In a book chapter which is now over ten years old,
Martin Thrupp identified what he called the ‘inconvenient truths’ about
education in Aotearoa. The biggest is that our system is structured on
something he calls ‘middle-class advantage’. This concept is a recognition of
the fact that children come into school under very different sets of
circumstances in their home life. Their parents have differing levels of
education. They have very different experiences of health. Disadvantaged kids
may read less in the home. They will be exposed to less ‘curriculum-relevant’
stimuli in early childhood and beyond. Social sciences used to bundle these
variables up in one general term – ‘life chances’.
One question that is never asked, yet is certainly
just as ‘inconvenient’, however, is how the very structure of our education
system actually exacerbates such differences. For the last fifteen years, New
Zealand secondary schools have used a unique standards-based system to measure
achievement called the NCEA. The way students are measured is based on the
accumulation of credits from standards that are not ‘topics’ in the
conventional sense. Instead, they are assessments of individual skills or
competencies in a ‘domain’, in a wider structural framework that mimics those
of many countries’ vocational education systems. The system was notoriously
beset with major problems early on, and has undergone two major cycles of
change that have fundamentally altered how it works. Arguably, its latest cycle
has produced the most worrying outcomes, and here is why.
First, it is important to understand that as of
2007, New Zealand does not have a national curriculum per se. It has a
curriculum document, largely filled with warmly written vision
statements and educational jargon, with next to no substantive contents inside.
But the question of what is in fact taught at school is left up to the school
itself. Second, the NCEA can be broken up into two types of standards: internal
and external. External assessment is entirely centrally moderated and internal
assessment is marked by the school (with small samples being centrally
moderated). Third, it is common to hear proponents of the NCEA praise its
‘flexibility’ as a key positive over other alternatives. This is because
schools can choose any arrangement of individual ‘standards’ to offer in
whichever combinations they wish. To the progressive-minded individual, all of
this is sounding wonderful, even approaching the utopian dream.
The reason why the reality is far from the utopian
dream that should theoretically follow from these settings, is that schools have
begun to manipulate their results in the pursuit of a ‘good news story’ or a
favourable position on league tables. This is precisely because they can. Additionally,
this is happening more in low-decile schools, on both class and ethnic lines.
But this is not just about fairness in awarding results. The most significant problem
that arises is one of social justice, whereby students of socially disadvantaged backgrounds are receiving a
greatly diminished curriculum. One practice that is becoming more common in schools is the withdrawal
of students from enrolment in standards that the school predicts they will
fail. This is usually not for any educational reason, but largely because
failing a standard is recorded and counted in national pass rates, while being
withdrawn is not a result that is recorded. One school engaged in this practice to
such a reckless and extraordinary degree that it was placed under statutory management by the Ministry
of Education as a consequence.
Many factors play a role in this, including
Thrupp’s own discussion of the way zoning works to reproduce the class
structure within schools, which dovetails with the growing inequalities in
school experiences I have just mentioned. As Thrupp says, ‘by failing to raise
middle class advantage in education as an issue, politicians and policymakers
imply that it is a natural part of the world order, over which they have no
control. And so we have a society where most people see putting their child
into a high socio-economic school as value-free’. This
has also given immense favour to critics of the NCEA whose concerns about the
system are increasingly evident. In 2015, former Auckland Grammar headmaster
John Morris, who is a well-known opponent of NCEA, presciently identified what
was now happening in schools all over the country:
The NCEA system encourages schools and students to
choose soft-option unit standards and easier achievement standards so that
schools reach the 85% pass rate demanded by the government. […] It is common
knowledge that ‘gaming’ occurs. For example, schools maximising the easier to
get internally assessed standards and minimising the more demanding external
assessments, and withdrawing candidates from NZQA data who are failing, to
ensure higher pass rates.
The new NCEA change package, which proposes
reducing the number of internally assessed standards and modularising credits
in larger blocks for the purposes of curriculum coherence, is a good step in
the right direction. But already there are attempts by defenders of the current
structure to mislead people about the effects of these changes. Stuart
Middleton is one of these, who on his blog likened the change package to
a throwback to the days of School Certificate:
[T]he discussion about NCEA […] has got bogged down
in a nostalgic dragging up of all the old features of the examination system
that was replaced by NCEA […] We see this in a quest for large blocks of
credits (something already able to be done), in the need to squeeze credits
into recognisable conventional subjects […]
Middleton is someone who clearly believes that
education is about becoming qualified to enter a career, but talks about little
else besides. He asserts without evidence that ‘The process of starting those
[career] journeys requires the availability of learning that can [sic] attempted in
small chunks with rapid rewards.’
I am likely not the only one unsure about what the
changes he lists have to do with School Certificate. It remains to be seen what
is so wrong with, as he calls them, ‘recognisable conventional subjects’ –
perhaps the reason subjects are ‘conventional’ is, rather than being arbitrary,
because they have disciplinary
conventions that must be understood as part of the learning
process. Proponents of NCEA, however, largely subscribe to the further
fragmentation of learning programmes. They believe the solution to students
being unable to integrate understanding in a discipline is to merge them
together into an indistinct bubble – in eduspeak this is known as
‘interdisciplinarity’. They are, of course, forgetting that
‘interdisciplinarity’ is meaningless without ‘disciplinarity’. Nonetheless, the
fact remains that this fragmentation, however it is dressed up, has contributed
to the vast inequalities of school experience between low- and high- decile
schools that have re-emerged, as many in the profession are finally now
realising.
The characterisation of opponents as constantly looking
backward to the days of norm-referenced assessment is a fig-leaf defence for
the current miasma of chaos swirling in our schools. NCEA is a system that is,
right now, the centre of the ‘inconvenient truth’ – that standards have been
covertly dropping in our schools and that the assessment system has directly contributed
to an extreme worsening of class and ethnic inequalities. In 2017, just one
percent of decile one students entered a professional degree.
New Zealand ranks second in the world in terms of inequality in reading levels
between the richest and poorest students. These statistics not only
sound appalling – in truth they show an education system in crisis. But it
appears NCEA has only endured in its current form for so long as part of its
proponents’ strategy for survival – pretend that nothing is wrong with it and
constantly remind those who are sceptical about the ‘bad old days’. It is time
for the truth to be revealed.
Further reading:
Collins, S. (2018). Unicef ranks NZ education among world’s most
unequal for boys and girls. Education Central,
30 October 2018. URL: https://educationcentral.co.nz/unicef-ranks-nz-education-among-worlds-most-unequal-for-boys-and-girls/.
Middleton, S. (2019). Arriving back at the beginning not knowing where
we have been! EdTalkNZ, July 25 2019. URL: https://www.stuartmiddleton.co.nz/2019/07/arriving-back-at-the-beginning-not-arriving-back-at-the-beginning-and-not-knowing-where-we-have-beenking-where-we-have-been/.
Morris, J. (2015). NCEA/Cambridge debate – clearly the blinkers are
still on at PPTA headquarters. New Zealand
Herald, 22 September 2015. URL: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11517082.
Thrupp, M. (2008). Some inconvenient truths about education in
Aotearoa-New Zealand. In St John, S. and Wynd, D. (eds.) Left behind: How social inequalities damage New
Zealand children (pp. 109-119). Auckland: Child Poverty Action Group.
