Here we go, another move is being made to have New Zealand dumbed down yet again. Now, the suggestion is to scrap the first year of NZ's NCEA; a qualification roughly equivalent to the UK's GCSE's and generally taken by students at the age of sixteen.
The below quote says to me, that teachers are shoving through students by simply making stuff up. In NZ, teachers are no longer subject to rigorous inspection, rather they are 'peer reviewed' which means there is a strong motivation to look good in front of colleagues.
I believe the current proposal to drop NCEA Level 1 is an admission of failure. There are so many students now functionally illiterate that they fail even the lowest level test, or they leave before sitting. So, the Ministry of Education have to scrap it to save face, rather than address the real problem, which is; that teachers no longer teach, and schools are simply places warehousing children to keep them dry while the parents work. Parents are now the ones doing the teaching, teachers grandstand all day long, do nothing and stand around complaining about literally everything.
Last year, students were almost twice as likely to achieve an excellence grade on an internal assessment than an external assessment," ERO head of assessment Ruth Shinoda said.
