Yesterday, the new Minister of Education, Hon. Erica Stanford, announced the formation of a Ministerial Advisory Group to review the primary school English and Mathematics & Statistics curricula. It is an honour to be named as a member of this Group alongside so many highly respected individuals, including the Group chair, Dr Michael Johnston from the New Zealand Initiative, and Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin, one of the earliest public supporters of my campaign to Bring Back Column Addition to New Zealand’s early primary maths curriculum.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to everyone who has supported my endeavours over the past 10 years. That includes the teachers and students who have joined me on this journey to restore confidence in mathematics education in New Zealand.
You may not hear from me for a while, but rest assured that I will be working and thinking hard about important things next year.
Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year to you all.
It was a welcome surprise to hear Brian Conrad talk to Kerre Woodham last week. Brian Conrad is a Professor of Mathematics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Mathematics at Stanford University in California, USA.
Woodham had come across Conrad’s recent op-ed in The Atlantic, in which he discussed the findings of his examination of a 1000-page draft of the controversial California Mathematics Framework (CMF). The CMF is similar to New Zealand’s draft Common Practice Model (CPM) in that it proposes how teachers should teach and the rationale behind it, with a strong focus on equity.
I shan’t attempt to explain what is already very well articulated by Conrad himself. Believe me when I say this guy is thorough. You can go to the website he created to publicise his critique of the CMF, including a whole document about citation misrepresentations. It is, unfortunately, no surprise to me that Conrad discovered so many false or misleading claims in the CMF. One of the CMF authors has been called out in the past for making claims but citing research that says almost the exact opposite.
Conrad also shines a light on the CMF’s false promise of greater equity by meddling with traditional pathways (algebra and calculus) in a bid to level the playing field. Again, evidence of success in San Francisco over a span of 10 years was exposed as a misrepresentation of the facts. Removing an “inequitable” option led to a reasonably predictable outcome: the socioeconomically advantaged students found other ways to access that option, while the socioeconomically disadvantaged students were left even further behind, thus widening the achievement gap. In much the same way that New Zealand’s Ministry of Education sat on their hands for 10 years after the Numeracy Project turned out to be a failed experiment, California’s State Board of Education has decided to press on with the CMF’s flawed ideology, turning a blind eye to the truth and quietly removing references to the San Francisco experiment from the final document.
But algebra and calculus is so last century, right? Instead, the CMF wants high schools to focus on offering alternative pathways (data literacy masquerading as the more rigorous data science) that Conrad describes as “off-ramps”. That too has already happened here in New Zealand. Once upon a time, there was a fork in the high school road at the end of Form 6 (Year 12), when students could choose to study calculus or statistics in Form 7 (Year 13). That fork has moved forward to the end of Year 11 (Form 5), and in reality, for many students, their choice has been pre-determined. The modular nature of NCEA means that schools can offer different courses with more or less algebra in Year 11. Students with less algebra in their course are effectively limited to a statistics pathway, while students with more algebra in their course have the full choice of studying calculus or statistics in Year 12. Many students discover too late that their study and future career options are limited by a lack of algebra (and hence calculus) in their maths education. The struggle to get back onto the calculus track without the pre-requisite algebraic skills is enormous. Meanwhile, students on the statistics pathway are also short-changed because, over time, the mathematical content has been eroded and replaced with statistical literacy – the ability to interpret statistical graphs and critique statistical claims. Don’t get me wrong, these are very valuable skills to have in the age of information and disinformation, but as Conrad points out, statistical/data literacy on its own will not lead to exciting careers in data science, as promised by the CMF.
It is important to note that high schools are not to blame; they have a responsibility to navigate the system and find achievable pathways for all students, including those who struggle with algebra. Any high school maths teacher will tell you that students tend to struggle with algebra not because of the mysterious variables x and y, but because they lack fluency with basic arithmetic, especially division and fractions. In other words, the problems start at primary school.
While there are many similarities between what’s happening on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, there is one major difference. California’s CMF underwent two rounds of public consultation before being adopted in July this year, whereas no public feedback was sought when New Zealand’s Ministry of Education released Phase 1 of the CPM. In my previous post, I drew attention to the flimsy evidence offered to support one of the CPM’s theoretical teaching approaches. Schools would be right to be wary of claims that such approaches are “evidence-based”, particularly when some of the CPM authors are also teacher educators who have a commercial interest in promoting their research.
We are less than a week away from finding out whether the CPM will be made compulsory for all state school teachers in New Zealand. Whether or not you believe in the sociocultural ideals of the CPM, the sleight of hand in attempting to push this model through without public consultation is troubling enough.
Dr Audrey M. Tan 9 October 2023
Further listening/reading about the California Mathematics Framework:
The findings of the 2022 National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) in mathematics and statistics have been released, and it’s the same old same old. Only 42% of Year 8 students are meeting curriculum expectations, down from 45% in 2018, with statistically significant drops in achievement among girls, and Māori and Pacific students.
If you want some good news for a change, the schools that I work with defy these depressing statistics. Read all about it here. It shows you what progress and achievement looks like when you understand the mathematical and cognitive principles of teaching approaches that really work, and simply get on with teaching the kids.
The Minister of Education is probably right to be grateful that the results weren’t even worse after three years of disruption to learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. But can we honestly expect to raise student achievement when the Ministry continues to allow experimentation in the classroom, promoting “theoretical frameworks or approaches to teaching, informed by evidence of how ākonga learn”? It was dismaying to hear the Minister defend some of the highly dubious content in Phase 1 of the Common Practice Model (CPM), published earlier this year. Not to be confused with the refreshed mathematics and statistics learning area, where feedback was sought on the first two drafts before being finalised, there is no evidence the CPM was ever released to the public in draft form.
In this document, we are told that “a critical maths pedagogical approach uses maths to develop critical awareness about wider social, environmental, political, ideological, and economic issues. Critical maths recognises the importance of understanding, interpreting, and addressing issues of power, social justice and equity in the community and the wider world.”
Of the references offered to support this approach:
two were not publicly accessible;
one was 25 years old, an indulgent academic introspection suggesting that teachers play “mind games” to increase their awareness of the “values” (definitely not the numerical type) they signal to students when they teach maths;
one was a respected university professor’s plea for undergraduate teaching to move away from textbook problem-solving and towards the use of more open problems. Written 13 years ago, this opinion piece is not even close to being educational research, let alone applicable to either critical maths or teaching school-aged children;
this one was actually an interesting read, but the authors rather undermined themselves by citing an example of moving beyond teaching about and for social justice to teaching with social justice. They admitted the problem wasn’t real-world, let alone related to injustice – it was just inclusive teaching. Indeed, the authors acknowledged that mathematical proof is democratic in nature, so this was a fine example of how, if you respect the culture of mathematics, there is no injustice. Simple.
Which brings me back to one sentence in the CPM that ought to set alarm bells ringing:
“Ākonga are encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free.”
Is the Ministry seriously proposing that teachers should encourage their students to challenge the neutrality of mathematics, to mistrust the very tool that would empower them to rise above dominant discourses and assumptions and reach their own conclusions through objective thinking, critical analysis and logical deduction??
My mathematical training compels me to keep an open mind, so I decided to ask an entity that could reasonably be expected to be benign and neutral (but not culture-free since it was created by humans. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.) Here is what ChatGPT had to say about the matter:
Q: Is mathematics benign, neutral and culture-free?
A: Mathematics itself is a branch of knowledge that deals with logical reasoning and quantitative analysis. As a subject, mathematics is generally considered to be neutral and culture-free because mathematical concepts and principles are universal and can be applied across different cultures and contexts.
However, the way mathematics is taught, used, and applied in different cultures and contexts can reflect the values, beliefs, and biases of those cultures. For example, the way that mathematical concepts are taught and presented may differ based on cultural norms and traditions. Additionally, the use of mathematics in various fields such as finance, engineering, and social sciences can reflect cultural biases and power structures.
Overall, while mathematics as a subject is generally considered to be neutral and culture-free, its application and use can be influenced by cultural factors. It is important to be aware of these potential biases and to approach mathematics with a critical and culturally-sensitive perspective.
ChatGPT 3.5
So even an artifical intelligence engine is able to recognise the difference between mathematics being benign, neutral and culture-free, as opposed to its application or the way it is taught. That the Ministry of Education failed to make that distinction is disturbing.
By all means, let students use maths to examine social injustice…in their social science lessons.
Believe it or not, I do actually have some good news to share.
Our decimal number system is a place value system. It was designed to be used in columns, and finally, the Ministry of Education agrees. The nzmaths.co.nz website has published new resources for teachers to support early learners with addition and subtraction of two-digit numbers, recording the calculations vertically! Column addition is officially making a comeback!!
Although these resources are intended to support students “not on track to meet the expected level”, absolutely no student should miss out on this foundational learning. If you are a parent whose child has been told by their school that they are not allowed to line up the columns, you can now politely refer to these resources and reassure your child’s school that it is officially okay. If you have a learner who is struggling with the “renaming/regrouping” method of column subtraction, you can show them the “borrow-and-pay-back” method, which is much easier to apply.
How far the nzmaths.co.nz website has come, proffering answers such as “Teachers should debate whether they will introduce the written form at all” and “Early teaching of the written form often locks students into low-level thinking from which they never emerge” until I called them out in 2013.
Please share this news widely, especially among teacher groups. Teachers already celebrating the column-based methods are seeing the benefits: their students’ understanding and problem solving are noticeably improved. In other words, they have been unlocked from low-level thinking and are now emerging! This is not a surprise if you understand the cognitive science of learning.
After two decades, the return of early column addition doesn’t feel so much like a victory, just a huge relief. Now, we can really start to fix New Zealand’s big maths problem.
Weaving is the Big Idea of NCEA Numeracy, but it is starting to unravel. Although an NCEA Literacy disaster is looming too, I shall focus on Numeracy in this post, partly to reduce the word count, partly to avoid referring to the curiously punctuated Literacy & Communication and Maths Strategy, but mostly because I have first-hand experience of some of the work done on the Numeracy side, whereas I have only been an observer of the work done on the Literacy side.
Trials tests in 2021 and 2022 of the new NCEA Numeracy standard have not gone well. So poor were the results of the 2021 pilot, the Ministry of Education had no choice but to postpone the co-requisite unit standard, by one year, to 2024. In the first instance, the standard will not be mandatory as originally intended, otherwise too many students might fail to achieve the NCEA qualification.
Questions about the readiness of secondary schools and their students, the practicalities of administering the test, and indeed the test itself, are being raised. This debacle more or less confirms what we should have known all along: there is no quick fix to address New Zealand’s numeracy crisis.
It is understandable that familial familiarity with the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) prompted the then recently appointed Minister of Education to launch a review of the NCEA in 2018. Feedback gathered during the review supported the findings of a Tertiary Education Commission study in 2014: the current NCEA numeracy requirement – a minimum of 10 Numeracy credits gathered from a selection of unit or achievement standards – “cannot be used as a reliable indicator of students’ numeracy capabilities”. (Unfortunately, I can attest to that. Teachers and educators like myself do their utmost to get their students to pass, but unless students appreciate that we are not just teaching to the test, rather the skills acquired will be of genuine value in everyday life, there is no guarantee that students will retain those skills and go on to become numerate adult citizens.)
The official response was to replace the current NCEA numeracy requirement with a direct assessment of “foundational numeracy”. Most people would agree this is a sensible idea. But where is the roadmap for teachers and students? How can we reasonably expect students to be ready for this assessment when we haven’t changed the teaching and learning of Mathematics and Statistics in all prior school years? The Maths Strategy and Action Plan published this year as part of The New Zealand Curriculum Refresh announced in February 2021, comes too late. To quote a retired principal, “the decline in maths achievement in primary schools needs an immediate solution, not a five-year plan”. By enacting the NCEA Change Programme before the Curriculum Refresh, the Ministry of Education has clearly put the cart before the horse.
New Zealand’s maths education system is fractured, with no realised vision of the minimum 10-year journey towards Numeracy and beyond. The Ministry pumps out documents “filled with a lot of bureaucratic speak”, or inspirational videos aimed at…who? Oh, so the key message now is that “all [high school] teachers will be teachers of literacy and numeracy. All teachers will need to know their learners even more.” Sense the urgency, as high school teachers are given guidance on how to weave numeracy into their specialist subject. How ironic that we already have a workforce of primary school teachers who know their learners well. They teach across all subjects, including Mathematics and Statistics, and are perfectly positioned to weave the maths they are teaching into all aspects of their students’ learning. That, folks, is how we develop true numeracy.
Full disclosure: In 2020, I was part of the Numeracy Subject Expert Group (SEG) that developed the new NCEA Numeracy standard: a single standard and assessment worth 10 credits, which is a lot for a single standard – all standards worth Numeracy credits currently range from 2 to 6 credits. Many aspects of the assessment had already been pre-determined, e.g. the content level and the number of credits, but the structure and the timing of the assessment were up for discussion.
My initial recommendation was that the Numeracy assessment should be split into three standards, as per the three strands of the Mathematics and Statistics curriculum, the rationale being “a single standard/assessment would be overwhelming for most learners, particularly given the importance and mandatory nature of the credits at stake”. I also suggested that “we should allow for the accumulation of 10 Numeracy credits over more than one year. For example, students might be able to apply their number knowledge to solve problems well before they are able to reason statistically.” A modular approach to the assessment would have relieved some of the pressure on students and their teachers. In fact, one wonders why the Ministry did not simply look at developing the rarely-used current package of three numeracy unit standards (total of 10 credits – all three required) into the mandatory co-requisite.
Sadly, my recommendations were not taken up, and secondary schools are now faced with a single high-stakes assessment that takes so long, it causes major disruption to the usual school routine. Even more worrying is that the trials have focussed on students in Year 10, as if the standard is a pre-requisite for the NCEA, not a co-requisite. The intention is that students will sit the test when they are deemed ready by their teachers’ assessment tools. The mathematical level of the content might be suitable for Year 10, but that does not necessarily extend to an assessment of numeracy. At the time of developing the standard, numeracy was pre-defined as “the ability to access, use, interpret and communicate mathematical information and ideas, in order to engage in and manage the mathematical demands of a range of situations in learning, everyday life, participatory citizenship and work.” (Try saying all that in one breath…) Does that description align well with the maturity level of a Year 10 student? Why are trials not being run with older students, as suggested by a participating principal?
In 2007, one of the original writers of the Numeracy Project hoped that in fifteen years we’d be closer to having every child effective in mathematics. This is the year of reckoning…I think we’ll call that “Not Achieved”. And in the true spirit of the NCEA, the Numeracy Project writers are apparently allowed as many re-sits as they like; they are still contributing at every level, digging us into an ever deeper hole, writing ever longer sentences. As long as the Ministry of Education continues to rely on such expertise, we are likely to be waiting another fifteen years.
It was such a privilege to simply be at the New Zealand Principals’ Federation Conference in Rotorua at the start of last week, in the presence of so many dedicated primary and intermediate principals from around the whole country, let alone be invited to speak. The atmosphere was positive, energetic and energising. It really is no wonder these outstanding people were all selected to become school leaders!
Somehow, despite trying to remain discreet during the pōwhiri, I ended up on stage, sitting next to the Associate Minister of Education, Jan Tinetti. I was truly humbled by her special mention of me in her speech.
There were some brilliant speakers at the conference, and not only did I get to shake Sir Ian Taylor’s hand, I had a one-on-one with him at Rotorua Airport before we both flew home.
As for my own session, here is a bespoke slide to tie in with the conference theme “Power, Passion, Pace”, signifying the need to renew, refresh and move ahead after a fragmented year in 2020.
I asked my audience to engage with the sobering data presented, and to be inspired by the students at a decile 1 school whose lives changed forever when their teacher showed them how to line up the columns. This is not just about getting better results in our local and international tests – this is about equity in our education system, and ultimately, equity in our society.
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with many special messages like this one:
“Your talk was the highlight of the NZPF Conference for me, as far as what can be done to change practice in my team to improve outcomes for students. What you said made sense and the changes that need to be made are not major. Thank you for enlightening us. I hope the government take notice and promote your ideas!”
Special thanks must go to NZPF President Perry Rush, for leading the charge this year to do something about New Zealand’s maths education. The hundreds of principals who jumped onto this website as soon as he sent them a link are a testament to his tremendous leadership. Let’s see what these amazing school leaders can do on the ground. Wishing them all Power, Passion and Pace!
In my previous post, I provided an overview of the past 20 years of mathematics education and declining student achievement in mathematics. With the announcement of a refresh of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC), this seems like a good time to discuss the first steps towards restoring confidence in mathematics education in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Explicitly value the culture of mathematics and mathematicians
Earlier this year, I attended a Ministry of Education (MoE)-facilitated hui for Mathematics and Statistics. It was explained that the Ministry desires a bicultural curriculum that explicitly values all cultures, and that we need to shift to a decolonised, anti-racist curriculum.
Immediately, we are faced with a paradox. The word bicultural suggests that we should explicitly value only two cultures, or at least value two cultures more highly than other cultures. Does that not sound a little bit racist?
I do not wish to discuss racism here. In the context of mathematics, I don’t have to. When writing a good maths curriculum, it is the culture of mathematics and mathematicians that needs to be explicitly valued. Studying the common language of mathematics is naturally inclusive and promotes equity in the system. The beauty of mathematics is revealed to people when they realise, not only can they apply mathematics within their own cultural context, it is the same mathematics that can be applied in other cultural contexts. Mathematics is a unifying approach that fosters understanding between communities.
The social landscape of Aoteroa New Zealand is changing rapidly. Of course, local schools and kura must respond to the cultural needs of its learners and whānau, but continually writing new maths problems is exhausting for teachers and hardly a sustainable approach. It’s not mathematical thinking, either. Teachers should contribute the rich materials they write to a central bank of resources, for the benefit of other teachers and their students. As the database grows, we will spot and appreciate patterns, the same mathematics being applied in different contexts and cultures. This must surely be the ultimate in cultural sustainability.
Celebrate column addition (and other column-based methods)
“Education in New Zealand is a student-centred pathway providing continuous progression and choice.” – Ministry of Education website
It’s hard to imagine any education system in the past that wasn’t centred around students. I cannot think of anything more student-centred than giving children the wisdom of our experience and empowering them with the best mathematical tools available, so that they can make continuous progress with their maths and have a full choice of subject options at secondary school and beyond.
Our decimal number system is a place-value system that was designed to be used in columns. The decision to actively discourage our youngest children from lining up the columns not only disrespects one of the earliest key breakthroughs in mathematics, it disadvantages the children who need it the most. I don’t have to explain the benefits of column addition to any parent or caregiver who has seen their child struggle with the cognitive load of a mental strategy.
If this idea still rankles anyone in the education sphere, please read this discussion and note England’s progress since they brought back column addition eight years ago. Or, more locally, look at the progress achieved in a Decile 1 class of Year 7/8 students who caught up on three years of knowledge in five months.
Respect the cognitive science of learning and support children to learn their times tables
Despite this being an achievement objective in the NZC, it does not seem to be happening.
I do not support rote learning times tables if rote means “mindless recall without understanding the concept of multiplication”. But the messaging is that children should be using “number properties” to work out multiplication facts before committing them to memory. This is a false prerequisite.
This topic was discussed years ago, but more recently, I have come across some alarming research, detailing observations of the concept of multiplication being introduced in New Zealand classrooms. It was mathematically unsound, and the poor children were so confused, they ended up regressing. We’ve got serious problems.
Cognitive neuroscience informs us that fluency with basic facts really does matter. See discussion here.
New Zealand’s own John Hattie has synthesised the results of tens of thousands of studies to measure the effectiveness of different teaching practices. The average effect size is 0.4, meaning that teachers should be aiming higher than that.
Direct instruction (0.60) and explicit teaching (0.57) are more effective than inquiry-based learning (0.4) and discovery-based teaching (0.21).
Scaffolding (0.82), deliberate practice (0.79) and linking new learning to prior knowledge (0.93) all have very high effect sizes.
Within-class ability grouping has a very low effect size (0.18). There has been plenty of discussion about “labelling” children, but there are far more pragmatic reasons for abandoning it. Preparing multiple lessons creates more work for the teacher and significantly reduces the contact time that any one student has with their teacher, resulting in low engagement levels and poor learning.
When done well, whole-class teaching means that students remain engaged for longer and everyone moves forward together, generating effective classroom discussion (0.82). This does not necessarily exclude group work, but the objectives of social, co-operative learning are quite different and should not replace whole-class teaching and individual practice for the core learning of mathematics.
The OECD’s PISA study in 2012 found that student-oriented learning was negatively related to mathematics performance in every education system – that evidence is very hard to ignore. If it doesn’t work for 15-year-olds, for whom it might be plausible because they should have the knowledge and maturity by then to be more self-directed in their learning, then it’s not going to work for younger children.
The same research found that teacher-directed instruction was positively related to mathematics performance, but high levels did become negatively related.
Thus, we have a strong case for mostly whole-class explicit teaching, with student-oriented approaches on the fringe. Perhaps the progressive educationists who support constructivism (the theory of learning in which children construct their own knowledge through their own experiences) forgot that the school day hasn’t gotten any longer. If students are to keep up with the rate of learning required to meet curriculum expectations, we simply cannot wait for them to discover maths by themselves, or risk them giving up when it starts to feels too hard.
There may be no silver bullet to fix New Zealand’s big maths problem, but bringing back column addition is probably as close as we will get. Let our young children line up the columns again and see their confidence restored, and likewise their teachers’ too. Then we can look forward to building a rich and flexible maths curriculum that will meet the needs of all learners.
NB: In 2019, TIMSS conducted their survey on paper in some countries (including New Zealand and Australia), and electronically in other countries (including England and Singapore). Relative placings and international averages are for the paper survey only. Combined relative placings on the questions above differ by no more than one place. Combined international averages on the questions above differ by no more than four percentage points.
In case you hadn’t noticed, that last question was multiple choice. New Zealand’s success rate is exactly the same as in 2015, and worse than what we would expect from random guessing (25%). An earlier cycle of TIMSS suggests a constructed response success rate would have been much lower.
This is not exactly news. Looking at the TIMSS 2015 results for Year 5 students,
If you think it doesn’t matter that children can’t perform these basic numeracy tasks (e.g. “they don’t need to calculate any more because we have calculators” or “it’s more important to develop their reasoning and problem solving skills”), then think again. When examining the performance of all countries participating in TIMSS 2019, there is a strong positive correlation between performance in the Number content domain and performance in the other two content domains, Measurement and Geometry, and Data. Similarly, there is a strong positive correlation between performance in the Knowledge cognitive domain and performance in the other cognitive domains, Applying and Reasoning. In other words, strong numerical proficiency paves the way for success in all aspects of Mathematics and Statistics, and you can’t solve higher-order problems or perform complex reasoning unless you have a good bed of knowledge to begin with.
What on earth has gone wrong?
Twenty years ago, a radical new approach to teaching mathematics in New Zealand, known as the Numeracy Development Projects or just the Numeracy Project, was rolled out across the nation before there was any robust proof of its effectiveness. In fact, the decade-long roll-out was the research experiment.
The goal was to raise student achievement by strengthening the capability of teachers through professional development. The philosophy was to prioritise conceptual understanding over procedural knowledge and skills (frequently called “rules”, with a negative inference). Despite acknowledging the interdependence of “knowledge” and “strategy”, the teaching of knowledge was relegated to a mere “ten-minute whole class warm-up at the beginning of lessons“. Written methods such as column addition and subtraction, divisively labelled as “algorithms”, were not to be taught to students, if at all, until students had jumped through a series of hoops for five or six years, calculating in their heads using increasingly complex mental strategies. The easiest methods for adding and subtracting numbers literally became the last lessons on addition and subtraction.
The Numeracy Project researchers created their own stages of progression called the Number Framework, and so the research conveniently showed that students were, um, progressing.
Or were they? In 2005, the National Education Monitoring Project reported that students were “improving in tasks that require quantitative reasoning skills, but declining in basic mathematics facts and solving simple number problems.”
In 2009, “there was no meaningful change in number task performance between 2005 and 2009, for either year 4 or year 8 students. The most notable change in performance was a decline for year 8 students on multiplication problems, where changes in computation strategy were clearly evident.”
The long-term trend from 1997 to 2009 was “a small net improvement in mathematics performance at year 4 level (held back from a larger improvement by the decline between 2001 and 2005 in basic fact knowledge), and essentially no net change in mathematics performance at year 8 level.”
It was clear the researchers needed to do something to address the deficiencies shown up by NEMP. They did do something. They shut down NEMP.
And, presumably, knowing their jobs and their Numeracy Project facilitators’ jobs were on the line, they secured their future by having the Number Framework embedded into the revised New Zealand Curriculum and writing the Mathematics National Standards to align with their aspirations, just as the experiment was coming to an end.
In 2010, the awful truth could not be hidden any longer. The final, longitudinal Numeracy Project study concluded that “the absolute levels on the Framework attained by students were in many cases well short of the numeracy expectations for students at particular year levels stated in the New Zealand Curriculum and in the Mathematics [National] Standards.”
An estimated $100M (based on $70M spent in the first seven years) of taxpayers’ money had been spent on a revolutionary approach to teaching maths, and it didn’t work. The experiment had failed.
But it was too late and presumably too embarrassing for the Ministry of Education to pull the plug, and much easier to go along with the idea that it was a “temporary situation while teachers are continuing to upskill themselves”. Apparently, “many teachers stuck very closely to the printed NDP resources (the “pink” books)”, which “could reflect the low levels of confidence that many teachers still have [despite two years of professional development]…In retrospect, it may be that teachers needed to receive support by facilitators for considerably longer…”.
It’s remarkable how the teachers could be criticised for doing exactly as they were told. Did the Ministry ever wonder whether the pink books were the problem? And what does “considerably longer” than two years of professional development look like? It suggests that not even our student teachers would be adequately prepared to teach mathematics by the time they complete a three year Bachelor of Teaching degree.
In New Zealand, a distinction is made between mathematical (content) knowledge and pedagogical (content) knowledge (i.e. how to teach maths). The parallels with the Numeracy Project are uncanny: initial teacher education (ITE) focusses almost entirely on pedagogical knowledge, with little regard for mathematical knowledge. A 2012 survey of first-year student teachers showed that “students enter ITE with minimal levels of mathematical content knowledge…It is questionable whether their performance can be brought to an acceptable level. Currently students are not assessed before graduation to ensure they meet numeracy competency requirements.”
If publishing the results of this survey was intended to raise the flag on the universities’ inadequate preparation of their student teachers, it fell on deaf ears. To this day, still only one university in New Zealand bothers to assess the numeracy of all their student teachers before graduation.
What can be made of such a muted response by the universities? There is little incentive to improve the training of pre-service teachers if there is an opportunity to sell Ministry-funded professional development to in-service teachers. In the decade following the Numeracy Project, primary school teachers in New Zealand engaged in higher levels of mathematics professional development than the international average. Yet, the “temporary situation” of 2010 has not improved. Page 53 of this report provides insight into what some Ministry-funded professional development programmes look like.
If, on the other hand, publishing the results of this survey was intended to provide a reason for the failure of the Numeracy Project, the researchers had left it too late. They weren’t assessing students taught in the days of old; they were assessing the earliest victims of their own experiment. These kids were now feeding back into the system as teachers.
Enough is enough. The results speak for themselves. Our primary school teachers are not at fault for a flawed curriculum based on an academic theory of learning. Our children deserve a quality mathematics education; right now, some of them are not even getting a basic one.
What should happen next? That will be addressed in my next post.
Today, all known cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand are either from overseas travel or through family/whānau transmission. If the Government is serious about avoiding school closures, then the response is obvious: any child living with someone required to self-isolate must also self-isolate, or at least stay away from school, regardless of whether symptoms are showing. Ideally, any adult or child living closely with someone required to self-isolate should also be required to self-isolate, regardless of whether symptoms are showing, but let’s focus on children for now and how our schools can remain safe during this crisis.
We have an overseas traveller who tested positive and the traveller’s child also tested positive for Covid-19. At best, an entire school community has been inconvenienced for 48 hours, with a smaller number of individuals being tested and required to self-isolate for 14 days. At worst, we have community transmission.
Since the weekend, overseas travellers are required to self-isolate but not necessarily their children. Self-isolating all children living with an overseas traveller is not much more of an inconvenience to that family since there should now be at least one adult at home. At best, one family is inconvenienced for 14 days and nobody gets sick. At worst, at least one person in that family gets sick, but there has been no community transmission.
While the Minister considers his next steps, schools may choose to be front-footed and adopt a cautious approach, asking students who are living with a family member who is self-isolating to stay away from school for the same period. Families and whānau with a member who is self-isolating may also simply choose to adopt this policy.
Many people are calling for all schools should be closed now. It may well come to that, but the impact on the nation would be huge. For now, I would like the Minister to be right when he says that school is a safe place for our children to be. That’s why the self-isolation policy must change, and he has only a small window of time in which to act.
It’s been a difficult week in Christchurch, under the world’s gaze for all the wrong reasons. The focus is, of course, on a small community so viciously and atrociously attacked, but with all schools placed in lockdown on that fateful Friday afternoon, most families in Christchurch were affected. This was an assault on all of us living here.
There were many heroes last Friday – naturally, our emergency first responders come to mind – but from the perspective of an educator and a parent, the teachers who guarded our children and kept them safe for at least three and a half hours are my heroes too. Many of these teachers are themselves parents. A good number of them would have been separated from their own children, wondering how much longer the ordeal would last, but were required to focus on looking after the children in their immediate care. It’s time like this we should all pause for thought and appreciate the huge responsibility that comes with being a teacher.
So, from the bottom of my heart, I want to say a big thank you to all of the teachers in Christchurch who kept our children safe last Friday; the same teachers who returned to work this week to provide stability for our children, even though they themselves are probably feeling rather fragile. I hope you are all doing okay.
Mathmo Consulting 
