I've said it here before; the time to actually defund education is way past!

My observation is, it would be in the vast interest of children's welfare to not attend school at all.

If the school yard is the highest achiever of educating children, then schools entirely focused on physical activity, would win out over the current standards.

Why are some 'educators' so afraid of testing ? In my very short teaching career, with 49 kids in two grades, the standard practice was a quick test every Friday morning, in Mental, Arithmetic, spelling, Dictation and social Studies: the kids did the tests, you marked them over the morning break and gave them back. So by the end of the very first week, you knew which kids obviously needed a lot of work, and which kids could do it all underwater. Obviously, it was a test of the teacher's performance as well. And obviously, you were working to improve the performance of the kids who needed support - THAT was the real test of as teacher. And yes, they all passed into the next grade at the end of the year.

Ah, I'm so slow - so that's why some teachers hate testing ?

As always, this fear ridded, hyperventilating author, critiques tests and testing! Like some kind of bogeyman, rather than the essential teaching tool that illuminates a child's progress, where he/she needs assistance or promotion to a higher grade?

The real fear that of incompetent teachers, who're the only ones threatened by a basic standardised school curriculum!

The days of staying in just one district until your education is done are over, with many mobile students moved by parents needing to follow gainful employment. Meaning, the basic curriculum needs to be the same in Hobart or Darwin and all points in between!

We've had far too much of this rubbish and "teachers" leaving university with a headful of untried intellectual concepts, thus tried and not found wanting phonetics, was abandoned in favor of whole of english learning!

As the first discernible consequence, illiteracy bloomed and significant number of kids left school after 10 or more wasted years, illiterate!

The future includes more technology not less and much more home schooling in front of a keyboard not less, where standardised lessons/teaching will become the norm!

With irrelevant recalcitrant troglodytes left floundering in its wake.

At the end of the day Phil, teaching is about kids and their needs! Not those of bored or disgruntled unionized, underperforming, overpaid teachers looking at a future, which might well not include them and a whole range of white collar service provider workers, the new anti technology, Luddites (wreckers) of the 21st century!?

Thinking inside a fixed circle of often irrelevant and confected alarmist ideas Phil, severely limits the questions and by definition most if not all the available applicable solutions!

Finally, our kids are not lab rats to be experimented on with untried intellectual concepts that may satisfy the bored, ""teacher", but just makes it more difficult for kids, who needs must, know at least three times as much as the Professors tasked with imparting knowledge.

Even where that includes an essential element of regimentation and cooperation/teamwork!
Alan B.

The average teacher is obviously terrified of testing, because it quickly shows which teachers are effective, which are not, & more importantly, which ones are hopeless.

Of course the unions want ever more teachers paying their dues, & doesn't give a damn that the useless teachers can hide in the system for many years, disadvantaging hundreds of kids in the process.

What a vacuous article.

It is clear that the author is a teacher who favours indolent and whimsical teaching methods and is incensed that the few hours every 2 years his pupils might have to spend to determine their basic skill levels might shine a light on his cavalier attitude towards their education.