March 08, 2024
Poverty tilting NCEA scores
An expert in student assessment says failure rates for new NCEA tests in reading, writing and maths point to problems in the system – but the Qualifications Authority isn’t releasing the data needed to understand what they are.
A large number of students who failed the tests at the first attempt then failed a second time; particularly those from schools with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage.
University of Auckland professor Gavin Brown says New Zealand school pupils lightly tested compared to some overseas education systems where tests are used to determine everything from pre-school entry to whether students advance or are held on their way through high school.
He says the NZQA hasn’t reported the information on the new tests by ethnicity, so he doesn’t yet know if Maori kids are doing substantially worse than other kids.
“The general trend though is that kids in the lower socio-economic neighbourhoods found the tests harder than students in the higher socio-economic neighbourhoods. It may not be fair, it may not be just, but it is the way the world is. Kids who start with more do better,” Professor Brown says.
Information from Maori medium schools was based on fewer than 300 kids, so it’s hard to draw any general conclusions on the effectiveness of kura.