Not going forward …

In the old days teachers wrote reports that said what pupils could do well, what they couldn’t do well, and what they should do to improve. It was based on the teacher’s professional opinion. Teachers knew their pupils fairly well and knew what they were capable of.

And when primary school pupils became high school students, teachers wrote reports that said what students could do, their expected School Cert and Bursary marks and what students should do to improve.

Reports had 2 A to E grades, one indicating achievement and one indicating attitude and behaviour and effort. As were good. Es weren’t.

There were brief comments too. Language teachers wrote about verbs, tenses and prepositions. Maths teachers wrote about writing neatly and finishing homework. English teachers wrote about vocabulary and Economics teachers wrote about neat graphs. PE teachers wrote about ball-handling skills – just for fun.

The whole A4 report folded into an envelope and sent to parents via schoolbag-mail at the end of each term. Parents stored it in a hard-copy database called a drawer.

Doubtless a consultant in the US, the UK or the Maldives told the minister that this way of doing reports is not ‘going forward’. (How come consultants only live in exotic places and why can’t they use e-mail or skype?).

I can just hear it… ‘Anne, what Aotearoa’s education system needs in this fast-changing world is a digital, state of the art, cutting edge reporting system.’ Obviously we Yanks can’t sell you a better way of teaching what with ours being rubbish. And we can’t flog off a national curriculum because we don’t have one. We can’t impress you with our ways of teaching numeracy because, um… well, you know. And as for values, well our in-school gun-crime is down… but by golly we can sure as heck sell you bigger bureaucracy.’

‘Anne, here’s the wow-factor and by golly I mean wow. The reports will show where a pupil is on the big scale and straight away, no I mean immediately. Parents will be able to see whether their child is better than average or worse. Obviously we’d not use the word worse because that would erode esteem. We could have a whopping big, real-time, normal distribution curve and we could mark on it where each pupil is, was and could be – on-line obviously. What, crap broadband? Anne, no problem, we can sell that to you too.’

Once upon a time a couple of ratbag scammers travelled to a far away land to sell the Emperor some new clothes. So new was the cloth that only the smartest people in the land could truly appreciate its beauty.

— Peter Giddens