Opinion
Every now and again, some brave soul suggests putting educators on performance-based bonuses. And every time, education unions pitch a fit.
Gee, I wonder why?
Almost one third of Australian children and just over a quarter of Victoria’s students are failing to meet new proficiency standards for literacy and numeracy.
NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) test results released on Wednesday showed that 28.9 per cent of the state’s students were falling behind tough new benchmarks introduced this year, particularly in grammar and punctuation, where at least 30 per cent in each assessed year level failed to meet expected standards.
The results were similar across Australia, where an average of 33 per cent were below expectations, including almost one in 10 students not achieving the expected learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy at their year level.
The “tough new benchmarks”, it might be noted, merely brought NAPLAN in line with international standards. Yet, even on the dumbed-down, Very Special Australian standards, results have steadily declined for over a decade.
Experts said the results were a “wake-up call” for Australia, as they exposed a “long tail of underperforming students” previously masked by low minimum standards.
The Age
Bear in mind, too, that thanks to Julia Gillard’s Gonski Plan, Australia has steadily pumped more and more money into education, in return for continuing failure. Which frankly sounds exactly like the sort of scheme Gillard would hatch.
Instead of admitting that they’ve failed, though, the education bureaucrats and teacher’s unions are clamouring to shoot the messenger.
NAPLAN testing for all students should be scrapped and the ATAR system recast to better reflect a student as a whole person, not just an exam score, a parliamentary inquiry has been told.
The negative impact on student wellbeing from the blunt, system-wide ranking provided by the two traditional measures of success was now far outweighing the benefits of keeping them, the Australian Education Union argued at Victoria’s inquiry into the education system.
The union has called for NAPLAN to be replaced with the testing of just a sample of students, as was originally intended, and for the VCE and ATAR to be reviewed to alleviate the negative impacts on student wellbeing.
How about we just give everyone a participation ribbon?
Victorian branch deputy president Justin Mullaly told the inquiry […] “the question has to be asked, what is the purpose of ATAR”.
Oddly enough, one of The Age’s own readers has the answer:
Exam performance is no more, no less a quantitative measure (or indicator at best) of discipline, capacity to problem solve, ability to store and recall knowledge and capacity to apply knowledge and learned skills to solve a problem or respond to a question. I would have thought these attributes would be valued.
Not in the sort of “progressive” utopia teacher’s unions aim for.
In its submission to the inquiry, the union called on the government to replace NAPLAN with assessments that were “fit for purpose”, including the professional judgment of teachers.
The Age
Age readers again to the rescue:
Teachers often overstate their students’ level of achievement. Sometimes this is to encourage students – who wants to give the child who is trying so hard another D? Sometimes it’s because what looks like normal or the standard is so different in these schools. Sometimes it’s because leaders want to see an improvement in results. The easiest way to achieve this is through grade inflation. This essentially hides the crisis.
Even worse, as several studies in the US have found, teachers will outright cheat to boost students’ exam results. Cheating on standardised tests in Atlanta was so endemic — indeed, “run like the mob” — that teachers held “erasure” parties, and prepared answer keys on plastic transparencies to make the cheating easier. Hundreds of teachers and principals were implicated.
The problem is particularly acute in low-performing, low-status schools. Though not exclusively: a “blue ribbon” school in Washington D.C. was also caught out systematically cheating.
One is given to wonder why they’re so keen to abolish NAPLAN in Australia.