Reply to Anne Tolley's comments in the Southland Times (29/5/10)

Dear Sir

I was very concerned with the information being presented by the Minister of
Education regarding National Standards in Saturday's paper(29/5/10).

Parents have been badly misled since the initial implementation of the Standards and
children will suffer the consequences of the unprofessional process that is
being followed.

The initial claim from the Minister was that the Standards will help bring up the
tail of underachievement, what is now being delivered has no direct
relationship to the curriculum and confuses the information already being
collected through more robust and proven assessment systems. The Standards are
now aligned to NCEA Level 2 and the yearly expectations developed from this
have been arbitrarily decided with no reference to research or developmental
progressions.

The Standards are a farce, and are not world leading as the Minister claims, in
fact our once excellent reputation as education innovators has been lost and
the international community of educators are confused about why we would go
down this failed path.

Teachers and parents asked overwhelmingly for a proper trial, with over 1,000 school
communities asking for this. The Minister rejected these concerns, and those
expressed in an open letter from our most respected educationalists, so now all
our schools and children are experiencing a trial.

The Government made these farcical Standards a legal requirement and many
principals and teachers have now been confronted with the moral and
professional dilemma of choosing between what is best for their children and
communities or following a system that has already been shown to be
flawed.

NCEA took around 9 years to properly embed, our National Curriculum took around five
years and to rush through these standards in a matter of months and inflict
them on our all our children is foolhardy in the extreme!

Yours sincerely.....