It is sad that what most people realise is common sense gets changed for no reason and without scientific basis. The world is competitive, University where most students end up at the students get ranked. So why we do not measure and compare a persons development early on to then find the strengths and weaknesses (we all have them surprisingly) and to help or encourage where appropriate.

I have to say that ranking against other students in the class is of little or no value. Does it matter if you are the top student in a class full of students who are years behind? Does it matter if you are the bottom student in a class of high-achievers? No, it does not. The system proposed of ranking against the class means that someone always has to be the 'dumb one' and someone the 'smart one', even if all students were either streamed into advanced or 'behind' classes.

I have to say the Victorian idea of ranking against state averages seems much more likely to produce a real result that actually means something.

Plain English Report Card:

Dear Parent/s:

Your son Johnny is a little turd (because spell-checker won't let me say s#!t). He is stupid, he wastes time, he antagonises other children. He is illiterate and lacks any academic motivation. As far as I can ascertain, his only academic interests are the linguistics of female anatomy and the bits of the Bible where someone 'begat' someone else, so Johnny can let us know what 'begat' means.

At lunchtime he is a standover merchant, bullying younger children into buying him lunch or giving him money. I believe his going rate is $30 per joint, or the girls may pay in other ways.

Johnny should be encouraged to go full-time into his part-time business of holding up petrol stations and TABs as quickly as possible so as to allow the rest of the students in his class to learn in a harassment-free environment. Next year, may I suggest he undertake Legal Studies so that he knows his rights in Australia, rather than knowing his rights if he lived in New York.

I am so glad I spent five years at university and $20,000 worth of HECS fees to try and 'engage' the atom of Johnny's brain that contains intelligence.

Sincerely,

Johnny's favourite teacher (wait till you read the metalwork teacher's report on Johnny's sword-building and the chemistry report on Johnny's bomb-making!)

(As Jack Nicholson beautifully put it in 'A Few Good Men', "You can't handle the truth.")

Ah, measurement, beloved by those who believe there is a black and white universe, that certainty exists and that people with merit are people just like them.
Pity we have destroyed the comprehensive school so, um, comprehensively isn't it Kevin? Because when you had a school of kids with mixed abilities and backgrounds, you could get some kind of realistic idea of where your kid sat, at least academically. Now that our school system is so segregated, as one poster has pointed out, being at the top of a school that is full of disadvantaged underachievers is going to give you a false idea of where you are at, just like being at the bottom of a selective school will also make you feel bad unnecessarily.
I always thought the road to true happiness meant accepting that there would always be some who were smarter than you and some who were less smart and not worrying about it. Most of us can see if the lights are on and someone is home in our kids, and how well or badly they do in exams (state wide or otherwise) often has little or no bearing on how they do in life. In my experience, those with social skills and self confidence out perform the rest in work and in relationships, but, unfortunately for the literal-minded like Kevin, there ain't no measures for that.
As Donald Horne put it, we now live amongst fantasies of exactitude, even at school.

Kevin Donnelly's constant bellyaching about education should get a F. Education evolves around student's needs and not the rantings of a few malcontents. Dr Donnelly obviously has some deep-set mis-givings about his own schooling to need to vent his spleen ad nauseum on issues that he has no control over. If parents want to know how well their children are going at school just ask the teacher, check their homework, read a book with them..etc. Become involved! It's easy as A,B,C.

Always suspicious of Donnelly's claims because they don't seem evidenced based. I just typed a few words into Google and up popped a report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (very reputable) which says:

"In a recent international study of reading,
mathematical and scientific literacy among school
students, Australian students had a mean score
significantly higher than the mean score for all OECD
students (OECD 2004)."

I seem to read fairly often that our students are doing well by international standards ( surprises me too), so maybe our teachers aren't doing too badly after all. Will Donnelly ever give credit where it's due?

A mate of mine explained it to me quite well, showing the change for him from traditional, to "let's not hurt his feelings" marking...

"In maths in year 7 I got an E, I managed a D in year 8, a C minus in year 9. My marks went up by 21 percent. Then I was told I was "working towards" and remained so until I finished school. I never reached what ever it was that I was "working towards" and, seeing no progress or results, I slipped back down to the place I started."

He realised his own limitations, but nevertheless saw in a very graded system a way of self-improvement. He admits that maths is not his best subject, and no matter how much work he does, he won't acheive many goals that he is "working towards". Even students who don't turn up to class get "working towards" when they arn't working at all. It is offensive to students who work to get a D, to be lumped in with some politically correct nonesense with a student who would get an F for not attending class.

It is assumed by many teachers that if someone gets a D that they cannot be happy with themselves, and need to be wrapped in cotton wool and given a euphemism for their level of acheivement. Weak students understand that they are weak students; the worst that we can do for them is removing any incentive to work by this cloudy language, and telling a student who acheives his potential at D that he is still "working towards" some goal. It's plain snobbery on the part of teachers to assume that we can't be proud of ourselves if we arn't acheiving a certain grade.

Hi DFXK,

I enjoyed reading your post. Unfortunately, one of the problems with not failing kids is that it gives them an unrealistic sense of their own ability. Better to be honest as in the real world one learns very quickly if one is not up to scratch.

Kevin

It saddens me to think that we wrap our kids in that much cotton wool that they do not realise that the world is full of pass and fails. If they don't realise this at school before they get to the real world then boy are they in for a shock. I as a parent myself had a report card with the A to E rating system only in my day you aimed to attain an A on your report card unfortunately an A in the new report card is unattainable by most students and the teachers know it. How can we teach our children to strive to achieve an A when it is unrealistic that they will ever be able to get it. Gone are the days when both your achievements and your under achievements were listed on your report card so that as a parent you were able to see exactly how you child was doing at school. Now according to the report card I received today mainly your downfalls are listed and as parents you are encouraged to help your child achieve and keep positive about school when all this report card achieved was to gut and dishearten my son and left him with a why bother approach to school. They picked out all the things he was having trouble with(which for me was good to see) but what they failed to do was to also list his achievements so far this year for which there have been many. Had they actually had a realistic view they would have listed both struggles and achievements so as to encourage him to do better next term so that by the end of the year he could see how much more he will have achieved if he puts in more hard work. For this I am quite disappointed with the new report system and think it needs more review. Either by the teachers writing them or by the big wig who created them.