A beginner’s guide to National Standards
28th November 2009

When John Key launched the National Standards for primary schools last month he hailed them as the most important educational reform of the past 20 years. Opposition to the Standards from leading academics and teachers has been widely reported in the media this week, indicating that not everybody shares the Prime Minister’s optimism. The argument quickly becomes technical, so here is a beginner’s guide to National Standards.

The National Standards are a set of benchmarks that apply to reading, writing and mathematics. They define what children should be able to achieve in these 3 subjects at each year level from age 5 to the end of primary school. They recapture some very old ideas about teaching and learning – remember, we used to call the primary years the ‘standards.’

From 2010 primary and intermediate schools will be required to report to parents twice a year about how their children are achieving against the National Standards. They must report in “plain language”, which means they must state if the child is above, at, below or well below the Standards.

From 2011 each school must include specific goals relating to the National Standards in their annual charter. The goals must be written as percentages of students the school will ensure are achieving at or above the Standards. From 2012 school results must be reported to the Ministry of Education, this information becoming part of the public record.

The introduction of National Standards fulfils a National Party election promise. National claims two main reasons for introducing Standards. First, they say that parents throughout the country are confused by the way schools report student achievement and that they have the right to be told plainly how their children are getting on.

Second, they say National Standards will ensure that New Zealand’s long ‘tail’ of under-achievers will become successful at school.

The Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, says National Standards are an urgent and necessary measure to correct an education system that fails too many children. She says National Standards are about improving student achievement.

In reality, they are highly political. National Standards are education’s version of the market reforms of the 1980s and 90s. They are formed around a view that high stakes assessment will motivate schools to transform struggling students into geniuses. They are like the farmer who weighs his prize pig every day but fails to realise that simply weighing the pig does not fatten it.

The introduction of National Standards sends a message that up to now children have bobbed about in a sea of conjecture. This is untrue. Teachers already measure children’s progress against clearly defined standards. The difference is that the current standards are not pegged to a particular moment in a child’s schooling.

National Standards, by comparison, assume that all children start school with the same ability and potential, and continue throughout their school years to learn in a steady, unwavering curve of improved achievement. This is nonsense. By drawing a narrow line between success and failure National Standards act as a brake on the brightest and condemn low achievers to toil through their school years as dummies.

Remarkably, for a policy that is a cornerstone of this government, the National Standards are completely untried. They have been written in haste with no meaningful input from schools and against the advice of leading academics. There has been no attempt to gauge their accuracy. We do not know, for example, if the Year 3 standard for reading is achievable by 10% or 90% of children. Neither is there provision to review the standards once schools have worked with them.

Countries that introduced National Standards programmes in the 1990s now regard them as failed policies. In England they are blamed for narrowing the curriculum, de-motivating children and lowering achievement. Schools in England are threatening to boycott standardised testing. By comparison, New Zealand has continued to rank near the top in international surveys of educational achievement.

Tragically, Mr Key’s prediction about the importance of National Standards may be right. We may come to view them as the point where our education system went off the rails.