Classroom assessment practices are greatly influenced by national and local policies on assessment. Typically, these include accountability requirements for schools to evidence and report their students' learning in the form of specific learning outcomes, calibrated against national benchmark standards of achievement and progression. An…

Effective school leadership in supporting outcomes for all students is critical. This study focuses on six New Zealand principals as they endeavour to make a difference to reading outcomes for 11 to 13 year-old students. In New Zealand, there are approximately 20% of students who are underachieving in reading. Once they reach the final years of…

Following the Tomorrow's Schools administrative restructuring, a second wave of educational change installed globalised discourses as governmentality policies in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on Foucault's "toolkit", this genealogical policy chronology traces the transformation of curriculum and assessment into a specific political…

This policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a…

Philosophy and schools, children and dynamite, elephants and postage stamps: each has a place, but not necessarily in any natural combination with the other. Whether schools and philosophy belong together depends largely on what we mean by both. To the extent that schools are instruments of government regulation and a mechanism for production of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two recent examples of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's approach to reducing the persistent disparities in achievement between students of different social and ethnic groups. The first example is cluster-based school improvement, and the second is the development of national standards for…

This is a critical time for the science education community as we embark on the creation and implementation of new national science standards. The purpose of this essay is to offer insight into how the language of curriculum standards, including that found in state science standards in the United States over the past 15 years, has posed barriers…

The recently elected National Government has proceeded, under urgency, to pass the Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill, legislation that seeks to provide specific information for both schools and parents about how well every primary and intermediate school student (Years 1 to 8) is progressing in literacy and numeracy compared with other…

This document provides a decision tree to guide the thinking of the staff of New Zealand agencies developing national education and certification standards. It is intended to help them make decisions about moderation of assessment--a process of sampling assessments to ensure that they are consistent with the required standard. After an…