Plunket charts for kids at school . . .

Dear me, Plunket charts for kids at school. Good grief. Don’t they realise that kids are all different?

Children don’t match Plunket’s height and weight and eye-colour charts. Often this is because they have abnormally short or tall or weird-eyed parents and sometimes it’s because some parents feed their kids more or run them around more.

The same applies to reading and mathematics. Some children bring good genes to school and some wear unwashed and torn ones.

It would be easy to rant about incompetent civil servants or vote-harvesting politicians but we all know that teachers are to blame and this time it’s the Maths teachers’ fault.

Hey Maths teachers, get off your big fat couches and teach them about normal distribution curves – please, and means and medians and standard deviations. Teach them that normal populations are spread around the mean, that some of the population is way out to the right and some are way out to the left – and that this is n-o-r-m-a-l.

Parents and politicians and the ministry’s statistician weenies need to understand that kids learn to read at different rates and so on the 12th of July when they’re tested and measured and recorded in a national database some might have a bigger score than others or a smaller score. This will only generate angst for the kids and parents and nastiness at PTA meetings about whose kid is smarter than whose.

We can probably assume that the tests used to generate these scores will be multiple choice because these can be computer marked and the scores can be stashed away on a hard drive and processed by a superconductor and the results can be published as glossy documents with coloured whale-tail watermarks and a suitably ethnic snappy one-liner that associates kauri trees or toheroa with children.

But fret not colleagues. This is a political initiative. It has as much to do with teaching kids to read and do percentages as a set of leaky bagpipes has to do with Tchaikovsky. If it were all about teaching kids to read we’d see better and more frequent teacher training, more teachers in schools, better facilities and all the belly whistly gadgets that they have in Scandinavian schools where they do value teaching and learning.

These Plunket-style reports, comrades, are all about politics. The outcome will be to show that this government has improved the quality of education more than any previous government. Too cynical?

Or not cynical enough? This could be the beginning of a come-back coup by Plunket. ERO and the ministry will be sidelined and schools will be inspected by large-busted and very assertive Plunket Nurses wearing sensible shoes and starched pinafores, instructing on nutrition, play and suitable television times.

— Peter Giddens