Tolley Backing Grammar – Nats going for Epsom?

According to the NZ Herald, Tolley is backing Grammar in their NCEA rebellion. I am surprised by this move, I was expecting a few more slaps with a wet bus ticket for Auckland Grammar on this one.

Tolley has condoned a school rebelling against government policy. Auckland Grammar may not be technically breaking the law, but certainly in spirit and proudly so at that! The law supposedly says that NCEA must be offered in state schools, but I can’t seem to find any legislation with that wording. There was no mention of NCEA in the Education Act when I searched the legislation website. In fact, it only is mentioned in statutes around eligibility around benefits as far as I can tell.

She’s given plenty of ammunition to the likes of Kate Gainsford, saying that she’s inconsistent with her telling off her primary colleagues for rebelling against National Standards. As an aside, the letter written by Gainsford to me seems it was very much ‘leaked’ Sir Humphrey style.

Since nothing Tolley could say would placate teachers regarding National Standards, this could be a moot point. She may have decided that since nothing bar ditching the policy is going to make teachers happy, it’s not going to make any difference.

My stab in the dark guess is that National is trying earn brownie points in the Epsom electorate, with the plan of taking the seat instead of leaving it to Act.

Kelvin Davis Nonsensical with ‘Cambridge Exam National Standards’

Kelvin Davis on Red Alert blogs that unless Cambridge exam national standards are developed, it proves that Cambridge is no better than NCEA. I find this post completely nonsensical. I will break down the post a paragraph or two at a time.

Anne Tolley inextricably linked success in National Standards to success in NCEA when she wrote in a letter to parents, “The standards have been designed so that a student who meets them is on track to succeed at NCEA Level 2.”

Okay. She has said something along those lines plenty of times.

National Standards have not been designed so that a student who meets them is on track to succeed at Cambridge Exams.

I agree. My understanding is that National Standards were designed as signposts against the New Zealand curriculum.

So what are primary school teachers who contribute pupils to Auckland Grammar going to use to ensure their boys are on track to pass Cambridge Exams?

Nothing. Why would primary school teachers make a different set of standards for signposting the Cambridge curriculum? Is Davis ignorant of the fact all primary teachers hate the National Standards for the New Zealand curriculum? Why would they create more work for themselves that is not required tacked on to a policy they don’t even like? Tolley hasn’t suggested this, I don’t understand the teachers would either.

Without Cambridge Exam National Standards teachers will not be able to tell parents in plain english reports whether their son is achieving at, above or below the level required to pass Cambridge Exams.

Quite irrelevant. The idea of National Standards is linked to New Zealand curriculum learning outcomes. Nobody has suggested otherwise.

If the Minister is consistent she will in the next few weeks develop a separate set of “Cambridge Exam National Standards” and impose them on all the teachers at Epsom Normal School, Mt Eden Normal and Auckland Normal Intermediate School,etc.

Consistent with what? Is Tolley supposed to tell AGS off or not? They would expect National to take strong action against AGS if this were the case. The use of word “consistent” seems to imply that Labour thinks they shouldn’t remain committed to NCEA. Labour can’t have the argument both ways.

It has been reported in the NZ Herald that Labour have been questioning National’s commitment to NCEA as the national high school qualification. If they are committed to NCEA, why would they make these nonsensical “Cambridge National Standards”?

“Anne Tolley’s unwillingness to defend the NCEA system against the might of Auckland Grammar School shows she has no faith in the system at all,” Mr Davis said.

To be fair to Davis, he got a decent quote in the article.

These ‘Cambridge Exam National Standards’ are necessary because according to John Morris, Principal of Auckland Grammar School, NCEA would be provided for his weaker students.

Why would you need ‘Cambridge Exam National Standards’ for students sitting NCEA?

The implication is Cambridge exams are harder than NCEA therefore achievement above the regular National Standards expectation is not a guarantee that a student is on track to achieve above the level expected to pass a Cambridge Exam. If the Minister does not create ‘Cambridge Exam National Standards’ designed so that a student who meets them is on track to succeed at Cambridge Exams, all the arguments she applied to justify the imposition of National Standards can be thrown back in her face.

Davis has spent an entire post building a straw man argument. He barely touched on an issue of real substance – the posturing of Cambridge for smart students and NCEA for dumb kids. The failure to address such posturing undermines the public credibility of the NCEA qualification. I am surprised that he hasn’t used this in an argument about Tolley’s apparent lack of commitment to NCEA. Neither did he attempt to capitalise on the lack of a response as a cause quoted in the Herald.

If she says the regular National Standards will suffice, then we have proof that Cambridge Exams are no better than NCEA.

If this were true, this would actually help Tolley…then there wouldn’t be any need for these nonsensical ‘Cambridge Exam National Standards’.

NCEA and Auckland Grammar

So Auckland Grammar School (AGS) has decided to do “officially” do away with NCEA for its Year 11 (5th form) students, as reported in the NZ Herald. I love how the greengrocer’s apostrophe appears in error in the article’s title, one with educational standards as a theme.

What does this actually mean? It is well known that AGS has not been a fan of NCEA for various reasons, and has pushed the Cambridge exams (what we call the IGCSEs and International A-Levels in New Zealand) for its students ever since the introduction of NCEA. This is not a radical step for them, merely an extension of what they have been doing for a long time.

Of course as a state school, it must offer the state qualification NCEA. Anne Tolley, in reaction to this announcement so far only has only released a slap with a wet bus ticket statement in response.

Trevor Mallard has blogged about this on Red Alert trying to put the heat on Tolley, attempting to link this snub of official educational policy by the school to that relating to National Standards for primary schools. I think he should be far more worried about statements like this from the article:

but the school could allow “some exceptions” with weaker students to have a “backup” plan and allow them to sit NCEA maths and English.

These sorts of statements posture Cambridge exams for the smart students, and NCEA as a poor relation for the dumb kids. This posturing has been a key disadvantage of the NCEA qualification since its introduction. Because some schools were strongly dissatisfied by it, they sought alternatives like the Cambridge examinations or the International Baccalaureate (IB).

This posturing increases the negative discrimination based on what school one went to. Simply put, under the old system, a 70% mark in Bursary history from Aorere College was just as good as the same from AGS. That is not the case now. A two-tier system has been created in our schools.

Mallard has made a subtle error in making the link to National Standards. National Standards are more popular with parents, and less popular (in fact not popular at all!) with teachers. NCEA is less popular with parents and more popular with teachers.

One thing to note is that NCEA is a lightning rod for education issues. What this means is that NCEA gets the blame for the perceived ills of New Zealand’s education system, even for issues that have nothing to do with the exam format or qualification structure.

Also, it is important to realise AGS is not a typical state school at all.

Some accuse schools using Cambridge exams as a marketing tool. AGS doesn’t need to market itself at all. It spends thousands of dollars every year trying to keep students out – it costs the school a lot to combat enrolment fraud.

I would go far enough to say it’s a de facto private school with full state funding. It asks for a very large (probably the biggest) “donation” in the country, which most parents pay. Even disregarding the donation, if one does not already live inside the school zone, it’s arguably more expensive to send your son to AGS than a private school. Only the well off can access real estate in the “Grammar Zone”, which commands a big house price premium.

I also can’t think of anywhere else in the world where having a prison in your own backyard doesn’t dampen the demand for real estate.

Mistakes in Exams

Every year, there are stories in the media about the exams. Like this one in the NZ Herald about errors. Errors in exams can make things really difficult for students as they can place them on edge through no fault of their own.

I don’t have any doubts that the NZQA try their hardest to find mistakes. But I think they are missing a crucial viewpoint in their checks. The article reports:

Three checks are made during the editorial process; an independent checks then sits the exam before someone critiques it. A national assessment facilitator employed by NZQA checks the paper, then the examiner checks the paper.

I think they could improve their hit rate in finding errors if they had a student point of view incorporated into their pre-exam checks. NZQA already do this for post marking. They are the one of the few exam boards in the world that return original exam scripts to candidates as a matter of course, and do not charge a fee for this. One rationale for this is the candidate will be a far more motivated scrutineer of the marking than anyone they could hire to do the final round.

If we look at some of the mistakes noted by the article:

• Chemistry Scholarship paper gave the wrong value of a molecule.
• Te Reo version of Level 3 Statistics and Modelling paper had an incorrect algebraic equation.
• Level 3 Biology paper mislabelled tree-ferns.
• One exam centre had missing pages in the Level 2 Geography Resource booklets.

We can find reasons why these mistakes would not be picked up by NZQA processes, if we consider the student point of view.

The chemistry one is a bit vague, but as an educated guess I think it was an error given in the molecular weight quoted for say a titration calculation. The people doing the checking for NZQA were probably subject experts, and if the molecule were not obscure, they probably would have known what the actual molecular weight was from memory. Thus they would not need the incorrect figure given in the exam.

They would have noticed if the figure was very wrong, but perhaps not if there were only slight apparent errors. Or they would have been able to work out the figure quickly as they would know the weights of the constituent elements from memory. Students lack the familiarity of the subject matter that the subject and teaching experts have and may have been more likely to spot this error.

For the statistics and modelling error, we are not told whether the equation was a valid equation, but inappropriately selected, or the appropriate equation, but written down incorrectly. If it were the latter, it could be the case that it was glossed over quickly because the people checking it knew that formula by heart and did not need to refer to it to work out the answer to the question.

In regards to the mislabelled tree ferns, it’s easy to see why it would be confusing. This would cause students to doubt their own knowledge of the subject. However, the subject experts would not get such doubts, and furthermore when checking the exam, they don’t get the pressure the students get. Once again, the subject experts would not have needed to refer to diagrams to know what part was which.

As for the last error, they may have not been much NZQA could have done to fix that. Printing mistakes get made from time to time, and it wasn’t as if all centres rather than just one had the missing insert.

As far as I know, NZQA doesn’t have reading time for exams. (Time allowed for you to read the paper, but not allowed to write anything down). Having reading time may have allowed this error to be spotted by the students themselves before the exam started, rather than panicking in the middle of exam when they needed the information on those missing pages. This may have reduced stressed as the student wouldn’t be thinking, is it just me going crazy.

With that said, it is easy to judge things with the benefit of hindsight. The other thing is, assuming that it is beneficial to do so, how would you get the student point of view? It wouldn’t be possible to get current candidates to do this. I think the only way one could would be to get former candidates who did the exam one or two years ago.

To address the subject knowledge advantage that these students might have, you would make sure you have range of students, including those who have not advanced in that subject since they sat the exam for real. It wouldn’t be perfect, but would definitely be more realistic than getting subject experts with decades of teaching experience to trial run exams.

The Issues Behind the PPTA Strike Headlines

True to their word, the PPTA went on strike today. Various media have reported on the strike. One NZ Herald story is linked here.

So what’s not in the media? A lot. Most reports have been focussed on pay.

Teachers have not only been dissatisfied with pay, but with the government wanting to claw back conditions granted in previous times.

One of those issues is class sizes. There has been plenty of debate about it. Having smaller class sizes is better for the teacher, but obviously it costs more. What about the impact on achievement? Hattie’s Visible Learning, says it depends on what the teacher actually does with opportunity it provides. He found that teachers who already have a large class, when given a smaller class, do not perform much better on average. His conclusion was that smaller class sizes do not automatically increase student achievement. Of course, this is quoted in the media as “class size doesn’t matter” because it makes a nice little soundbite for the news.

Workload is quite an issue for teachers. Despite general support for the NCEA system from teachers, one bone of contention is the increased assessment workload it requires of them. What is not generally known is now that the curriculum has been changed (latest curriculum document published 2007), the NCEA standards have to be altered to reflect those changes.

Starting in 2011, new level 1 standards will kick in, followed by level 2 in 2012 and level 3 in 2013. Each school is charged with how they are going assess these new standards and alter their unit plans, assessment plans and get them sent off to NZQA to be checked. Most schools do this themselves, but some outsource this work to private companies. This amount of work was not needed prior to NCEA, as nearly all assessment was done by NZQA by setting and marking exams.

The PPTA has also called the government to address issues with teacher recruitment and retainment. From this story in the Herald:

Ms Gainsford said the ministry’s method of calculating vacancies – by counting job ads in the Education Gazette – was deeply flawed.

“If you talked to lots of principals and told them there was no teacher recruitment problem, they would laugh.”

The method reported fits in with an OIA request I made last year regarding what the Ministry defined as a teacher shortage. I wrote:

One reason the definition is blunt is that it doesn’t account for the actual number of apparently qualified candidates. Mathematics teachers are deemed in many places to be in short supply. But I asked one principal of an urban Auckland decile 3 school how many candidates would apply for a Mathematics vacancy. The principal told me that about 160 would apply.

That principal told me that most of these applicants were not suitable. And a lot of these were teachers from overseas who are not native English speakers or not familiar with the New Zealand system. A school would often have to toss up between just filling the vacancy or doing without until readvertising again. I think this is what Gainsford is referring to.

What People Search For

Somebody recently found my blog (this page probably) when searching for the following terms: ncea cabbage subjects bum

So I thought I would have would have a go at searching those terms for myself and see what I could find. I found a ncea hate page on bebo and a forum on the 2008 results amongst other pages.

One of them is an example of NCEA being a “lightning rod” for issues that researchers (Hipkins et al if I remember correctly…) found in their surveys into attitudes towards the qualification. What is meant by this term is that it is a focal point for all the criticisms of the education system, not just the assessment method itself.

Forum posters complained about the “feminist” excellence question in geography. I haven’t read the posts in great detail, but it would seem the poster is blaming the qualification for what they see as a poor question. A poor question can be written in any assessment format.

The bebo page is more a criticism of the assessment method itself. Statements are made along the lines of NCEA is dumbed down, discourages excellence (pun not intended), credit disparity and other points which have been made before. Your mileage may vary on what to think of the arguments made with quite poor spelling in some places.

I wonder how much of this can be isolated from resistance to change. By the time school students have parents and teachers who did NCEA, the system would have changed again and there’d be a new generation of people complaining about how back in the day NCEA was a great system and so on.

Alternatively, despite the best changes to make NCEA better, it will be a glowing indicator of inequities between rich (not necessarily just private) schools and poor schools. With some schools eschewing NCEA, the divide with NCEA for the “dumb kids”, and the Cambridge exams  for the “smart kids” may increase over time. Ironically, NCEA may make what school you go to matter more than it did before.

The Good Old Gender Divide

No surprises with an article highlighting girls being ahead of boys in the NCEA stats.

Of course despite this trend in this country and other richer countries, girls are still spoken of as if they are some oppressed academic minority, which becomes glaring at university. I have mentioned this before in a post last year.

Me being cynical, I don’t think this will gain any mainstream traction until in about 20 to 30 years time. I predict it won’t be until then that we see stories about a missing generation of educated males. The so called man drought will be worse, with women competing for fewer educated males as it is still the case that the woman tends to  ”marry up” rather than the man.

An Overoptimistic Conclusion for NCEA

The NZ Herald reports on supporters of NCEA cheering the closing of the socioeconomic gap in achievement since the qualification was introduced. While I do not wish to put down the efforts of hardworking teachers, I have doubts about how much this closing of the gap is due to anything particularly special about this qualification.

There are numerous other explanations that could explain the closing of the gap. Some I can think of are:

• Teachers and students getting used to a system
• Modularisation of courses often leads to increased pass rates
• NCEA is dumbed down (the cynical reason, for the record I do not hold this opinion)

What do I mean by getting used to a system? Well, for a few years an exam will not change its format too much. Then one year, they tweak the exam format, and surprise surprise, there is a measurable drop in the performance of the cohort relative to the previous cohort.

Now that NCEA has been around for a while, there are more resources available for exam preparation. Students are now quite likely to have older siblings who did NCEA before them; and may be taught by teachers who did NCEA themselves if being taught by a new teacher. The marketplace providing study guides and textbooks in the NCEA environment has had time to mature. There are plenty of examiners’ reports and previous NCEA exams available.

The strength of this particular part of my argument does rely on being able to show that the change in assessment hurt students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds harder than other students.

In the UK the modularisation of A-levels is said to have increased pass rates. Here is one story by the Independent about this. Compared to A-levels, NCEA has modularisation on steroids, as students are entered for achievement standards (the NCEA equivalent of modules) and not subjects. With A-levels, if I recall correctly, all students entered for a subject will sit the same modules.  But this is not the case under NCEA, as there are no compulsory modules, bar the literacy and numeracy tagged credits. So if one believes that modularisation made A-levels easier, one would have the same belief about NCEA.

Note that the A-levels (and GCSEs) that most students sit in the UK are not the same as the International A-levels and GCSEs, commonly referred to as Cambridge exams that some schools offer in New Zealand. The Cambridge exams tend not have modularity and coursework that the UK domestic ones do. Some schools in the UK (mostly independent or academically focussed) schools have switched to Cambridge exams also for the same reasons that NZ schools have switched to them.

And finally the cynical option, that NCEA is dumbed down. I would disagree that this is the case for anyone who takes a ‘traditional’ maths course at least for NCEA. The cynical case is stronger for the lower levels and anything linked to the literacy and numeracy requirements. The use of Unit Standards as ‘cabbage credits’ to get people to pass  has been controversial. The current work of realigning the NCEA to the current curriculum has taken this into account.

Which leads me to my dislike of the use of Applied Mathematics as a euphemism for ‘cabbage maths’ in schools. At university, Applied Mathematics is a real discipline with academic rigour.

A Cursory Glance at the Early History of NCEA

Recently I have received a stack of papers in response to an Official Information Act Request enquiring to the policy underlying the NCEA.

The earliest document I have is dated 8 December 1997. According to this document the NCEA was part of a whole review of the NQF and done in line with a review of tertiary qualifications. Some concerns known today regarding its implementation were known back then, like the use of unit standards and teacher workload.

One snippit of the report that will be popular I suspect is

Moderation is necessary because in qualifications assessment, credibility is the key.

Often in these sorts of documents certain bits of information are blanked out. What seems to be interesting is that somebody has used correction tape over some names. The tape isn’t so opaque after it has been applied so the names underneath are still visible. Which has made me more curious about the names than if nothing had been done at all – I wasn’t looking for a scandal. Normally I believe it is customary to black out the names, then photocopy the document…

One always has to be mindful of the political implications of things. The author of the document notes:

Overall, the draft report provides useful analysis to inform policy decisions. However, there is a significant risk that it could spark controversy. All sides of the debate around qualifications and the NQF could selectively read the report as vindicating their stance, whereas in fact it presents various perspectives and often competing views.

It is therefore desirable that the report be publicly released together with a report on tertiary review submissions, so that a fuller context for decisions is given.