Thanks for revealing these things Phil. However I think you're a bit too gentle referring to NAPLAN simply as 'farce.It is more than farce. It's more like the thalidomide of literacy and numeracy education and will have the same kind of drastic effects on our kids' education.

Yes Cambo, your medical reference is spot-on. I agree. There are serious social and emotional dangers for participating children that can have serious long-term consequences for them. School Principal, Derek Hedgcock says,"Compliance based schooling wallows within the lexicon of downtrodden confirmity, uniformity, retribution, external-extrinsic control with a chemical signature of cortisol and all manner of the pervading emotional states of fear. Such is the essence of NAPLAN. Sorta like NAPALM."
He suggests that our fear-based system can have severe, adverse consequences 'encoded into the DNA of our species'. His is an observation of schooling outcomes that is seldom considered.

And if left to the teachers, will the students learn anything, or just attend the school?

What sort of a beat-up is this? Sour Grapes?

It seems to me that the best way to ensure a sound and well-rounded education is to have a comprehensive curriculum for all subjects, and a sound testing regimen to test the effectiveness of both the curriculum itself, and of its delivery to and absorbtion by the students. Without uniformity, what do you have? Variability, uncertainty, good and bad schools. And, without uniform and reliable testing, what do you have? Variability, uncertainty, good and bad schools. Result: either good and bad schools - with students benefitting or suffering resultantly - or reasonable assurance of a quality minimum standard of excellence across all schools.

Without something like NAPLAN we are back to the old private versus public school inequality situation - with those who can afford it getting the best, and the rest getting a just-so education heavily dependent on the quality of individual 'public' school teachers and the willingness of the local P&C to fund equipment and teaching resources.

Good education needs good curricula, and good teachers and teaching resources. These can't be assured without rigorous development, testing and funding. Should parents and educators have to wait for HSC results to determine and correct deficiencies in the 'system'? Or is it better to have 'waymarks' throughout the eduation 'voyage' to enable early attention to any weak links?

Maybe NAPLAN isn't perfect, but it certainly seems to be a step in the right direction. And, not before time, IMHO. (At least as far as the 'public' system is concerned.)

However, the application of Naplan should not be onerous, but should be supportive of schools, teachers and resourcing, and Naplan testing should be a once-a-year thing - and all these 'sample' tests should be strenuously discouraged. (I tackled a 2010 year 9 maths test, and it seemed ok to me.) And, maybe the emphasis on grammar and puctuation could be a bit overblown, but the heart is in the right place.

Well written!
To Saltpetre, Have you researched the methods of assessment in Finnish schools?

Saltpeter,
I agree fully.

From what I can understand of the situation (and it is so contorted it is not easy to understand), each school can have its own curriculum, and each teacher within a school can also have their own curriculum, and a teacher can also change their own curriculum part way through the term if they so please.

What a mess, and the whole system does appear to suit the teacher, like almost everything else in the education system.

It eventually results in certain subjects being left out that a teacher may not like teaching, such as the situation in QLD where nearly 80% of grade 4 teachers did not even use a maths textbook, and the teaching of science was down to 5% of teaching time.

No wonder the teachers are whinging about it, having to go back to teaching, instead of "facilitating" the class (another word for doing as little as possible).