Testing 3, 2, 1. Michael Lawrence

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СКАЧАТЬ supply store or even the local newsagent will reveal dozens of different publications all designed to improve a student’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy) result. Whether any of the material tested by NAPLAN is of value to students is never debated, but it is now, by default, part of the curriculum. In April 2018, MIT professor emeritus Les Perelman undertook a comprehensive review of the NAPLAN writing test and concluded it was ‘by far the most absurd and the least valid of any test that I’ve seen’.3

      Why has it taken a visiting American professor to tell us this?

      The US has seen similar results with its national testing program; after a decade-plus of the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) test, results indicate no changes in the ‘achievement gap between poor and wealthy students and gains on achievement tests are small, even after extensive time has been allocated in schools across the nation for direct preparation for the tests’. (David C.Berliner, 2014)

      In Victoria, the My School website appears to suggest that one of the main criteria for selecting a school should be NAPLAN results. The system encourages students to move from lower NAPLAN-scoring schools as if this will magically improve educational outcomes. As previously mentioned, the students remaining in the lower-scoring schools will supposedly somehow have any deficiencies identified by the test rectified by means unspecified. This is an unlikely outcome as the school concerned will most likely forfeit some of its funding through loss of student numbers and quality teachers who may have elected to move elsewhere rather than continue in the environment of a school depleted of funding and its most talented students.

      In Australia it can be difficult to find an educator who is not caught up in the standards movement—though I suspect many are not there by conscious choice.

      The movement is, at its core, the idea that the best we can do is ensure every student has a minimum standard of certain skills. Apparently, it follows that if they have these skills they can work out the rest from there. I have witnessed situations where teachers have worked countless hours trying to fit the government-recommended curriculum into the allotted hours for a given subject, only to be told that the entire subject had been scrapped by the school or, worse, that much of the content was now deemed unnecessary as it was not relevant to the VCE examination (and therefore the ATAR score) component of the subject.

      A recent report from libertarian think tank the Centre for Independent Studies pushed back against criticism of NAPLAN, stating: ‘A test cannot be blamed for a lack of improvement—this would be analogous to blaming a thermometer for a hot day or criticising scales for a lack of weight loss.’ (Joseph, 2018) The report at no point addresses exactly how looking at the thermometer (or scales) with greater frequency can improve results. The assumption is maintained that if we teach the ‘basics’, whatever they may be, creativity and all other necessary capacities will follow.

      Acclaimed educationalist Sir Ken Robinson addresses this need for the basics. ‘The old systems of education were not designed with this world in mind. Improving them by raising conventional standards will not meet the challenges we face now.’ (Robinson, 2015)

      NAPLAN suits politicians and administrators for whom it is expedient to make sweeping generalisations about the education system, students or teachers to justify spending or cuts to spending.

      Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg recently spoke of the problems of standardised testing in Australia: ‘… wherever standardised tests are running the show it narrows the curriculum and it kind of changes the whole role and meaning of going to school from general useful learning into doing well in two or three subjects. And it often makes teaching and learning very boring when the purpose is to figure out the right answer to a test.’ (Pasi Sahlberg, 2018)

      The NAPLAN test, a supposed ‘snapshot’ of the entire country’s students in the same week, does little to encourage hard work and diligence in students. Instead it confronts them with challenges for which they have not had the opportunity to prepare. They do not know which elements of mathematics, English or science will be tested (although this does not prevent the detailed study of material like that contained in previous NAPLAN tests). Essentially this sends the message that, while it may identify ‘naturally talented’ students, nothing else—determination, persistence, grit, the ‘growth mindset’ and so on—matters.

      The modern roots of the standards system lie with US President George W. Bush and his 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. It supported standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and measurable goals could improve individual outcomes in education. The Act required US states to develop assessments in basic skills. To receive federal school funding, states had to give these assessments to all students at select grade levels. This involved all students sitting a test each year.

      Bush’s unpopular program was followed in 2010 by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, essentially doubling down on the same shaky ideas, as if somehow tightening up the components could alter the outcomes. It increased the stress on testing, meaning that now not only would schools and governments be held accountable for results, but teachers could be given a bonus for ‘excellent’ results or even fired if students’ results were not deemed satisfactory. This unleashed a witch-hunt-like fervour for attacking teachers (American teachers are already among the most poorly remunerated in the developed world), epitomised by a Newsweek cover story declaring: ‘We must fire bad teachers’.

      GERM WARFARE

      Sahlberg has dubbed this mania for standardisation the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM for short) and is obviously dedicated to wiping out what he regards as a menace to the world’s educational wellbeing. Of course, if you take the fetish for more testing, more standardisation and study theory to its extreme, good test results can be obtained, as South Korea, with one of the world’s highest secondary-school graduation rates, has discovered. School there starts at eight in the morning and continues until nine in the evening, when most students head to private tutoring academies known as hagwons for an hour or two before going to bed and repeating it all the following day (a law has been passed limiting the hours hagwons can operate until no later than 11pm; and a dedicated police squad regularly raids hagwons suspected of breaking this law). Hagwon teachers can earn enormous salaries and it is common for families to go into debt paying fees for this private tuition. The best known of these, Andrew Kim, takes in a whopping US$4 million a year lecturing to some 150,000 students online at the equivalent of US$3.50 an hour, in addition to writing hundreds of books, textbooks and workbooks.

‘In Korea, your education can be reduced to a number,’ a South Korean student told Amanda Ripley while she was researching her book The Smartest Kids in the World. ‘If your number is good, you have a good future.’4

      Students absolutely loathe the system (although they seem to loathe the mainstream education system even more), possibly because the teachers in the latter are under great pressure to maintain student numbers—indeed their entire wage depends on it—so they administer a perpetual series of annual tests, the results of which determine entrance into the top universities, thus ensuring success in career and later life. Many believe hagwons are the key to South Korea’s vaunted PISA scores. The world’s highest-paid teacher, Andrew Kim voices great discomfort at the inequity of the system, despite profiting immensely from it himself.

      ‘I don’t think this is the ideal way,’ he told Ripley. ‘This leads to a vicious cycle of poor families passing on poverty to their children.’ He added that, in his opinion, Finland’s was a much better model to follow.

      Kim said he planned to work in teacher training from 2017 (Ripley’s book was published in 2013) and to improve the mainstream system for his then 6-year-old son. Ripley said that she didn’t find anyone, including the head of the South Korean education system, who thought they had a good system СКАЧАТЬ