A Mess of Educational Pottage

"Experience Day Tramps"

The government's NCEA education system is deteriorating by the year.  Some "woke" schools are voting with their feet.  Simon Collins, writing in the NZ Herald, has written an excellent piece on the issues.  

First up, he presents the argument of the "external exams are evil" folk.: 

At Kia Aroha College in Ōtara, no one sat external exams this year.  "We don't do exams," says principal Haley Milne.  "We don't want to put our young people in the gambling situation of an exam, where people's lives can fall apart in one day."

Her mother Dr Ann Milne, who was the principal for 22 years until 2016, says the college aims to develop young people who can think for themselves rather than just recite rote learning.  "Exams are a colonial system," she declares. "Exams test your memory and that's all. They don't actually help you to apply that learning in any way."

Kia Aroha College is presented as an "extreme" case--but the attitudes and principles at play are found right through the government school system.  The use of external exams is dropping sharply away.

Papers with external exams have dropped from 32 per cent in 2008 to 26 per cent in 2017 of all assessments for Level 1 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).  At Level 2 externals have declined from 28 per cent to 21 per cent. And at Level 3 they have plunged from 37 per cent of all assessments in 2008 to 24 per cent last year. 

Combined with much higher rates of achievement, merit and excellence in internally assessed papers, the Ministry of Education sees the trend as "a risk to NCEA's credibility and robustness".

Is is not strange that  two critical features now stand out in the government school landscape?  Who would have seen that coming.  Firstly, the use of external exams has "plunged".  Secondly, the achievement and passing rate of internally assessed papers (the majority) have risen astronomically. 

If we were an employer, we would definitely put up a sign: "Internally assessed graduating students need not apply."
 

And then there are the neanderthals--schools and principals which insist on deploying external exams.  Tim O'Connor, principal of Auckland Boys Grammar School, summarises their position:

Auckland Grammar School headmaster Tim O'Connor is so opposed to the group's proposals that he has taken his school out of NCEA Level 1 completely from next year, and has developed an alternative system that will still include exams.

Most Grammar students in their last two school years now sit Cambridge exams, which are run not only outside the school but outside the country.  Students will also still be able to opt into NCEA Levels 2 and 3 - but, in most subjects, only courses which include an external exam.

"All our courses have to have externals," says O'Connor.  "The difference is we are not killing ours [students] with kindness. We are saying we are preparing you for what is to come in an academic environment where you should be assessed in a variety of ways and external exams are part of that.

"You enter an external exam to be able to show the examiner not only the knowledge you have acquired and retained, but that you can then articulate that in a new manner given the impromptu question you have been presented with.  "That is a skill which requires you to have stored quite a lot of fundamental knowledge into your long-term memory."

The previous government determined that it was going to lift pass rates throughout the country, and set numerical targets.

Most achievement gaps in NCEA have narrowed dramatically since 2011 when the former National Government set a target of 85 per cent of 18-year-olds achieving NCEA Level 2 by 2017.  The target was achieved to within a decimal point, lifting the number of 18-year-olds with Level 2 from 74.3 per cent in 2011 to 84.9 per cent last year.

Our school-by-school analysis shows that schools in the richest communities (deciles 8-10) already had a median Level 2 achievement rate of 82 per cent of their Year 12 students back in 2008 so they had only limited scope to improve, lifting their median to 90 per cent in 2017.

Schools in the middling deciles 4-7 lifted their median pass rate from 70 per cent in 2008 to 84 per cent last year. The most dramatic gains were in the poorest three deciles, where the median pass rate soared from 57 per cent to 81 per cent.   Within that group, the median Māori Level 2 pass rate jumped from 50 per cent to 78 per cent and the median Pasifika pass rate almost doubled, from 42 per cent to 80 per cent.

The median pass rate in state schools rose by 15 points for girls, to 85 per cent, and by 18 points for boys, to 80 per cent.

So--all good then.  Huge improvement and turnaround!  Not really.

Counting only those who entered NCEA in Year 12, last year's Level 2 achievement rates were 81 per cent at Grammar and an extraordinary 97 per cent at Kia Aroha.  However, these dramatic gains for boys, poorer and Māori/Pasifika students were achieved by taking advantage of NCEA's vast range of 9360 available courses [emphasis, ours], ranging from "Demonstrate understanding of atomic and nuclear physics" to "Experience day tramps".

The story is quite different for University Entrance (UE), which is awarded to students who achieve at least 14 NCEA Level 3 credits in at least three out of a much narrower range of traditional academic subjects, and have good literacy and numeracy. These requirements were tightened in 2013 after universities expressed concern about students' literacy and numeracy.

Schools in the richest three deciles still managed a small lift in their UE achievement rates from a median of 66 per cent of their Year 13 students in 2008 to 69 per cent last year.  But the median achievement rates actually dropped 3 points to 45 per cent in the middle deciles, and slipped 1 point to a miserable 27 per cent in the poorest deciles.

While the pass levels rose considerably, the subjects being "studied" were a polyglot of mish-mash confusions.  A qualification given to a student who "achieved" in day tramps is put in the same category as an ability to "demonstrate understanding of atomic and nuclear physics". 

The nation's universities have seen through the rort, and have insisted upon students having achieved in the real subjects, the core subjects, the stuff that really matters--that is, "traditional academic subjects, and have good literacy and numeracy."

The upshot is this: where a pupil goes to school matters.  There is a horde of government schools which offer an "education" in irrelevancies.  We call these the tiddlywink schools.  They dutifully pat themselves on the back, telling their pupils what wonderful achievement rates they have experienced in irrelevancies such as "experience in day tramps", whilst muttering darkly about "colonialist education" and the great harm that it does to poor disadvantaged kids. 

Fools then engage in a bit of clever misdirection.  They argue that poor socio-economic areas produce sub-standard education--thus, the rich are ripping off, stealing from, the poor.  But what they cleverly fail to concede is that when it comes to schools in poorer socio-economic areas, parental control and demands are lessened.  In Otara parents may wish for a more traditional, academic education for their children.  But parents have no clout within the system.  They must live with what they are given.  Ironically, this represents a pure and oppressive form of socialism.

But in the wealthier areas (such as the Auckland Grammar zone) parents have far more say, and have far higher expectations for their children's education; they make demands accordingly.  The school is happy to comply.  It is a win-win outcome.