
The lesson to be learned is to cancel socialist ideology out of education and return to education with effective teaching in the basics at all levels but particularly primary school. Otherwise we are still just left with large numbers of underachieving students at upper secondary levels. Playing around with NCEA is just rearranging deck chairs.
A multi billion dollar failed experiment. Why NZ education is allowed to spend so much money on this waste of time is beyond me.
Most of the English speaking world do Cambridge, why do we have to be learning something else?
And to make matters worse, NCEA is crap and we all know it.
We have to make a distinction between the NCEA as a qualification mechanism and the way NCEA courses have been downgraded.
I don't want to appeal to authority - never the best way to settle an argument - but I can point to my dozens of publications in academic journals and two books (edited volumes) on middle and upper secondary qualification regimes in many countries. I have some idea what the issues are in high-stakes assessment.
I remain in favour of the NCEA in principle as it allows schools and teachers to tailor-make programmes for classes and even individuals based on learners' characteristics and desired career-oriented (ultimately) outcomes. I love the fact that I can offer the strongest students in Year 13 university-oriented, external exam-assessed Achievement Standards while I can offer a lesser class internally-assessed Unit Standards for comparable units of work (e.g. redox reactions in chemistry). I love the fact that I can stitch together challenging programmes for motivated youngsters aiming to get into competitive-entry programmes at university while I can set another class up for Tech or apprenticeships.
I also love the fact that the NCEA enables me to assess learners on a broad variety of skills, some of which can not be evaluated by external exams (e.g. project work).
No, that does NOT mean the NCEA regards practical skills ("origami folding and barista") as being on a par with academic skills in maths and physics. We need to get away from the archaic view that terminating assessment is all about ranking students in a single file from 'best' to 'weakest'. The ultimate goal of schooling is preparation for a career. One set of qualifications leads to jobs as barista and origami folder, another to careers based on maths and physics. These kids are not competing for the same resource so why get uptight about each strand having its own standards of competence?
I am all for bringing Cambridge into NZ schools for those who would benefit from them. The NCEA is so flexible that it can merge with Cambridge quite effortlessly (the same cannot be said for the IB, which is based on the European rather than British model of schooling).
That the NCEA has been going to rack and ruin in some people's eyes is attributable to the watering down of standards for basic skills that mostly should have been acquired at primary school. It's a systemic problem, not specifically an assessment problem. Please think twice about calling for the abandonment of the NCEA - it is skin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But yes, let us definitely have a hard critical look at how the NCEA is administered.
It is quite possible Heather that if you were "gonna" sit Level 1 NCEA English in the near future you might well be "gonna " fail !
If you could substantially improve your English spelling, grammar and syntax your prospects in your chosen profession might well be "gonna" to get a lot better
Or as some would say, it might well be "gonna ged a lot beddah !
I recall when the NZ Qualification Authority was mooted to become the lead of ALL Educational domains, both public & private. The concept "floated at the time" as to what it would mean for education here in NZ was "loudly proclaimed as being the bee's knees".
Following its "infancy" there where many, in later Years, who walked back from being Private Training providers, due to the complexities of NZQA demands.
Thus we had a system that allowed a person to participate in a training course that would allow them at the end of their training to achieve "something".
I will use a course in Motor Mechanics, under NZQA training profiles as my example -
[1] - all students that enrolled, were paid to be there by the State and some received a fee to cover transport costs
[2] - most (in some cases) knew their way around an engine, some did not
[3] - many had poor literacy skills, these stemmed back to previous education sectors
[4] - practical work was the best of the course, theory was not welcomed as much
[5] - attendance was hap hazard, those who stuck it out learned more than they thought they would, those who did not headed for "failure"
[6] - oh that is right, no one "failed" if you were in class on the last day you got either a certificate of competency or one for attendance - and the State, sorry taxpayer paid the Bill.
Not sure how many sought active employment, that was not "recorded".
So it would be interesting to see how many of today's students who achieve NCEA, what other achievements they would attain for a purposeful function/trade etc from any external training provider and for those who "fail at NCEA" what are their employment prospects.
The 'course' in motor mechanics in the preceding post would have consisted of a clutch of related Unit Standards. US's originated in vocational education, hence their focus on observable skills that the candidate either exhibits or does not.
It was a mistake to generalise the US model to academic subjects. Hence we soon saw the introduction of Achievement Standards and later a return to external examinations for some AS's.
In neither US's nor AS's do students get passes for merely attending - at least, they are not supposed to. Teacher-assessed Standards can be problematical with regard to consistency of assessment but that is an issue which ought to be addressed through mandatory in-service training rather than coyly skirted around.
Schools are not employment training centres although programmes that students pursue at upper secondary level should mesh with tertiary education and career-specific training programmes.
Upper secondary schooling is a complex business, reflecting the increasing complexity of the economy and labour market. In turn, the associated qualification and certification regime needs to reflect this. The NZQF (Quals Framework) was an attempt to create a single qualification structure that could accommodate everything from the old School Cert to PhD. A spin-off benefit was that the distinction between schools and tertiary institutions became blurry as schools can offer courses above Form 7 level and polytechs can offer school-level courses. Dual enrolment at school/tech became possible as both institutions fed qualification information into the same overarching qualifications framework.
I only can comment as a university Arts lecturer for 25 years. There has been a steady decline in students' ability. The top 5% is the same. But then the drop begins with a much bigger tail. As a group, I would mark my students a D for effort/study skills, D for research, D+ for prose, C- for outside the box thinking. Basic math and writing skills are mostly non-existent. Regardless, structural grade inflation is widespread.
Agree with earlier comments regarding the Authors poor language with the word 'gonna'. A professional journalist should know better
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