This is Naplan week. No, not the tests – that was a few months back. August is when the results come out to schools and parents. It isn’t as exciting as the annual festival of the year 12 results, but it is developing a life of its own. We are bombarded with media releases, claims and counter claims about schools and results. Cheer squads or jeer squads form up, the occasional moral panic revived, along with the usual exhortations to do better next year.
Apparently this year Queensland and Western Australia are standout improvers (yay!). Since 2008 there have been gains in all content areas (yay!) but not in writing (boo!). Year 3 and some year 5 tests show significant gains (yay!), but years 7 and 9 are letting the side down in writing (boo!).
But there is more. Literacy and numeracy results have plateaued between 2015 and 2016. In the words of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority “plateauing results are not what we should expect or assume from our education systems”.
Well yes … and no. Sure, test scores in literacy and numeracy have apparently plateaued. We can’t say that about the rest of our “education system” because it doesn’t lend itself to tick-and-flick Naplan-style testing.
But what a letdown. By most accounts schools are well into literacy and numeracy. They scramble to prepare kids for the tests, often putting aside non-testable stuff like history, art, music and the like – and these kids repay us by … plateauing?
And in the process the flatliners have allowed the federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, to rush in where angels fear to tread. In a told-you-so moment, he says it once again shows that money doesn’t lead to improved results. It’s a brave call to link plateaued or poor Naplan scores in just 12 months to money matters but he’s now done it twice this year, last time to a chorus of groans from educators and statisticians.
So what about the plateaued results? The reality is that they are almost certainly a product of our unique approach to schooling. A couple of decades ago England went down this high-stakes, test-driven path. The low-performing schools were beaten up, everyone then focused on the tests, scores improved … and eventually plateaued. Kids and schools learned how to play the game, almost certainly at the expense of engagement in broader learning for the long term.
Meanwhile schools and teachers were blamed to the point where there was a serious decline in participation and commitment – and that was just from the teachers. Even today morale in English schools is not good. All the ingredients now exist for a replay of this in Australia.
Schools can always improve, but our current test regime will have little to do with it. Viewed in isolation the tests are well-constructed and do tell a limited story about individual student progress. But that’s as far as it will ever go. High-stakes standardised tests don’t improve schools. It was always a nonsense to believe otherwise. Meanwhile the level of student anxiety, stress and disengagement from school is on the rise.
A second problem lies in what we conclude from the tests – and what we ignore. The annual Naplan results festival is built around shifting scores and the rise and fall of various states and eventually (when My School reports next year) schools. But trends in Naplan scores tell a much bigger story, one which is less palatable but more urgent.
As we showed a couple of months ago, a significant and very Australian problem is the growing achievement gap between those schools which increasingly enrol the strugglers and those which enrol the more advantaged. The results in the advantaged schools edge up a bit every year while the results of the strugglers head downwards. We won’t lift our overall achievement in Naplan or anything else until we lift the strugglers. And we won’t lift the strugglers until we properly target their schools and stop overinvesting in schools which are already well-resourced.
Sadly, little will change until we reach crisis point. Maybe reaching a plateau is the beginning. Funny thing about plateaus: they go up, then level off. But at the other end is a long downward slope.
[Source:-THE GUARDIAN ]
