NAPLAN ranking – an educationalist comments
The highly esteemed, recently commissioned principal of St Andrew’s Cathedral School, Sydney, Dr John Collier has made a salutary assessment of the MySchool website data. (Sydney Morning Herald, 2010)
His comments in the Sydney Morning Herald synthesise widespread community concern that school and student performance and subsequent education policy regarding individual school need will be strongly conditioned by test results published on MySchool.
While readers should review Dr Collier’s article the following quotes provide ample evidence for concern that a disproportionate emphasis is being placed on NAPLAN scores as the credentialing around which school performance, evaluation and ultimately resourcing will be founded.
‘Attempting to express the quality of a school in a single statistic is so reductionist as to be misleading.’
Dr Collier’s judgement has been extensively supported by other commentators when he says: ‘Much of what schools do – pastoral care, extension of life opportunities through co-curricular and sporting programs, formation of values, creation of community – cannot be quantified.’
‘The broad sweep of academic work with students across 13 years of the schooling journey is not easily reduced to a single statistic based on years 3, 5, 7 and 9.’
Dr Collier argues such simplistic evaluations entail substantial methodological difficulties, such data aggregation may be invalid, sample sizes may be too small to be justifiable and issues of selective verses non-selective student enrolment patterns further erode the validity of such measurements.
‘One of the main difficulties with bald statistics is they take no notice of the starting position of the student in terms of skills, and do not assess any value the school has contributed in improving those skills over time.’
Because all secondary schools – government and non-government – face their major enrolment intake in year 7 the product of that year’s literacy and numeracy testing is entirely patterned by the quality of each student’s primary learning.
Dr Collier draws the obvious conclusion that ‘students with a higher starting base of skill in absolute terms outperform those from a lower starting point,’ a factor long appreciated by parents and educationalists alike.
Other commentators have pointed out that specific cohort results can vary considerably across early school years for a wide variety of reasons.
In Dr Collier’s estimation: ‘The only statistic available is each student’s ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, the new national form of the Universities Admission Index). This statistic is much more informative and therefore much more valid than NAPLAN comparisons. It is based not on a brief test on one day, but on nearly 20 hours of end of year 12 HSC or International Baccalaureate examinations, and cumulative in-school assessment tasks.’
While many educationalists will wholeheartedly agree with Dr Collier the practical reality for the federal government is that final year statistical determinants come too late in the schooling cycle for the government to make decisions regarding resourcing.
As the Minister constantly states the government wishes to determine ‘areas of educational need’ during and not at the end of a student’s schooling.
The Minister’s community justification to publish NAPLAN results is founded on the grounds of equity and learning transparency where parents and families have a right – indeed a responsibility – to be given more information concerning a school’s relative performance.
Based on the government’s assessment that institution performance is strongly determined by teacher performance – together with infrastructure quality and resource funding – the government will not relinquish its determination to implement teacher assessment and evaluation programs, much to the concern of the Australian Education Union.
The reality of the government’s revolution is being underpinned by the pragmatic review of results.
Where school and student outcomes are measureable the government believes it can justifiably implement benchmark assessments.
Qualitative outcome determinants indicated by Dr Collier and others will be either overlooked or disregarded in the government’s zeal to introduce school change based on narrow quantitative measures rather than broad evaluative assessment which is difficult – if not impossible – to publish on a national school website.
‘One of the problems with making the NAPLAN results so high stakes is that it will encourage schools to teach to the test with endless drills to make students “test savvy”, which may improve their score but not fundamentally affect their literacy and numeracy.’
Dr Collier’s condemnation of the government’s narrow assessment strategy directly equates to the current education dilemma facing the Obama administration in attempting to change the country’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ schooling legislation.
Many US school teachers are merely training pupils to pass nationally agreed tests rather than extending and stimulating students to explore, to challenge and to inquire.
Constricting student learning hardly equates to nourishing and fostering a better educated society than does limiting student schooling to a set of test patterns derived across the narrowest of time frames.
Ranking by NAPLAN results rates a fail, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February 2010, p 11. www.smh.com.au
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