Our education system is lacking competitive assessment

Concerns about the politically correct approach to assessment are not just academic.  As many parents realise, what passes as student assessment is often so vague and nebulous that parents, and students, are unable to get a clear and succinct statement of what has, or has not, been achieved. 

As noted in the Commonwealth funded report, Reporting on Student and School Achievement investigating how assessment is carried out across Australian schools:

… parents really want a 'fair and honest' assessment of how their children are progressing. They do not want to find out in later years that a child has 'a problem because he didn't have the fundamentals'. Parents believe that advice can be ‘honest’ without being negative. Many considered that written reports are too often politically correct at the expense of honesty.

More importantly, parents are denied the ability to see how well students in a particular class are achieving in comparison to other students across the same year level. No amount of talk about personal growth and that learning is developmental can disguise the fact that if students have not mastered basics skills then they are at risk.

Students, given that they are not compared to others, are not the only ones saved from the embarrassment of being told that they may have failed. Such is the influence of progressive and left-wing views of education that measuring school or teacher performance is also politically incorrect. 

Notwithstanding the wealth of information that is regularly collected by education authorities around Australia, that could easily be used to identify under-performing schools and ineffective teachers, parents and the public are kept in the dark. As stated by the head of Victoria’s Curriculum and Assessment Authority, after detailing the wealth of information gathered that could be used to evaluate school performance, "The information provided by the data service is confidential to the school and access to it is strictly controlled".

Teacher unions are fierce critics of making school performance information available to the public. In states such as Victoria and New South Wales, much needed state-wide literacy and numeracy tests could only be introduced on the condition that schools were not compared and that the information collected was kept secret. 

In part, unions oppose making results public because they prefer to focus the debate on the need to increase resources - more teachers and smaller classes - instead of using current resources more efficiently. Teacher unions also argue that it is wrong to publicly rank schools as some schools, because their students come from a more privileged socio-economic background or the school might have selective entry, will always outperform others in terms of achieving better results. 

Ignored is the overseas research identifying to what extent particular schools add value to student learning by measuring how much student ability improves over a set period of time. Instead of simply comparing schools’ year 12 results, a value add approach measures how effective schools are in lifting standards and ensuring that students perform better than what otherwise might be expected.

The union’s fear is that if school results are made public, in areas such as the HSC, then it would become obvious that how well a school performs is not simply a result of how much is spent or how small the classes. 

In fact, as common sense suggests, the reasons why some schools perform more successfully relate to issues such as the quality and rigour of the school’s curriculum, the commitment and dedication of teachers, having a disciplined and focused classroom environment and creating a school culture that celebrates and rewards success.