NAPLAN results show it is time to hand trust back to teachers
Analysis By Gabrielle Stroud
Wed 14 Dec 2016
The national report on NAPLAN results released this week shows Australian students' performance in the past few years has flat-lined. Predictably, it has caused a frisson of panic. Media outlets have run the story as a headline piece and politicians have been called to account.
Federal Minister for Education, Senator Simon Birmingham, for example, has said "politicians need to work together to address the falling standards" in education. But Senator Birmingham's suggestion shows just how misguided our Federal Minister for Education is: politicians cannot address educational standards because they are not teachers.
If politicians truly want to improve standards, they should step away from education and hand trust back to the professionals — our teachers.
The trust in teachers has been eroded
Very few teachers across Australia would be surprised by the new analysis of NAPLAN results. Most of us have seen it coming. With each and every change that's been implemented by political parties in the past decade, Australian teachers have had their autonomy stifled and their judgement suppressed. Systematically, the trust we once had in our teachers has been eroded.
It began with the Melbourne Declaration, a manifesto written by politicians in 2008, that promised every child a world-class education.
From this, NAPLAN and My School were born. The NAPLAN results meant teachers were no longer seen as a reliable, primary source of information about their students — graphs and results from a single test were instead deemed more valuable.
The advent of the My School website led to parents regarding schools as something more like insurance companies, where they could "shop online and compare".
More recently, the rolling out of an Australian Curriculum — that was still governed by individual states and territories — had teachers trying to navigate two curriculums and reconcile the differences between them.
Today, the endless paperwork associated with Professional Teaching Standards means teachers are required to "prove themselves" over and over, which takes them away from the valuable work they want to do: teaching students. Classrooms have gradually become centres of accountability, where learning is prescriptive and curriculums are imposed.
Teachers can no longer meet learners at their point of need, teach them and then celebrate their progress.
Instead, as Senator Birmingham advocates, teachers need to be gathering data about where students "ought to be performing" and "where we expect them to be".
We ought to be raising the bar of ambition, Senator Birmingham says — which is a curious statement because there isn't a teacher out there who is aiming to lower it. Helping students to improve, grow and flourish is the core work of a teacher.
We need kids to fall in love with learning
It seems there are some fundamental things about teaching and learning that many people — not just politicians — fail to understand. Firstly, it needs to be understood that repeatedly testing and assessing students is not "teaching" and does very little to promote learning or motivate students.
Senator Birmingham has suggested introducing reforms that will identify struggling students earlier and allow for more targeted interventions. This translates to testing students when they're younger and then attempting to "fill the gaps" with prescriptive remedial programs.
But student learning doesn't work that way — we need our youngest and most vulnerable students to fall in love with learning. We need them to discover that school is a place where they are valued, where there are opportunities, and that coming to understand new and interesting things about the world is a wonderful and important skill to have.
In this way, our youngest Australians begin to see themselves as life-long learners, capable of achieving amazing things and taking an active role in their experience as a student.
Welcoming students to school with a comprehensive testing procedure and targeting the weakest performers does not ignite a love of learning — it gives students the message that school is a place where self-worth and effort can be quantified, and that they haven't met the mark.
NAPLAN doesn't tell us everything
It should also be understood that NAPLAN is merely another standardised test — it offers a snapshot of student progress at a particular point in time and, while it does provide teachers with useful information about how students are performing, it does not reflect the quality of student learning.
What is NAPLAN and is it important?
- The National Assessment Program tests the literacy and numeracy skills of students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9
- Students cannot pass or fail the assessment
- The annual testing is designed to help governments and schools gauge whether students are meeting key educational outcomes
- The results help identify strengths and address areas that need to be improved
- Schools and parents can see how an individual students learning is tracking compared to their classmates and the national average
Such tests are one of numerous assessment tools that teachers may choose to use, according to their professional judgement, during a program of learning.
What sets NAPLAN apart from other assessment tools, however, is that it is a "high stakes" standardised test, the results of which are published on the My School website, used to compare schools in league tables and determine future funding. Holding up high-stakes test results as the single measure of student performance diminishes our understanding of what students have achieved overall, the progress they've made and the skills they have acquired in areas other than literacy and numeracy.
Subjects such as art, music, science and sport are noticeably absent from this annual student performance snapshot.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that high-stakes testing negatively impacts student well-being, self-esteem and confidence.
My own daughter, a bright, articulate and creative eight-year-old is reluctant to leave Year 2. "I'm scared of NAPLAN, Mum," she tells me. And her fears are not unfounded.
I've seen students — capable and clever — seize up when they sit the exam. Their eyes appeal to me for help, yet there's nothing I can do.
It's not only about funding
It's of particular importance that we all come to understand that the current crisis in education is unrelated to funding.
Though politicians repeatedly assure us that we have record levels of funding going into schools, it should be apparent by now that funding alone is not the solution. Throwing money at education without truly understanding where the fault lines run has not — and will not — stop the cracks in our school systems from deepening.
Of course, the real tragedy of this situation is that our students are slipping through these cracks. They are victims of a well-funded system that sets them up for failure.
So then how do we go about lifting the standard of student performance in Australia?
The answer is simple. We need to hand trust back to teachers. We need to recognise and value teachers as professionals, who are capable of making informed judgements about what students need to learn and how they need to learn it.
Politicians need to step back from the educational arena and recognise that decisions made about education are best made by educators.
Gabrielle Stroud is a freelance writer, novelist and recovering teacher. Her critical commentary of Australia's education system was published in Griffith Review's Edition 51 Fixing The System.[/QUOTE]
