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.