Compulsory schooling treated as sick joke

We have different ages of exiting formal schooling;

We have different number of years of schooling for Primary pupils;

We have different names for the first year of schooling;

and so it goes on and on with some peculiar structural changes to some state systems. They tinker. That’s Australia, kiddies.

While blanket testing forces teachers to turn Mathematics into Calculations only, the study of English into Spelling and Grammar mostly; and Science into a paper-and pencil subject...rivalling New York at its worst... we stay silent. The present emphasis on skill development in schools is unparalleled. We are heading away from the prospect of a decent education system at a fast rate.

“Clearly, what is currently passing for education reform is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to ..... stupidify education” says U.S. parent reformer Pricilla Gutierrez. That seems to sum it all up.

The Senate Inquiry into NAPLAN offered an opportunity for Australian people to have a say, and the public decided not to do so in large numbers. There were 270 written submissions, and those of us who did write, failed to emphasise the relationship between blanket testing and classroom learning.

Indeed, the author of the Terms on Reference did not ask for such comment, but it did give some of us a chance to have a say. Such comments were, rightfully, ignored. The window was opened a little and, with some professional comment about teaching and learning from more organisations, it could have been opened wider, but it was kept closed. It was a Naplan and Myschool thing.

There is no place in a real, live learning institution, such as a primary school, to have anything whatsoever to do with hard, judgemental blanket testing, such as Australia borrowed from New York. We needed to talk about that issue; as well as what goes on in the classroom, and how we can connect the levels of achievement above any pre-existing levels with the relationship to the desire to learn. It’s not that difficult to do.

We didn’t talk about it. Classroom teachers know about it but they are busy people, so we don’t ask them. The organisation of compulsory schooling is just too sick to talk about in public. Open debate is well controlled. That’s what we do in Dystralia, kids.

We didn’t say enough about the kids, nor judge the morality, necessity, evaluative use, learning outcomes and alterations to classroom practices of the tests, from a child’s view. It’s touchy, because careful consideration would probably lead to a banning of the testing program. All interested folk and organisations were too concerned about Julia’s website that, it is alleged, describes schools properly; and the senators themselves had a busy enough time having to study the written submissions at the same time as their personal and party futures were threatened during the federal election. It was tough on them.

It was such a shame that MySchool, the auto-da-fa of Australian schooling, took over real schooling issues in the turmoil. The Green Party’s initiative to have such an inquiry, in the absence of a suitable policy of its own, was politically astute but it required a committee of super-people with heaps of time and serious terms of reference. Some of its officers will have to start writing early, I suspect, if the report is to surface this year. In any case, Julia will be pleased with the outcome and use it to her advantage.

Post Script: The above was written prior to the release of the Report on Monday, 29 November, which gave three hearty cheers for Naplan, as expected. Hang in there kids; it won’t disappear for another twenty years. Your generation of teachers will be anxious people, manipulating their syllabuses so that they can find time to coach you, especially during the first few months of each year. I now wish that I had kept my old Weekly Tests in Arithmetic and Grammar from my testing-fixated Principal days.

Even my six general half-term exams would be handy. You see, in my infantile "professional" period, I believed that practice was important, and that fear-of-failure could be implanted; and that sharing pupil progress, as an evaluator with the evaluatee, was too difficult to undertake. Besides, I didn’t know much about it...not as much as classroom teachers know these days. I’d, now, surely make a few bucks from publishing steady testing programs for use for the first few months of each year. On second thoughts, shares in ACER these days might prove more profitable. Might as well make money out of the sorry mess...but then there is ... professionalism. Bugger.