NCEA is gone. Marks out of 100 are back, grades from A to E are back, needing to pass 4 subjects at least in order to get the qualification is back.
Now, how long have we been talking about the need to do this? About the fact that NCEA is rubbish, that it's been gamed, that it's not respected by employers, that it's not understood by parents? How long have we talked about this?
And then within 18 months of Erica Stanford taking over the education portfolio, the changes are made.
This is absolutely, by the way, the right thing to do. Nowhere, in none of the assessments of what's happening at NCEA Level 1, 2 or 3, do you hear anyone say - hey, you know what, this is a good system. It's always criticism.
The ERA had a look at NCEA Level 1 last year and they found such big problems with that they recommended getting rid of it.
NZQA last year found only half of year 12 students actually finished 3 full subjects. They didn't even get to do 3 full subjects, but they somehow managed to pass NCEA.
NZCER found that learning was not the focus of school at NCEA level anymore, assessment was.
The OECD two years ago found what we always know is going on lately and our ability to read, write and do maths was slipping. It had now fallen below the OECD average.
The NZQA Insights paper found a huge number of kids got Level 3 because it's easy, but UE, the old equivalent, they couldn't get it because it's not easy.
Now, none of this is news to us, right? Some of these reports actually date back to 2018, 7 years ago. Yet NCEA hasn't been scrapped until now.
Now, this is brave, because any change this big is brave, but especially, it's brave right now at a time when secondary school teachers are already dealing with a lot.
They have a curriculum refresh on the go. They've got new compulsory exams already now, they've got this. They are busy and they're about to get busier.
And while I feel for them, and I do, our kids are too important and their education is too important to muck around.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show HERE - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
Make no mistake, mucking around with education has always been the modern politicians and MOE civil servants favourite past-time.
None actually care about the pedagogy because a penny to a pound almost none involved are educationalists at heart.
They are usually more dogged ideologues with a chip to prove their point is 'better'.
Who suffers? The generations of children who aren't that cognisant or do not have parents who see though the opaque garbage.
Today we have more of the same where reading, writing and mathematics achievement is terrible but children sure know how haka.
Yes, sorry I simplify it to that but is that not a symptom of the bigger issues.
Make the core subjects core, the objective choice subjects secondary and the subjective choices available to those that want them.
Measure them and provide feedback and things can be improved.....but firstly leave the ideology behind and leave those kids alone.
More than a decade ago, I was one of the two statisticians for NCEA and New Zealand Scholarship, along with Michael Johnston. From a statistical perspective, NCEA is cumbersome and very expensive. When introduced into one or two states in the USA during the 1960's, standards-based assessment proved to be 15 - 20 times as expensive as norm-based assessment.
NCEA over-assessed, and kids ended up tired and drained from too many exams and internals.
Nevertheless, I thought that NCEA had some good points, including fairer assessment, and getting kids to perceive links and connections between different ideas - extended abstract thinking.
Of course, some people get stressed during exams and do not perform as well as they might otherwise. If you can't sleep properly or panic slightly, then your grades are affected. It could cost you a place in Medical School.
Agree that internals are helpful for many kids but hard to control. When I was the statistician at NZQA, I had to develop methods for identifying schools that were either too soft or too hard in their internals. It was not easy!
At the end of the day, our kids performed less and less well over twenty years. Time for a change!
David Lillis
I have at times been a harsh critic of Stanford, but I give her credit now for dumping what has been a disgraceful ruination of NZ education started decades ago. It is there in black and white in the illiteracy/numeracy/sheer ignorance of thousands of young folk. But it will take decades to bring results. A generation lost in ignorance and they know it not. [And AI will be no help...... that is predicated on creation of "epsilons"... useless eaters.,]
More embarrassing, uninformed garbage, again, from Heather, who has never taught a course in her life. NCEA should have simply been continuously improved each year with the bad parts stopped, and good parts strengthened, and added to, as it went along. Writing "NCEA is rubbish, it's been gamed, it's not respected by employers, not understood by parents" is saying generations of great Kiwi children have had a worthless education that has made them useless. That is not true. National presided over NCEA for 9 years during John Key. Why didn't they stop it then - when Heather says everyone knows it has always been rubbish? The only piece of rubbish is News (empty) Talk radio DJ's pretending they know how education, economics, and everything in between works. The Nats will replace the current system with the same half-baked, not-properly-thought-out nonsense that is characterizing Luxon's dirty-dealing leadership. The PM is shallow and not capable of deep thought on any issue, including the Teaty. National, and New Zealand, are paying the price.
How on earth did we end up with an education system that issued school leaving certificates that were devoid of any literacy and numeracy competencies ? It reminds me of America where scandalously students are unable to read their high school diplomas. . Whole Language ( WL) reading method of course never focused on actual achievement in reading but instead the very wrong ideology that reading proficiency was a natural human accomplishment like learning to speak . That is why our primary classrooms are littered with WL reading books and somehow just exposure to them made children readers. Hence our devastating decline in literacy- reading and writing .
It will take decades to remedy this .The NCEA results reflect the horrible results of academia forcing nonsense ideology on our children for over 50 years.
I had students, who had severe literacy deficits happily acquiring credits in being Baristas , micrewave cooking etc. No correction in their literacy was given.
My sympathies are with Robert MacCulloch. The NCEA system was indeed improved upon over the years - Achievement Standards were added to Unit Standards, and external examinations were brought back. The real problems have been with the public perception of what upper secondary assessment and certification should be all about. Before the NCEA, people thought they understood what the lists of percentages meant, but the fact of the matter is that even many teachers had little clue about how those statistically manipulated marks had been arrived at. Along comes the NCEA and criterion-referencing and they don't like it because it's different from what they are used to and they think understand,
But let's not cry over spilt milk. Upper secondary assessment regimes need to be tied to career development pathways. The proposals before us recognise the vocational track as an alternative to the academic one, and good on it, but in the highly efficient European systems we see at least 3 distinct tracks - academic, vocational and technical. There has been much moaning about inter-subject comparability of assessment but why on Earth should a student heading for an apprenticeship in motor mechanics be assessed in the same way as one aiming for optometry at varsity? Criterion-referenced Unit Standards began in vocational education but are not appropriate for academic domain, whereas marks on scales of 0-100 are largely meaningless in vocational education.
I could go on for a very long time - I have two edited volumes and lots of papers in refereed academic journals on this topic - but let's see what happens...............
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