Shocked? Is the Minister really shocked? Shocked to find out that Labour when last in Government removed National Standards within their first 100 days might be against national testing. Hmm, ok. There was a huge sense of relief from the majority of the profession to find out that the scourge of the SMART Tool might be over before it starts. But the below article on Stuff does highlight the ongoing political dishonesty from this current Minister as she looks to try to pitch teachers vs parents. When the truth couldn’t be further from the truth, both teachers and parents have a shared desire to see the best for the child. One could think that the approach from the minister suggests that she is ill prepared to deal with the actual policy debate about if national testing improves learner outcomes. Ginny Andersen appeared to subtly confirm a major Labour Party education policy at a conference last week, but her party says the policy had already been announced — it’s just almost no one had seen the announcement. There is an interesting distinction that needs to be made between policy announcement and positioning. This announcement would have been surprising if Labour had previously pledged its support for the SMART Tool, but finding out that the Labour Party is not in favour of standardised testing is entirely consistent with its history. While speaking as part of a political panel beside education ministers Erica Stanford and David Seymour, Andersen said she would cancel “mandated testing” for primary-aged students. The MPs were at an Auckland Primary Principals’ Association event last week, when Andersen promised to put an end to the new “Smart Tool” if Labour took power after the election. That new tool coordinated twice-yearly testing for students in years three to eight. The actual position is that Labour would remove the SMART Tool, schools would still work out which assessment tools they would use to track learning. It’s refreshing to hear Ginny talk about wanting to return professional decision making to schools. Her promise surprised Stanford, the education minister who was sitting on stage beside Andersen. Stanford announced the roll out of the “Smart Tool” just a few months ago, describing it as a “low-stakes, light-touch” assessment tool. No amount of claiming that this is ‘low-stakes and light-touch” makes it true. The reality is that this style of testing is disruptive to the normal learning programme we want learners engaged in. “Parents will receive that information in their next report card. Labour wants to take that away from parents,” she said, after the event. And this is where we get into the real dishonesty. Removing the SMART Tool won’t change anything about the long standing requirement for schools to report to parents twice a year. She added, “Labour’s plan to scrap twice-yearly progress checks in reading, writing and maths shows they are out of touch with parents. Parents do not want less information about how their children are doing. They want more.” Nice try, turns out parents have a range of different expectations for what they want by way of formal school reporting. Erica has a habit of trying to paint all parents as if they are the same (turns out one size fits all isn’t just for learners). This is why Labour’s position is so much more inline with parents and educators. Labour thinks that the designing of report information should be done by parents and schools. Andersen told the crowd of principals: “If I was the minister, I would not have mandated testing because I think it is important teachers are working within their schools to understand what works for your communities and your parents. And you deserve to have that autonomy.” Gosh that is a refreshing comment given the last couple of years. She said she was “worried about the Smart Tool”. As she should be, this tool has seen a huge amount of taxpayers money going to an overseas company just so the Minister can achieve an ideologically driven goal of national testing. Asked to confirm if that was a solid Labour Party policy going into the election, a party spokesperson replied with a simple response, “yes”. That education policy isn’t listed by Labour as one of its election campaign promises and, as far as Stuff can see, the party hadn’t issued any formal statement announcing the policy. This is where the article gets odd. But the spokesperson did direct Stuff towards Andersen’s private Substack account. Here is the substack article - it took 30 seconds to find. I like that this was put out through Substack. On Substack, where Andersen has accumulated 115 subscribers, she made a similar comment a few months ago. This is where the reporter misunderstands Substack. AEC covered this Substack at the time and the post has been read 1,000s of times. In a newsletter posted on that social media site, Andersen wrote: “We need to end the obsession with testing.” But she included a caveat with that statement, which meant it wasn’t clear that Labour was promising to get rid of mandatory testing for primary school students. She said, “Parents deserve clear, regular updates on how their child is progressing at school, but not at the expense of real learning. This isn’t a caveat, both the reporter and the Minister are trying to conflate national testing with reporting to parents, when this is not the case. We have had decades of reporting to parents twice a year with or without National Standards/Testing. “Labour will ensure parents get straightforward, consistent reporting on their child’s progress.” The newsletter did not include a clear commitment to put an end to the just-launched Smart Tool. Launched this year, the Ministry of Education described the Smart assessment as “a learning check-in”. “It is not a high-stakes test,” the ministry said. The tool was launched this year in some schools, with the Government planning to have it working in all primary schools later. It assessed reading, writing and maths for students in years three to 10. Using a quiz-like website, it asked students multi-choice questions or for short written answers. An example assessment, published online by the ministry, included just 15 questions. Get full access to Aotearoa Educators Collective's Substack at aecnz.substack.com/subscribe
