A very interesting article Phil. I was educated in Queensland primary (1950-59) and secondary schools (1960-63). Primary school teaching was very formalized with only three subjects taught: English, Mathematics and Social Studies. However music, art,crafts, dancing, physical education and sport were all a part of the school program. But with the exception of Manual Arts (in Grade 7 and 8) these were not examinable.
Apart from the external exam, the "Scholarship", in grade 8, students were subject to three in-school end-of-term exams. The results were recorded on the Report card, which you took home for your parents to read (and sign).
The Inspector paid an annual visit but all he did was ask a few general questions to the class.
At the end of our primary years we thus had a very solid grounding in a rather narrow range of subjects.
You state: "It didn’t last ... down-under, things went well for a while until moral-campaigners, management theorists and change-for-change-sake artists left the schooling doors open. They altered the structures of education departments and schooling went “back to drastics”.
Phil over what period are you referring to and what do you mean by "things went well for a while'? Inspectors have been gone for years, primary school children nowadays enter High School with a shallow grounding in English and Mathematics although they have been taught a much greater range of subjects than in the 50s. Just what "drastics" are you talking about?

WTF?

In the time I spent teaching in QLD secondary schools I say many attempts to free students from the drudgery of everyday school life.

Unfortunately, it was those charged with implementing these changes that fought hardest to ensure they would not be successful.

Happy to except pay rises, improved working conditions and regular breaks from class for in-service those fraudsters called Head of Department thwarted attempts to change the status-quo.

They selected the brightest and most motivated of students and trained them to “do” exams.
This suited them, the principals, parents and that small group of students until they finished school and had a university placement.

Those teachers capable of change implementation left disillusioned often to the glee and smirking and snide comments of the HODs and their toadies.

Often in the press I will read articles and letters from now retired HODs expressing dismay at the current educational system. It was the egotistical and amoral decisions that they made all those years ago that have shaped the current educational landscape

A most timely article. I work at a Technical College which, despite its track record of success in just three years in an area with a entrenched problem of low-retention rates for senior secondary students, is now being conspired against by both state and federal Labor governments and forced to close.

Those teachers capable of change implementation left disillusioned often to the glee and smirking and snide comments of the HODs and their toadies.
WTF ?,
you sound rather sound so don't belittle yourself by calling yourself a teacher. You're either male or female but definitely not teacher.
I can identify with with your sentiments re the heads of Department of Education. Every govt. department is contaminated with such vermin kept at great cost.

You only have to mention QLD,
This state is that far behind any other au state or territory.
I believe it all stems from the Joe years.
I am not surprised that you have problems in any area.
In a recent trip through QLD it is quite apparent that road safety comes a distant last in priority, let alone schooling.
Unless u get your act in to priority you won't have any kids to school.
I say this state is to vast to be administered by the same legislature.

Interesting article. NSW schools seem to have the same problems. New teachers are soon overwhelmed by the existing culture where testing the studnets memory passes for assessment of knowledge and understanding. Anyone who resists will eventually either surrender or leave. It is not just the administrators that are the problem the culture of testing has become ingrained in teachers as well

Desmond,
small correction, not Joh (joe) but Wayne, Peter & Anna.

As my children - who are now young adults - went through school, I hoped only that they would emerge undamaged. I never hoped it would foster intelligence, critical thinking, creativity or social skills that really matter. The industrial model of teaching, the endless rejigging of curriculum while failing to look at the essential dysfunction of the structure of education; the notion that children learn in a single way or speed and only in certain age groups...It truly astounds me that we are so implacably stupid when it comes to education. I home schooled both my daughters for several years and I'm convinced that they both learned far more, explored far and were far more prepared to adventure into the world as a result of time out of school, not inside it.

You cannot control what you don't measure.

The exams and testing I have seen, while testing memory, also tests the ability to apply the knowledge. Without it the teacher is only guessing as to their progress and any problems.

As retention is greatly enhanced by repetition, for the kids that bother to revise, the learning is reinforced, and they can move onto the next stage with a solid foundation.

Those "well rounded" children brought up in a carefree schooling environment are seldom equipped for skilled employment, and their prospects forever constricted.

Until Education is accepted as a discipline by Parents , Students ,Teachers and Governments nothing more than Slush Results can be anticipated .

Introducing "New Curriculum" always results in abstract BS that cannot be explained or understood .

The malaise we suffer in our children's education must have been understood by the ancient Scots one commenter of those times suggested that it would be easier to move a Cemetery than to change the Curriculum ; perhaps we need to go back wards rather than for wards !

Testing and measurement is important so we can know if we are learning. The problem arises not from the test themselves but because testing outcomes are treated as the goals rather than learning as the goal. The difficulty becomes one where testing is seen as a form of punishment rather than testing being seen as a way to show how much you have understood and been able to apply.

We do not put nearly enough effort into establishing how we can test for learning outcomes and how to cater for individual differences.

The system is set up to reward the strong as they get confirmation of their success but at the expense of punishing the weak. Ideally learning success should be measured against the innate ability of the person being measured. Did they do as well as they could have rather than it being a comparative measure.

This is hard to do but not impossible.

Dear Fickle Pickle
"Ideally learning success should be measured against the innate ability of the person being measured. Did they do as well as they could have rather than it being a comparative measure."
In my primary and secondary years (1950s and 60s)the quantitative information provided on the trinnual Report Card for the respective subjects consisted of: grade achieved for each subject(marks out of 100), position in class for each subject and overall class position across all subjects. However the Report Card also allowed for the teacher(s) to comment on how he or she thought the student was performing relative to the student's ability. Of course it was a subjective evaluation but nevertheless provided the parents with some idea of their son's or daughter's "innate ability". Sometimes the comments could be critical eg "Tommy is not performing up to his ability" or encouraging "Billy finds Mathematics difficult but he is trying very hard to improve"
Unfortunately EXTERNAL testing does not allow for this useful feedback.

I am constantly in awe of your buoyantly, irrepressively positive outlook, Fickle Pickle, but I suspect that it occasionally needs a reality check too.

>>Ideally learning success should be measured against the innate ability of the person being measured. Did they do as well as they could have rather than it being a comparative measure. This is hard to do but not impossible.<<

It appears already to be an insuperably tough assignment, merely to measure educational outcomes in a manner that is acceptable to all.

How much more difficult, though, to measure "innate ability"?

Where does one start?

With heredity, perhaps. One of those personal genetic analyses. Pretty tough if your father was Einstein, I guess.

Or phrenology?

More importantly, what would you be able to do with the data, even if you were able to determine it in a clear and consistent manner in the first place?

My school reports, year after year, were chock-full of "could do better if he tried" comments. Would this feedback be any more useful, simply because it has some apparently objective measurements associated with it?

Or are you perhaps looking at it from the perspective of the teacher only?

"His innate ability is sufficient to allow him to breathe, so long as he concentrates really hard. This term we met our target of 95% against this measurement, only requiring medical attention on one occasion, when he was momentarily distracted by some bright colours."

I would agree with Pericles and even go further.

To test innate ablity, apart from being incredibly difficult could even be more harmful, as the teacher would then be telling the children what they were capable of, not just how they performed in a test.

The main reason for testing is to see whether the child knows and understands the curriculum. The curriculum having been determined to be the requirements to function well in the outside world.

The merits of the curriculum aside, if the child is not achieving the outcomes required, some action is required either in remedial teaching, parental supervision etc.

The alternative is what happens in the USA where children graduate without being able to read.

Pericles here is one way.

A person shows their ability early in life. One way to check innate ability and how well a child is developing (or an adult for that matter) is to keep a record of performance for each child. If we keep records for a few million children we can expect to get some pretty good indicators as to how a child develops given a whole range of innate and environmental factors.

That is, we compare the child against themselves.

That is, if we turn testing into helping people develop their abilities rather than testing to compare with others we will get much better results.

So what was this "pro-rape" web site? What did it actually say?

Nobody is going to tell us, because the whole thing is being orchestrated...

Shadowminister you say

"To test innate ablity, apart from being incredibly difficult could even be more harmful, as the teacher would then be telling the children what they were capable of, not just how they performed in a test."

The teacher would tell the child their range of expectations. Why this is harmful is hard to imagine. Surely it is sensible for my golf teacher to inform me that I am unlikely to win the club stroke championship next week and that if I manage to retain my handicap at my age I am performing well and better than expected.

As I have mentioned above testing of the same person over time moderated by comparing against other people in the past development is more informative and useful for development compared to a system whose main purpose appears to be to sort a cohort of people into categories.

FP,

Considering that achievement is largely dependent on effort, and that early testing at best gives a band of ability, the range of potential achievement would range from zero to mid level for the bottom of the class and from mid to excellent for the top of the class.

The teacher would be in effect grading the kids, and if you believe for an instant that this information does not make it back to the rest of the class, so that the kid is pegged for ability, then you are kidding yourself.

Secondly, how are you going to measure progress without some form of testing?

The kid that wants to perform better in tests knows that he can do so by working harder. If he thinks the teacher perceives him as thick, there is no motivation to even try.

The only motivation I can see for some one to try and stop testing is because their child performs badly, and rather than thinking that their likkle darling might either not be a genius, or needs to pull his finger out, the testing must be bad.

Give me a break!

An interesting approach, Fickle Pickle. But I still cannot see much advantage.

>>One way to check innate ability and how well a child is developing (or an adult for that matter) is to keep a record of performance for each child<<

So... the answer is to perform regular tests?

That would certainly measure ability.

But I fail to see how it would measure "innate" ability.

Could you perhaps explain a little more?

Individual,

Check this year's NAPLAN results (which, to those QLD teacher bashers, is the Holy Grail of educational failure). QLD is NOT behind EVERY state and territory, and it really isn't far behind ANY state or territory.

Shadow Minister I am not proposing less tests but more. I am however proposing that the emphasis is on the test results of an individual compared to their past results. How well does the individual progress against themselves. A bit like your golf handicap. Of course children, parents etc will compare child against child but the emphasis society can make is child with themselves.

Pericles yes that is what I am proposing. Can it be done? Well yes.

I spent many years devising Q and A tests to measure "understanding" of concepts of tertiary students and the results correlated highly with performance of the tasks the students were to do in the work place. Understanding is something that comes more easily to some students and others never get it no matter how much they try. That is a fact and no amount of effort or study will change it.

The ACT uses the ACT scaling test http://www.bsss.act.edu.au/year_11_and_12/act_scaling_test which is a set of tests that measures innate ability.

Other examples are the time it takes for a nerve signal to move from the brain to the limbs as a measure of innate batsmanship (ever wondered why so many top batsmen are short?)

The sad thing is our testing regimes with their emphasis on sorting and classifying the population only does part of the job. I suggest our testing can better serve society by changing the emphasis to development of the individual

Thanks for the additional detail, Fickle Pickle.

But it still doesn't make clearer any difference between ability, and innate ability,

>>The ACT uses the ACT scaling test... which is a set of tests that measures innate ability.<<

Could you perhaps explain how it does this, as there is nothing in the description that provides any indication.

Or maybe we are having the wrong discussion - what do you personally see as the difference between the two terms?

FP,

You raise some interesting points. I actually believe in testing the abilities of the children precisely to find what they are capable of and where they will need help.

However, I am also a strong believer in streaming the children, as I feel that trying to teach the super bright at the same pace as the challenged is harmful to both.

The testing in these streamed classes will be amongst peers of equals, and will be more about effort than ability. This would be even more effective if the streaming went along subject lines such as science & maths / languages / history, geography etc. So that different strengths in the child could be catered for.

But I must admit that I would hate to be the principle explaining to parents why their kids aren't streamed where they think they should be.