People are funny cattle!? Risible rubbish Phil, that seeks to shift the blame for incompetent teachers, the only ones at risk of exposure to their lack of cognitive skills, on to their students?

Our children need to do a lot better in science and maths and are poorly served by blame shifting teachers, all to often knowing less in these two critical areas than their charges?

And they are the only ones wanting abandon NAPLAN, given it exposes their incompetence!

Someday, some Government exhibiting a couple of ounces of common sense, will transfer all means tested needs based public education funding to parents, who will then be endowment empowered to direct that education endowment and select the school of their choice based on best practice bench-marked, apples for apples comparisons! The very thing NAPLAN is supposed to do, unless sabotaged by non compliant states or schools?

Coupled to, [given control of funding is limited exclusively to parents, the only option then available to state governments, will be,] regional Autonomy! When that day dawns, we will finally be able to clean out, the excuse making incompetent drones, from our school communities! And give parents the control you claim is missing!

The only cattle in this super simplistic diatribe, are the union protected incompetents, lead by the nose by the union chiefs of animal farm! And now tremble in terrible trepidation, least they be exposed by NAPLAN! Its purpose!?
Alan B.

As an old woman with many grandchildren and great grandchildren I can say with experience that literacy and numeracy in this country has dramatically declined since educators decided to stop hurting the feelings of children and parents by eliminating rigid end of term exams and abandoning the proven method of reporting accurate marks for those exams and each child's place in the class.
No longer are parents able to see where their children's weaknesses lie so that they can give some support at home. No longer are parents aware of their children failing in any area.
Children are automatically elevated to the next grade at the end of each year, regardless of whether they have the ability to cope at that level, ensuring they fall even further behind.
NAPLAN has become the only resource parents have to assess their children's educational development compared to their peers and to a national base.
I expect to see a further slide in our children's results unless there is a dramatic change in the whole process.

"Since NAPLAN destroys elements of cognitive behaviour in children"
This is an extraordinary claim, but you have provided no evidence for it.

Obviously focussing too much on tests can be a problem. But that doesn't mean there must be no tests at all. So what exactly do you have against NAPLAN?

A bit over the top, Alan B.

Extract the union-bashing and the ritual witch-burning of teachers and there is nothing left in your comment.

I'm married to a retired teacher, one of the old school types, not a ladder-climbing smart-arse corporate psychopath, of which there are plenty to go around in all professions.

She happily used her own money and time to supplement and individualise her teaching material, to help struggling and gifted and left-behind and advanced learners. Teaching was her life's work, her profession, her joy and her hobby. NAPLAN doesn't measure this, neither could or should it. Assessment of teachers' and students' ability and performance must, to be meaningful, be done by flesh and blood teachers, ideally from outside the immediate classroom, school or even the system. But this takes time and effort and knowledge and face to face interaction.

Propping a kid behind a desk with a written assessment task takes no understanding or cognitive ability at all - it is management by robot, or worse.

Presumably, Alan B wouldn't know or care about education - he seeks no answer to educational challenges, but a number against which dollars can be allocated and careers made or broken; something with which to bash unions, despite not even attempting to demonstrate that there is (or is not) a link.

NAPLAN, it seems to me, lacks relevance. It is a sideshow. Was the system before NAPLAN truly broken? Does NAPLAN fix it? I think not, to both questions.

I don't know what Alan B did/does for a crust, but I guess that he wouldn't welcome having his efforts judged entirely on the basis of a single external, impersonal assessment once every two years.

But then again, I'm not a teacher either, so what would I know?

Right in all but one thing Big Nana. Testing was not eliminated to avoid hurting children's & parents feelings. That was the excuse of course, but they were eliminated to avoid hurting the career prospects of the lazy &/or incompetent teachers.

NAPLAN is not a test of students, they are a test of the teachers. That is why they are totally against it, & any other testing that highlights the incompetent teacher against the competent.

The program should be taken further, & lead to automatic dismissal of all teachers who's students results are in the bottom 10% for 3 consecutive years. Then it would be achieving a really useful result for our kids.

Alan I agree with most of your post, but am worried about your meaning of "regional Autonomy". If you are talking about giving Head Masters, combined with P&C association the power to hire & fire, I can agree. However if you are thinking about any sort of curriculum authority I would never agree.

Due to the war, & employment there after, I attended 14 schools, in 3 states. The curriculum was so different in each state, that NSW was a full year behind Queensland in primary schools. It was only because I had been lucky enough to be in a combined 5Th/6Th class, & was exposed to the higher year math, that I was not way behind when we moved to Queensland.

With the increased mobility of people today. it is of high importance that all kids in all states, are studying the same curriculum at the same age, throughout the country. It would be nice of course, if they had competent teachers to do that with.

Once every school year John.

Big Nana gets it, where you choose to get offended!

You don't know what I do for a crust! How is that germane?

And given your wife was dedicated, she deserves our grateful praise.

So, exactly what point are you trying to force down our collective necks?

Are you claiming that your profession signals some shortfall in intelligence or its acquisition?

Simply put, exams must be used simply as a tool to expose shortfalls! And those "TEACHERS" who can't stand the heat need to get out of the kitchen!

I weary of seeing things that are not broken fixed by graduates, with a head chock full of entirely untested intellectual concepts! I prefer students, not lab rats!

Our kids are going backwards at a rate of knots, with more and more leaving school still illiterate and possessing substandard numeracy! Which by the way, confers whole of life negative consequences!

Must phonetics be confined to remedial teaching? At least if you can read, you can apply studious remediation any shortfall in your job ready knowledge!

At the end of the day, it's not about you or your offended wife! Just the kids the current "UNION PREFERRED SYSTEM", BETRAYS!
Alan B.

Your points are well made Hasbeen and regional Autonomy is largely what you say it is!
Alan B.

The rot starts right at the bottom - in primary schools, which are little more than child-care centres where the brats must not be upset, nor face competition, but must be subjected to Left political dogma. The commo teachers' unions reign supreme.

Hi Big Nana & Alan & HasBeen,

Yes, I agree that " .... Simply put, exams must be used simply as a tool to expose shortfalls! And those "TEACHERS" who can't stand the heat need to get out of the kitchen!"

I taught for a minuscule time in the sixties, 49 kids: 23 in Grade 5 and 26 in Grade 4. The first two hours on Friday mornings were devoted to tests across what they knew well and also had learnt that week, I marked them over the break (no, I don't know how), and passed them back. Guess how long it took to realise which kids had problems with mental, arithmetic or spelling ? Oh, okay: by the end of the first week.

Mostly farm kids, about a third, maybe more, were quite bright and really didn't need anything much from me. Half of the rest picked up what was needed with some ordinary effort, so around a quarter needed quite a bit of attention - about a dozen. Four or five kids really struggled, poor kids. I hope they did all right.

At school myself back in the sixties, we had tests galore - full exams twice a year. I thought it was an exciting time. Surely, as long as a teacher has the wits to encourage every child with the promise that they can always do a bit better, that a bad mark is just a bad mark and can be improved on with effort - that if a teacher associates outcome with effort, not with 'brains' or luck, the kids won't wilt under the slight pressure of a test every so often.

Kids don't get goals every time they go out on the field. In all my time as a reserve for the B Grade for Works (Nightcliff), I never got a goal. Pissed me off, but at least I could swim and jive. And surely school curriculum is not beyond any kid, if they put the effort in and have a half-decent teacher ?

Joe

Phil has a superb website, the reference to Dianne Ravitch is very much worth a read.
But where do most young people get their "education" in this time and place?
From TV, computer, and Iphone screens (and the now all-pervasive social media).
But what about the pernicious form of "education" or more correctly robotic training promoted by the Accelerated Christian "Education" phenomenon, which is popular in some circles in Australia, especially in Queensland.
Does such robotic training or more correctly brain-washing equip its victims to live with discriminative intelligence in todays rapidly changing quantum world of instantaneous everything.

And what about the forms of programmed corporate "education" which requires (as an integral part of the package) children to watch and listen to advertisements from corporations flogging their "must have" consumer products.

Sorry, am I the only one who noticed this:

//We are in for a pretty tough 2007 if NAPLAN is still in place.//

Never mind NAPLAN, Phil's only gone and invented a bloody time machine!

As an ex-teacher, I remember all too well that staffroom politics played a huge part in who got what classes. The Deputy Principal's in-group got the high-achieving classes, while the out-group got the rest.

No matter how dedicated or able the teacher, when you have to teach the 'rest', your chances of high-grade results are nil to nada.

What the sanctimonious idealists of the education system prefer not to acknowledge is that nature does not provide all students with crash-hot academic ability. Children born with high IQs do well in school, regardless of who teaches them. The rest don't.

Systemic social constructs play a huge part - high-academic ability people marry one another and produce high-academic ability offspring. The rest don't. High-academic ability parents send their children to high-academic ability schools. The rest can't afford to.

The 'NAPALM' tests just reinforce everything that is wrong with both society and the current education system. The tests should be abolished, as they are little more than just another education fad. To echo the author's arguments, most of these fads eminate from the US, a pathological meritocracy from way back.

Big Nana

'... I can say with experience that literacy and numeracy in this country has dramatically declined since educators decided to stop hurting the feelings of children and parents by eliminating rigid end of term exams and abandoning the proven method of reporting accurate marks for those exams and each child's place in the class.'

I'm not so sure about that. I worked as a stenographer in the public service during school and holiday breaks in the late 70s/early 80s (the last-gasp days of the competitive education system). I can't speak for numeracy, but I remember being appalled at the lack of literacy in the letters I had to 'decipher'. My older sisters, who had also worked as stenographers and secretaries in the 60s and 70s expressed the same outrage.

It's just a theory on my part, but I suspect that a lot of the much-hyped 'decline' in literacy is really because, in the old days, poor literacy was disguised by the invisible hand of stenographers and secretaries (virtually all of whom were women) correcting men's mistakes. Since the 80s, the stenographer/secretary role has all but vanished. The custom now is for all employees to write their own correspondence and reports. And it shows. Having said that, it's almost impossible to tell whether literacy and numeracy have actually declined in recent decades, as comparable past records are unavailable.

For my part, I throw my hat into the educative belief system that academic comparison is extremely damaging to children's self-esteem. Unlike you, I believe that placing children in a ruthless hierachy of academic achievement leaves them scarred and frustrated. As a parent, I was less interested in my children's academic achievement and more interested in whether they were enjoying school and benefiting from the things they were learning.

There is a saying "you cannot control what you don't measure"

Naplan tests children for a few hours every 2yrs to check how their education is progressing. I cannot comprehend how anyone in their right minds can claim that this damages the children.

The only possible answer is that the activists against Naplan want to cover up the results that point to poor teaching. Notably the worst results are in union control public schools.