Greg’s Blog – principal (le?) learning

Well, they’re here.  National Standards have been released.  We have been told all of the things we ‘must’ and ’shall’ do; given templates to follow; had the spin.

My big question is still  ….. where are the trained education professionals who support this initiative?  I’m not talking about those who are paid to be positive (like in the MoE), I mean those in schools who are prepared to stand up proud and say ‘forget it you doubters, this is going to be great’?  Are there any I have missed?  Seriously, where are they?  Are there any?

I only know of ONE principal who has told their BoT this is going to be great.  And that’s because they see it as a great marketing opportunity and a way to sock it to their neighboring schools.  Great collegiality there!

As Andrew says, there is nothing inherently wrong with standards.  We all have them and certainly at our school we have spent considerable time and effort ensuring that we have consistent and reliable assessment information on which to base judgments we make about our children, classroom programmes, interventions, and so-on.  Without good assessment we can not making good judgements.  Without informed professional judgments we can not make quality decisions.  Without good data we are simply flying in the dark.

We are the professionals.  Ultimately we need to stand up for what is right, what we know is the professional thing to do.  We are told that ERO will be the agency that checks the standards are implemented, reports are in plain language and other aspects of the political agenda are complied with.  The MoE website on Friday still would not relinquish the text of the new NAG so I still don’t know what it says.

This seems like it may be a step back in the time tunnel to the Judith Aitkin days where a single view of compliance requirements drove education policy through assessment.  At that time people like Lester Flockton encouraged schools to stand tall and insist that anything beyond the letter of the law is merely opinion and therefore doesn’t need to be accepted.

We are self managing schools under the BoT model.  Where there is a clash of belief between ERO opinion and legal fact, fact wins.  Between self management (following legal requirements) and ERO, the self managing school is right by definition.

The new standards are quite different from the draft versions.

I wonder if they were developed and shared simply with a desire to inform practice and without the compliance if we would be so resistant?  If they were a document intended to create a collaborative system wide picture to sit alongside the revised National Curriculum if we would be so negative?  I doubt it.  We all have established  ’standards’ already.  Sometimes they will be higher than the national ones!  We have always compared expectations with other teachers …  The difference is now we have politicians telling us what  to think.  Educational novices (politicians) dictating to managers (MoE) , who mandate it for the professionals (teachers, principals and other educators).

Professionals on the outside rather than professionals at the centre.   Very low trust.  Back to the Future?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Learning and Teaching, opinion, political, school leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.