National Standards - A Good Idea, but....
2010-11-10 20:39:00.0
AUTHOR: Peter Dunne
Karl Marx wrote once that the thing to learn from history is the people do not.
That is almost a metaphor for the way we make major policy changes in this country.
From the advent of the Resource Management Act, through to NCEA, and now it seems National Standards, we make the same mistake. And we never seem to learn.
Bold ideas – often containing far-sighted reforms – founder because we fail to put in the proper effort to launch these initiatives in a way that takes people with us, deals with all the implementation issues, and makes the effort to inform people why the changes are being made and how they will benefit from it.
If people understood the Resource Management Act streamlined planning procedures by overturning 54 different pieces of old legislation and consolidating our planning law in one place, they would likely feel more kindly disposed to it than they do. Instead, they see a monolithic piece of legislation that slows things down and stifles development, the very opposite of what it was intended to achieve.
If people saw NCEA as a much more flexible and responsive way of measuring educational achievement that told employers and students alike far more accurately what students had actually learned and how proficient they were, it would be embraced as an innovative piece of educational measurement. Instead, too many people still see it as a dumbing down of the education system.
Now with National Standards, if parents were confident they were an effective way of measuring a child’s comparative achievements, they would have confidence in the system. Instead, they see a looming shambles because of what looks increasingly like a rushed implementation, and contradictory advice to schools from the Ministry of Education, and an overall unwillingness to consult too widely.
It is time to learn the lesson. I am contacting all the primary and intermediate schools boards of trustees in my electorate to seek their experiences of National Standards thus far, to see what we need to be doing, even at this late stage, to get things right.
The last thing I want is to see Karl Marx proved right again.