The 'rationale' behind teachers wanting to boycott literacy tests? They know that their own literacy skills and teaching abilities are rubbish.

Exactly Jo! And what you get when you fix something that just ain't broke! And by folk who've left university with a head full of untried and untested intellectual concepts? And when their lack of success indicates they're on the wrong path, implacably defend it.

Almost as if they were defending very large salaries and position? And have as a consequence, I believe, inculcated a fear of exams? That previously were only ever a never feared tool.

[Answer what you know then go back and look at what you missed to see if a depressurised memory serves? And no this won't affect your grades.]

A tool that allowed educators to find out which child was falling behind and needed a little extra help in foundational subjects, when it mattered. In year one or earlier!

When he or she could actually catch up, instead of falling further and further behind, to eventually give up!

And are also likely to resist a harmonised national curriculum on the flimsiest of rationals? So to avoid the scrutiny that alone would enable?

There's a lot to be said therefore, for regional autonomy and curriculum compliant principals, given largely unfettered control once more.

Which in the first instance removes the obstructionist fee demanding middleman and their counterproductive, highly rewarded interference?

Time for a return to phonics. Particularly in year one or earlier!
Alan B.

Dyslexia runs strongly in my descendants, courtesy of my late husband. No teacher or school program has been able to help. Those who get no outside help have problems with reading all their life.
The ones I have raised were taught to read, by me, using phonics, which is the only method I know.
Dyslexic children don't recognise patterns in words so whole language reading is not possible for them.
Phonics enables them to decode words by sound and work out what they are. Certainly some of their reading is very slow but at least they have the tools to work out what the words are.

My kids were lucky enough to go to a little country school out from Maryborough, with 70 kids, & 3 teachers & the teaching headmaster.

Better still first & second class combined were taught by an aging grandmother, who did not hold with this "new fangled rubbish".

In the 5 years we were there not a single kid got past second class unable to at least basic read, & do simple arithmetic. The nearest high school said the kids from that school were the best prepared in math & reading of any they got.

A few years later a mate still there sent his youngest off to boarding school. The little school had expanded to almost 300 kids, & was full of bright eyed, bushy tailed young lady teachers, fresh or recently out of university doing their country teaching stint. They of course were using all the latest fads & techniques, & less than 60% of the kids could read, write or do any math when they turned up at high school.

To place primacy on the sounds and forms of the English language is racist and xenophobic!

All languages and alphabets are equal and children should know how to spell and pronounce all of them or none at all!

Why get worked up about literacy when innumeracy is a bigger problem? There are an awful lot of people who can't do basic arithmetic, which you might think doesn't matter in the age of the pocket calculator. But those who can't grasp arithmetic will never be able to do any of the higher maths required for the STEM jobs that we are ensured will be so important in the future.

For the record, the 'E' in STEM does not refer to English. I think a bit less focus on reading and writing and a bit more focus on 'rithmetic would benefit students.

Concerning the PIRLS test.
The best predictors of PIRLS 2006 reading scores are (1) the level of poverty, and (2) presence of a school library of at least 500 books. The amount of instruction in reading is negatively related to PIRLS reading scores.
Krashen, S., Lee, S.Y. and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is the library important? Multivariate studies at the national and international level. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 8(1): 26-36.
I replicated these results with PIRLS 2011. Once again the strongest predictors were level of poverty (negative) and the presence of a school library (positive).
This time the amount of reading instruction was not related at all to PIRLS scores.
Krashen, S., Lee, S.Y. and Lao, C. 2017. Comprehensible and Compelling: The Causes and Effects of Free Voluntary Reading. Libraries Unlimited.

Research on the teaching of phonics.
Intensive systematic phonics teaching has a positive influence on tests in which children are asked to pronounce words presented in isolation, but no impact on tests in which children have to understand what they read.
Garan, E. 2001. Beyond the smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan 82, no. 7 (March): 500–506.
Krashen, S. 2009. Does intensive reading instruction contribute to reading comprehension? Knowledge Quest 37(4): 72–74.

Phonemic awareness. According to my analysis (Krashen, 2001) phonemic awareness training improves scores on tests of phonemic awareness, but does not influence reading test scores.

Krashen, S. 2001. Does “pure” phonemic awareness training affect reading comprehension? Perceptual and Motor Skills 93: 356–358.

You are, of course, free to disagree with the results of this research, but you are not free to ignore it

If mats is a problem then being able to pick up a text book and read instructions and examples. Can and does alleviate many alleged problem and is tantamount to getting the horse before the cart!

Good reading skills as a first requisite aren't racist or xenophobic! Just a useful tool that allows almost anyone to independently acquire relevant information. And on any STEM subject!

Resisting that is arguably, the only racist or xenophobic commentary on this thread to date. And typical risible rubbish put about by folks deliberately obtuse or welded to whole language learning, where their pronunciation (pro nun see a shun) becomes, (pro nounce see a shone) Controversy,(Con trov es see) Becomes (con trove essy) Even though there's just one E in controversy!

So from day one, whole of language learning comes with mangled pro nounce see a shone. That can only ever be remedied by phonetics! And at foundation!

Otherwise film becomes fillum, milk become millick and so on?

Albeit becomes (Al be it) instead of (all be it) Al though, I could Al ways be wrong?

By their fruits ye shall know them and our proof of the pudding shows, we've been not only been going backwards for years? But have deliberately limited the class to the pace of the slowest learners, for fear of creating elitism?

Just how diabolically dumb is that, chain you brightest most able minds to the limited progress of the intellectually challenged so their feelings won't be hurt!

Better that problem never occurs, by inculcating a culture of early learning, music and meditation in the class room. To develop the full potential of every Aussie student to the max, but particularly those whose parents see education as the devil's tool.

Or english taught as a requirement, in an english speaking country, as racist or xenophobic!

Don't like english shocks? Prefer Arabic?

Well just get yourself over there where she is spoken mate and just try to get on? Okay?

WE don't need you or your arrogance personified attitude!
Alan B.

Comprehension of what words mean is only ever accomplished if langue is taught as a mother tongue with pictorial examples. Thus if a lion crosses the road? Is accompanied by a pictorial depicting that event, comprehension follows.

Whole of language advocates don't just understand that, as they fight for their preferred template and one that has seen us falling further and further behind our contemporaries!

No only is our future harmed by this pigheadedness, but the kids destined to be part and parcel of it!

Illiteracy and innumeracy numbers have never ever been higher! So the changes and the untested intellectual concept experiments have worked well haven't they!?

Stop treating our kids as lab rats in pet projects!

If it ain't broke don't fix it!
Alan B.

Only an academic could have produced that post Skrashen.

Would you please tell me how having a library in a school helps anyone who can't read. Do they pick up reading skills by osmosis, from the books mere presence. Don't you think they have to be able to read, before a library is of any use?

And these people wonder why we reckon they are a total waste of space & money.

I was being sarcastic. I thought that would be obvious.

But there is a truth in there. The "progressives" that run Education would consciously or unconsciously revile the English language as it represents (to them) colonialism and white supremacy.

What good is a library is children can't read?
The underlying question is how we learn to read.
The hypothesis is that children can understand texts with the help of contact, knowledge of the world, and basic phonics. Understanding texts is the way we learn to read.
Frank Smith presents this example: The child is reading the sentence "the man is riding on the horse." And cannot identify the final word. Knowing the meaning of the rest of the sentence and recognizing the initial consonant will lead the child to identify the last word. It doesn't ensure 100% accuracy, but. it reduces the possibilities.
Those who think you need 100% knowledge of phonics need to explain how soon many children learn to read without full knowledge of all phonics rules, and sometimes with no knowledge of phonics, as well as the finding that intensive heavy phonics does not predict scores on tests in which children have to understand what they read.
Also: phonics experts have not succeeded in describing all the rules of phonics, many rules are very very complicated, that the experts keep modifying their descriptions.
I discuss this in: Krashen, S. 2002. Defending whole language: The limits of phonics instruction and the efficacy of whole language instruction. Reading Improvement 39 (1): 32-42.

I am tired of the reading wars especially when the group with the loudest, most dogmatic of voices seems to be lead by psychologists, speech pathologists and special education teachers rather than reading experts or even experienced early years' teachers.

These same people are advising the Federal Minister for Education. Simon Birmingham’s panel is not ‘an expert education committee’ commissioned to independently evaluate the merits of a phonic testing program. It is a narrowly focused group with a shared view of how all children and their teachers require a prescriptive explicit synthetic phonic program despite evidence to the contrary. (See statistical data related to synthetic phonics released October 2017 by Education Department, England)

Some panel members have been involved with, and endorse, ‘Multilit’, an expensive, explicit and prescriptive program of instruction for low progress readers. Presumably this expensive program (or it's cousins, Minilit and Initialit) will be adopted by many schools if a synthetic phonic testing program is mandated. During my forty years of classroom teaching I found cupboards full of discarded programs of a similar ilk, some hardly used.

What I know from my own experience as a sixties trained teacher (TITC)is that children in a supportive, stimulating environment love to read and write. When children are engaged and excited by learning they use a range of strategies to make sense of print. In this context it is easy to identify the needs of individual learners and build on strategies accordingly. By listening to, discussing, observing, collecting work samples, assessing and recording it is easy to track the progress of individual learners and identify areas of need. Extra support for individual children in the classroom context is highly desirable.

Yes, some kids need one to one support and some of them may benefit from explicit phonics instruction, but the needs of a minority do not justify a massive investment in a national synthetic phonic program and testing for all children!

This test is unnecessary. It will be costly. Clqssroom teachers can already identify children in need. Money would be better spent supporting these children in the classroom context.

Summur sums up every reason why numeracy and literacy are going backward and why those so affected always do less well as a demographic than those with less pedantic teachers and administrators at the helm.

The teacher always knows best, is only true in the minds of agreeing teachers and not backed by actual outcomes, with kids left behind, effectively deserted and abandoned by a system that's supposed to prepare them for success/life.

Instead sees them vastly over represented in our prison systems/divorce courts. As members of dysfunctional families and new generations of disadvantage.

Yes, not all children need phonetics, therefore ipso facto, none will be offered nor the exams that alone actually identify those best assisted by old fashioned stuff that worked!

And the reason I and my siblings were able to read at all or learn as I did, learn to love libraries, the worlds, adventure and possibilities they opened up.

No not everyone is like me, therefore, ipso facto, they need to be denied the advantages accorded to me!

Which seems to be the central argument of those now rigidly welded to a changed and demonstrably failed, the teacher knows best, system!

And know to a virtual generic man, they will be exposed by universal exams where they aren't involved as pre exam groomers or checkers? And left to them, completely undermine the intentions and outcomes of those tests.

Which will as intended, allow those who control the purse strings to know where additional resources need to be preferences/shared or allocated from a single bucket of money!

And at the coalface rather than centralist, collating, administrative deep pockets. And why they're screaming their confected outrage and obfuscation!?
Alan B.

Alan.
No wants to deny children a chance to learn phonics or to be tested during their schooling. And as a product of a fair bit of that ‘old fashioned stuff’ I know there is much to value from the past.

The concern, in this case, is enormous amounts of money will be wasted to implement another national screening (test) at the end of grade one. We already have national tests at grade 3, grade 5 and grade 7 as well as VCE which is more than we had when I was at school in the 50’s and 60’s.

The proposed screening program is described as a ‘five minute test’ of each individual child. Even if each test could be administered in five minutes this time adds up to millions of dollars to free up teachers for testing. Then there are the administrative costs on top of this. And what will this test change? The money would be better spent helping children with literacy and numeracy.

And, whatever approach to literacy and numeracy they may use, every teacher I know is aware and concerned about the very social issues you raise. They work hard to address the increasing problems of disadvantage,dysfunctional families, illiteracy and a lack of access to libraries etc. Teachers are generally motivated to give every child the best opportunity in life.

It is this motivation that makes many of us wish to see money spent to support children in the classroom rather than on another national test. Teachers always test children informally. They know who is struggling in their first year of school. We would like to see the money spent directly on supporting these children and that may be with phonics as you and I knew it.

At the moment that extra support is unavailable in most schools due to a lack of funding for specialist teachers, psychologists and speech therapists to work in schools, collaborating with teachers and supporting school programs. We had them in the seventies.

Our kids are missing out and another test will not change the situation.

If Mr Birmingham and his ilk would get out of the classrooms and stop using little children to assist in their electioneering and let teachers do their jobs, then children would have time to learn to read.
As a teacher, I know that students learn at different rates and the constant presence of either politicians or their ridiculous testing devices do not allow time for children to progress in their own way.

Once ( a while ago I'll admit) politicians and political views were forbidden in the classroom. I'd like to see this happening again.
Education is not a production line but at present that is how it is seen by the ignorant and the uninformed.