Assessment and the Draft New Zealand Curriculum

Planning for Purposeful Assessment
This is the intention of the new - New Zealand Curriculum document - it classifies assessment as being ongoing; that benefits students; that involves students; that supports teaching and learning; that is planned; well suited; valid and fair. - Great - but there is also mention of the need to gather and analyse school - wide assessment - and perhaps not surprisingly that this information should then be compared both internally amoung groups of students and nationally with other schools! This is a very ambiguous situation for many reasons but most importantly is that there is an attempt to create a level playing field on which to compare schools, using assessment, when clearly there is no level playing field or we would not need schools to be classed according to their decile rating. So why is this included in our curriculum???