Posts by giovanni tiso
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You can measure values and you can measure inclusion and you can measure all sorts of interesting things like integration into communities etc etc.
How, since typically schools in high decile areas are in suburbs with predominantly professional couples and little in the way of daytime communities? I'm also unsure how you measure inclusion, since it's easy enough for a school to encourage admission of the the special needs kids that are easier to include in a mainstream classroom. There are simply no comparisons of that nature that you can make from a school to the next.
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I think parents worked out in the end that a uniform and an old-fashioned name weren't everything.
However it is quite possible with appropriate testing at high school level to game the system so that children from certain schools will have preferential access to limited enrolment courses and be rewarded for the social standing and income of their parents. As it should be.
National standards aren't about helping underachieving students, they're about helping wealthy families to select the correct schools.
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What is the annoying bit in assessing of humans is the fact that .....surprise....we are all different. There is a spectrum of results of students - and teachers - from incompetent to competent. Pass, average, fail, or if you will, could be somewhere between from 0 to 100. Although I concede it is open ended, but more to the competent end I suspect. So we have to look at group dynamics in the measurement and the stats say there is a large uncertainty in any measurement you wish to make.
There's that, but what I object to more is that as soon as you start treating education as a science, then you automatically focus on the things that you can measure, however imperfectly, and stop paying attention to the things that are harder or in fact impossible to plot on a graph. How do you measure "values" or "inclusion"?
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That isn’t true as is demonstrated by any of the social sciences and any of the sciences that study humans directly.
You said a science like physics. It's not, it's a social science. Pretty elementary, really.
Why? What makes you think scientists are only capable of measuring easy things?
It's not that in the hard sciences you measure only easy things, but those measurements are expected to be repeatable. You can't do that with education. You can pretend to do that, wrapping your "results" in the language of the hard sciences, with usually calamitous results.
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I wonder if such groupings would have an effect on league... er, the schools performance.
Stop wondering.
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Huh? Care to explain Gio? There is a lot of scientific research on education and some quite lengthy degree courses in education. So I'm guessing you have a problem with defining education as a science?
The fact that you can study education doesn't make education a science. The results of those observations aren't easily repeatable and there is nothing like a laboratory setting, for starters. Secondly, what you measure and how you measure it is going to tell you some things about certain educational outcomes, but not about education itself. By which I mean that you can measure numeracy and literacy, and do so with some (not a lot) of consistency, but that is not what education is about. Being at school also means learning to be a social being and the skills you need to adjust in a number of different contexts and situations. You simply cannot measure any of that. But if you adopt the view that education is a science, you'll also invariably focus on the things you can measure and those things only, to the expense of all those other less tangible things (which, incidentally, are so valued by the new NZ curriculum).
There is a lot more to a school than the average testing results of its students. There are values, exposure to different cultures and social groups, a sense of community and cooperation, learning extracurricular skills, acquiring a better sense of oneself. Very little of this can be measured, but as a parent you get a pretty good sense of it without too much difficulty really.
(And yes, we could have sent our child to the school up the road which has better academic results at no trouble and zero extra cost. We chose to stay local because we believe that it's a better school and it would serve our child better. Besides the obvious point that those higher averages don't mean that our child would have better academic results there than he does here - that really shouldn't even need to be said.)
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I could bore you all with a long, hateful rant about the way my daughter - clearly already identified as being 'in need' - started high school last week with no assistance from the MoE at all, despite being promised both a facilitator and an itinerant, but you don't want to hear it, and I don't want the headache from crying again.
That would be because having a need is not the same thing as having a right. We must move from a needs based system to a rights based system as soon as humanly possible.
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What most folks haven't really adapted to yet is the idea that education is a real science in the same way physics and medicine are sciences.
Of course it could be that they haven't adapted to it because it's not true.
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Wild applause from the cheap seats. Thank you Russell.
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Those cards are allocated from here:
Ah, the old fashioned way.
At the presentation of the Elsie Locke's biography last year somebody pointed out that some of her best pictures had been taken by the SIS.