Could we ask families for specific written permission to include their childrens data in the results of National Testing we send to MoE?
I know the level of response we get to some requests is very low. And we are not allowed to identify individual children ….
Or conversely can parents only give permission for our schools assessment to be used for formative purposes and preclude their childrens information from being included in data reported to the MoE if they choose?
Seth Godin is one of the blogs I always read. I love the way he constantly comes up with a stream of gems worth listening to:
Frightened, clueless or uninformed?
In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you’re going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one.
Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it’s a temporary state.
Clueless people don’t know what to do and they don’t know that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like.
And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck.
The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared….
Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.
and:
The relentless search for “tell me what to do”
If you’ve ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.
People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: “If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I’m safe.”
We all have until the 19th March to have a say in the Special Education Review. This is a very important issue for schools and unfortunately will probably not feature highly on the ‘to do’ list for many school leaders.
I have been in innumerable forums where educationalists have been complaining loudly about the lack of service available from GSE, the inequities of delivery from early intervention (preschool) to school age, how hard it is to actually get a kid to see a speech therapist …. on and on it goes. Now is our one-and-only opportunity to actually have some input into future directions. Particularly when you are married to an SLT people tell you their woes about GSE …. now lets do something positive.
The review criteria and report are available HERE and you can simply email responses/submissions to se.review@minedu.govt.nz.
PLEASE take even 5 or 10 minutes to send off an email saying what you believe is good about the current system and what could be done better.
My submission – as an email – is below (but I have removed specific examples):
1. The most significant challenge for schools is the level of resourcing for children, individually and collectively. Currently we seem to be in a ’sub-optimal’ resourcing model. Some children receive the support they need to ’survive’ in school rather than to appropriately address their needs. My personal experience as a principal is to have to advocate very strongly at times for support that is an entitlement. We have children with significant needs in our school and at times we believe, as the education professionals who spend the most time with them, that they are not receiving the level of support simply to keep them safe – let alone make the most of their time in the education system for educational purposes.
2. TA funding has remained the same for some time while, at the same time, the cost of TA’s has gone up because of peoples annual increments and cost of living increases. This has the effect of reducing the hours children receive each year if the school is not to top up the difference and thereby attribute the ‘cost’ to the other children in the school. This is NOT the message GSE staff give parents when they quote how many hours children have been allocated when calculating the dollar amounts we actually receive.
3. It is extremely frustrating to have GSE staff refuse to confirm with us what recommendations will be made to TA time allocation meetings despite the whole team around a child agreeing what descriptors best fit a child on the moderation form at the IEP meeting. Given the allocation we receive at times the GSE personnel would seem to go back with lower recommendations than the team agree is most appropriate.
4. There needs to be transparent review and complaints process for when there are issues with schools, parents, families, etc.
5. Special schools have a child/learning focus, GSE doesn’t (as an institution). Individual therapists in the organisation are often wonderful but the overriding focus of the organisation is one of balancing budgets and meeting targets not serving the needs of children. This is a fundamental thing that needs to change! GSE needs to return to a child focus and get away from simply telling schools about their issues with balancing budgets. Special schools should remain as a choice for families – and isn’t the MoE precluded from employing specialist teachers and that is why Resource Teachers (Literacy, Maori, LB, Deaf, etc) are administered by management committees based in schools not GSE/MoE? Won’t it require a law change for this to change?
6. Why is there no moderate needs SLT service? There is any amount of research that shows the significance of (oral and other) language issues for many children not achieving well in literacy and numeracy.
7. Psychs have a crazily low full-time workload – I was told by a GSE manager 5 full time cases is considered a full caseload when I was on an RTLB management committee. This is an insanely low workload, particularly when you look at Physios, OT’s, SLT’s, etc in the same office; or RTLB, RTLit, etc.
8. Population based funding is a significant disadvantage to areas like Otago where there can be very big distances between schools and nowhere near the economies of scale there are in big cities. Travel soaks up a significant amount of the resource allocated to our region.
9. GSE as an organisation needs to earn back the trust and respect of the school sector. At the moment schools think twice about referring children because of the work involved and the low likelihood of an application being successful. This impacts even more on schools with teaching principals and/or no SENCO. I believe this view is held at least in part because of the issues outlined above.
10 The transition to school from the EI team is wasteful of resources and time. Children are often reassessed rather than simply handed-over and because of the different criteria can sometimes no longer receive a service when their needs still warrant it if they are to fully access the curriculum.
11 There is an overemphasis on behaviour with GSE. Often therapies would be more useful for a child than psych input. Most teachers in my experience have pretty good management of children. Resolving an underlying motor, language, coordination or sequencing issue through SLT/OT/PT may be of more benefit to a child than simply managing the behaviour that is a symptom of these things. It is my understanding that most GSE funding is for ‘delivery of behaviour services’ and would argue this needs to change. We are not able to access services for a child if there are no personnel to deliver them.
Many thanks
Greg Carroll Principal
I do wonder about the #6 above in relation to National Standards. When we see the numbers of children we do with language issues of all kinds on entry to school it is little wonder that quite a proportion of them go on to have literacy and numeracy issues at a later date.
We have children in schools who can splutter out strings of phonemes related to letters because of phonics programmes but they can’t syllabify or rhyme for example. This causes a big issue when they try to put it all back together again in chunks when reading or in spelling.Phonological awareness issues underly a big number of children struggling with literacy according to research I have read. We simply assume they can do this stuff on school entry, often they can’t.
Try doing maths if you have a sequencing issue – again research shows you have to be able to sequence to at least 4-5 parts to function in a school and manage classroom instruction. This is why sequencing charts work so well for children struggling to be ‘organised’ in the classroom. Interestingly I have found they often have a positive impact on those working around them as well as they ‘look over the shoulder’.
Again research shows 60-80% of prison inmates have some sort of underlying language disorder. Having more of the people specifically trained to work with children with moderate needs (there is no moderate SLT service, the SLT equivalent of what RTLB provide in behaviour) would have to make a difference. Jane’s research shows that teachers often don’t have the requisite in-depth knowledge to deal with these sorts of issues and perhaps even identify them in their children. Spend some of the $26m on this?
We are told that maori and pacifica children are overrepresented in the tail of achievement that exists in the NZ education system. Why is it then that the children who are doing best in the system are the ones who are currently the focus of the implementation of the National Standards and the ones who supposedely need the input the most are exempt for quite some time to come yet.
Would it not have made sense to focus on the ‘highest need’ group first? Should Standards not be culturally inclusive? Is this not a Treaty issue? How can a ‘barrier to learning’ be ignored like this?
Perhaps schools should follow the MoE lead and focus our Charter development targets on the high achieving and ‘average’ kids? The low achievers can have more time to work it our for themselves and we will get to them later… I can imagine how this would go down when I push send on my report to the MoE. How is this double standard acceptable?
Kids who struggle and need support to make progress in their school work often require a lot of support to make progress and ‘catch up’. This morning Terry Crooks has done similar but more detailed sums than mine:
“The Government keeps making the assumption that once poorly performing kids are identified, that that can be solved,” Professor Crooks said.
“The evidence suggests that it’s extremely hard to overcome major deficits of achievement.”
….. and ….
The Government has promised $36 million of extra funding over three years to help pupils found to be struggling under the standards. The funding is on top of existing money for teaching literacy and numeracy.
Education Minister Anne Tolley said yesterday that officials were preparing advice on the best use of the $36m.
The policy was designed to help the one in five pupils leaving school without the basic skills they needed, she said.
Official figures show 20 per cent of primary and intermediate children would represent 86,971 pupils.
When the $36m is spread between those pupils over three years, each child would get $138 a year.
Professor Crooks said that would pay for less than half a day of tuition each.
“You can’t do anything with that.”
Ten times this amount would give these kids half an hour a day for a term of 1:1 support. Then we might begin to make some progress. Are we going to see this level of support for our children who really need it …. don’t hold your breath? The special ed review might free up some money if they cut GSE overheads and bureaucracy but this should go into the therapists who actually make a difference to kids, not cutting services. It is already pretty impossible to get help for kids with any sort of therapy (Speech, physio, occupational therapy) needs.
Reading recovery can be for up to 20 weeks (two terms) at this half hour level of support and is specifically for those who are ‘failing’, or not achieving the standards in reading. Why should any other literacy or numeracy issue be easier to resolve than it is for reading?
So are teachers in for a lambasting in the future because millions of dollars haven’t been able to fix the issue of underachievement so it must be those ‘crap teachers’? Dig a little deeper and we are on a hiding to nothing on this one.
An increasingly precise description of the problem with nothing or little put into addressing it is not remotely helpful!
I have just been watching the news on TV One tonight and one of the lead items was about the PM stepping in behind the Education Minister as we finish day one of National Standards to actively support her and give the teachers and doubters a telling off. The media have a responsibility to ensure that they understand their stories and get the facts right. The NZEI are being criticised for spreading ‘misinformation’ about the Standards and yet the ones who provide our parents with their understanding about the Standards in the media still made quite a number of fundamental errors!
1. The Standards do not show who is ‘average’. Not meeting the standards does not mean that you are ‘below average’! In some areas it means well below average, in others less so. This obviously will be a huge area of confusion. Not meeting the standards is simply that – not meeting some arbitrary level of achievement. It does not mean half or more of children are better than you are, which is what an average is.
Maybe TV reporters need to spend time in a senior primary statistics programme?
2. New Entrants are not assessed against the standards. They are to be used at the end of 40 week periods and then progressing to the end of year as children are older. They are essentially end-of-year expectations. No kid is going to be assessed against them when they enroll as a 5year old.
3. The standards are not a default test. The exemplars in the book are not intended as test items. This would be a joke. The principal interviewed said “…there are many books at each level.” True but there are also easy and hard books at each level. Questioning needs to do more than focus on recall of plot or characters (or whatever) and be well structured to give a true indication of comprehension for such a high stakes assessment. This takes a lot of experience and professional learning to be able to do well. Few teachers could do this really well at the moment I would suggest, even though we already teach reading well as a profession.
John Key and the National Party are spending a lot on the ‘charm offensive’ around National Standards. Strong words today “there will always be those who resist change …. and put their own vested interests ahead of our young people”. Strong implications that teachers are afraid of the Standards because they may show up incompetence. The clear implication is that the politicians see themselves there to stop those devious teacher pulling the wool over our collective eyes about childens achievement and school effectiveness.
This is grossly insulting to the vast majority of our profession.
Many years ago I had a frank discussion with a group of parents about the merits of performance pay. My take was I am happy to be completely accountable for childrens performance if I can correct for educational potential, home support, etc. Deliberately inflammatory statement but it still highlights an issue. Kids school, and particularly pre-school and home circumstances are not equal. Their motivations and engagement are similarly variable – even through the day or topic by topic.
And who gets to take the credit? It takes the WHOLE school to educate a child, not individual teachers working as islands. We all build on what comes before, add our bit and it is the cumulative effect that is the school learning. Trying to differentiate out which teachers make a bigger difference than others is incredibly difficult. The answer to this will be different for each child, and so it should be. That is the point of having a diversely skilled staff. We all contribute our skills to the collective and simply by being collaborative we are more than the sum of the individuals.
Rather garbled post but I’m feeling really grumpy about this! Lets have the debate/s based on the facts and what is real. Stop using kids and their learning as political pawns! Schooling and our kids are way to important to muck around with like this!
I have been physically back at school all this week after a lovely, relaxing break. The end of the year was nuts and it felt like I only just kept the important bits above the water at times. But new year now and some focuses continue and some will be new.
We have two new teachers at school and both are going to be great!
The last few days have been heavily focused on planning – for the new year and for Teachers Only Day on Monday in particular. It is always fun thinking of interesting ways to introduce ideas and challenges to staff in the new year. We are having a major focus on Written Language this year and there are a lots of resources out there in cyberspace that have been wonderful for ideas and inspiration:
I am always looking for other ideas and resources so if you know of any please let me know in the comments! I particularly like videos to prompt thinking and provide challenges but have struggled to find any nice short, concise ones focused on writing professional learning.
I am hoping to have some fun on Monday too and provoke some deeper thinking, not just compliance with my view of learning and professional practice. Will share this from Seth Godin as a challenge to be open to new ideas, and this from TED to spark discussion about how we approach our professional learning this year:
We will also continue our ICT PD cluster for the 3rd year and this booklet from BECTA should spark some discussions too …
I thought this was a bit cheesey but also a good message and something to be aware of as we embark on the new school year. The joys of good broadband CAN be simply ‘more crap faster’ without good information management skills.
The resistance to the National Standards is hotting up and so is the rhetoric from the different groups involved. Today the NZSTA president Lorraine Kerr has this to say:
“If we already know which students are at risk of not achieving then why does the tail of underachievers still exist?
It would be unwise for any board to simply state an opposition to the national standards and by doing so denying a parent’s right to know how their kids are doing at school without having canvassed the views of their own parent community.”
source
Interesting that the STA president has such a poor understanding of governance, and educational achievement research. Governance is not about doing what is the most popular. It is about being informed and doing what is RIGHT. Parents are voted onto a BoT because the community believes they have the skills to make good decisions on behalf of the school, not to run surveys to canvass what others think and blindly follow this to determine policy. Governance is not simply about being a conduit or mouthpiece for community opinion; it is about being well informed and making sound judgments.
STA have made a number of statements in recent weeks showing they have a very low opinion of the professionalism and professional ability of NZ teachers and school leaders. Is this what BoT’s in general believe or is this simply the personal views of the executive? Our BoT certainly have a high level of trust in all the staff they employ, from the principal down. They assume competence and skill. The don’t micromanage, but do demand good quality information about the governance level issues like student achievement, strategic planning, etc. This is how it SHOULD be. They SHOULD be asking me the hard questions, ensuring that the information the get from me as principal is both valid and reliable.
The so called ‘long tail’ of achievement in NZ is used as a justification and catalyst for all sorts of educational policy decisions at the political level. I believe we have to be careful in reading too much into it though:
1. Professor Peter Tymms at the NZPF conference in Dunedin (2005) was quite adamant that a tail of achievement is a function of speaking english. I specifically asked him about this saying we are told it is a function of teacher competence and did he agree. He most certainly DIDN’T. He shared graphs from the UK and the US showing the same sort of overall achievement profiles as we have in NZ. He was careful in his choice of words so as not to be critical of NZ academics and policy makers but none-the-less very certain in his view. Professor Tymms work on school effectiveness is some of the best globally and he certainly has a comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence it. His presentations at this conference had a huge influence on my focus on the importance of ‘value added’ and ‘trajectory of achievement’ as well as simply overall achievement level when looking at student achievement. I think his keynote from the conference is still available to download from the NZPF site (it used to be), and is well worth a listen!
2. There is a very strong correlation between the factors highlighted by politicians as associated with the ‘tail’ such as ethnicity, and socio-economic factors. The same groups overrepresented in the tail are also overrepresented in lower socio-economic groups and consequently with other factors well identified as being linked with underachievement in formal schooling. There is a huge body of research in this area. Ethnicity of itself is NOT a causal factor in underachievement, it is much more complex an issue than this. It is insulting to the (ethnic) groups involved and to our profession to be this simplistic.
The pressure from the NZPF and the teacher unions is hotting up on the minister. She has a political platform to maintain but I am not sure if the NS reporting requirements will survive a concerted resistance from the profession in its current form. The language from the minister and the MoE is increasingly dogmatic and the language from the opponents is equally strong. Time will tell I suppose.
In the past week I have read all our reports. They are GOOD. They give detail on areas of ability and next steps, on development needs and what is being done to support. They give a good picture of achievement, especially when viewed alongside the literacy and numeracy portfolios that come home as well. Our parents are well informed, in writing, already.
I am not sure what it is envisaged the Standards are going to add to this??
oh – and it seems there is a principal who thinks the standards are good, I think? He is quoted here, at the end of the article.
"While this blog links from different websites the views I express here are my own and personal. They are not necessarily those of others.
CORE Education kindly host my blog but I am not currently employed by them."
Entries (RSS)