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ОглавлениеTHE SMELL OF NAPLAN IN THE MORNING
Testing ‘is a good servant but a bad master’.
— Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons 2.0, 2015
The headlines are hard to miss: ‘Why up to half of all Australian teachers are quitting within the first five years’, ‘Naplan writing test is ‘bizarre’…’, ‘The world’s best teacher doesn’t care about test scores’, ‘ATARs losing relevance for university admissions but students still hooked’, ‘Teachers are more depressed and anxious than the average Australian’.
These are all real headlines. They point to recognition that what we are doing in our schools at present is not working and has not done so for some time.
It was in the midst of this that I visited schools in Finland, speaking with students, teachers and the teachers’ teachers in Helsinki and Tampere (a couple of hours north of Helsinki) where I found that all of the above trends were virtually unknown to them.
When I explained how frequently NAPLAN1 tests are administered in Australian schools, they asked incredulously, ‘So your students have five lots of matriculation-type exams by the time they finish school?… Starting at EIGHT YEARS OLD?!’
They stared at me as though I were a child molester. In Finland children don’t start school until the age of seven. They do not do any form of standardised testing until they are in their late teens.
In a recent discussion with one of my year 8 classes about growth mindset thinking—the premise that learning can help make us smarter—a third of students admitted that the experience of taking the grade 3 NAPLAN test (as eight-or nine-year-olds) had made them decide that they were ‘no good’ at mathematics. Some said they could actually remember making that decision. I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘How many of you have experienced similar moments with English and science (the other subjects tested in NAPLAN)?’
The nature of the NAPLAN test is that it presents progressively more difficult problems for the child to solve, until they eventually can go no further with that particular activity.
Children of this age naturally assume that if the problem is on the test, then there is an expectation that they will be able to do it. And they certainly want to please the adults, don’t they? Those who raised their hands were not the rebellious students, they were mainly girls—good students who are (and certainly were at the time of sitting the test) very keen to please their parents and teachers.2
They trust, or at least trusted, adults and teachers unconditionally.
Finnish teachers asked me why Australian teachers let this happen to our students. It is a major discussion. How to explain why so much autonomy has been taken away from teachers (and also from administrators)? However, thinking about the obvious damage done to many young children forced to sit NAPLAN examinations, it is clear that if teachers do not speak up for the children, no-one else will. The companies that prepare the tests make many millions of dollars from them; we won’t be hearing much criticism from that corner. The states themselves and school principals are reluctant to be seen as unsupportive, hence they are called out as trying to hide ‘poor performance’ and end up losing students and funding.
So who is looking at the tests and asking if they are in the best interests of the students?
In defence of teachers, when NAPLAN was first introduced it was not deemed a ‘high stakes test’. Phrases such as ‘a snapshot’ and ‘an indicator’ were bandied about, the point being that teachers were not aware that what they were introducing could become a stress-inducing test which could alter for the rest of their lives students’ attitudes to vitally important school subjects.
One does not have to be in Finnish schools for long to understand that educators there are true professionals. They are trusted to devise the required curriculum; national curriculum guidelines are minimal and there is no ‘inspection’ associated with this. Teachers are expected to devise all forms of assessment; there is no standardised testing whatsoever.
The education union is the professional body and membership is around 95 percent. It is involved in all aspects of education.
A recent report in the UK’s Guardian newspaper spoke of the flood of interest in Finland’s education system: every year hundreds of delegations comprising teachers and policymakers from all over the world pour into Helsinki to see this nirvana for themselves.
So popular has it become that international visits are strictly regulated and have to be paid for: a presentation costs €682 (£588 as at November 2019) per hour and a school visit €1240. (Weale, 2019)
Back in Tampere, I did not dare mention that the school I work at (like most other secondary schools) also has two rounds of examinations (on top of the NAPLAN ones in years 7 and 9) in each of years 9, 10 and 11, meaning students sit no fewer than 12 rounds (each ‘round’ could be a period of up to two or three weeks comprising examinations and study time preparing and revising for the big day) of examinations from grade 3 through to year 12.
And I nearly forgot the AGAT (the ACER General Ability Test, ACER being the Australian Council for Educational Research). This is designed to help teachers assess learning potential and aptitude in years 2 to 10. Finland makes do with only the final matriculation exam.
‘Does it work?’ they asked, unable to suppress their shock.
The answer was a simple ‘No.’
‘Well, why do they do it? Why does the teacher allow the students to do it?’
The last question really hit home. There is no reasonable answer other than to say that this is the way we have always—well, at least for the last decade and a half—done things, which seemed terribly inappropriate even as the words left my mouth. I wanted to be able to say that when the test helps us to identify students who have a weakness in their learning we are then able to provide suitable support to enable them to overcome this and continue succeeding in their education.
But this would have been a lie.
The truth is that when weaknesses are identified through NAPLAN testing there is no set policy for addressing the issue. In fact, we (well, the My School website) will encourage parents to remove their sons and daughters from the poorly performing schools (or not to send them there at all) by making the schools’ results public.
The suggestion appears to be that the resultant drop in student numbers and public shaming will somehow encourage the poorer-performing schools to ‘lift their game’. That school funding is based on student numbers ensures that the poorer-performing school will also be punished financially. Parents in a position to move their children will do so, but what of those who cannot afford the money or time to relocate them to a more distant school? They remain in a classroom where many of their peers have also not done so well on the NAPLAN test.
In a school whose funding has been cut and whose better teachers are probably feeling somewhat disillusioned by all of the above, they—like the better-off parents—will be looking out for another school if possible.
If there is little to be gained by students in the NAPLAN test, then how do their teachers and principals fare? One can only imagine the stress of being principal at a school with the lowest NAPLAN score in its town or city.
Public shaming, likely loss of student numbers and funding, parent responses and students (not to mention their school) labelled the ‘worst’ in town. All for a standardised testing system that really does no favours for the students, who are almost certainly from the most disadvantaged part of town. Feeling somewhat guilty, I stayed silent on the fact that not only were we administering world record numbers of tests, but we were also teaching towards these tests, making their content the curriculum and judging the merits of entire schools, teachers, principals and individual students according to the results they yield.
Teachers in Australia are trained in the ‘mandatory reporting’ of anything resembling child abuse in any form. How could we have done this to so many thousands of students?
How many students and adults now loathe mathematics, science or English (perhaps there is a bright side to the fact that NAPLAN omits the arts!) because of early NAPLAN experiences? If the one third of the class I asked the question to are indicative, we are talking many thousands of students.
I have often compared the obsession with increased NAPLAN-styled testing to presuming you could change the temperature by looking at the thermometer more frequently.
The discussion rarely turns to why we should expect improvement. Indeed, the only logical reason to expect any is that schools are now teaching for the NAPLAN tests, effectively making them the curriculum (at the expense of many far more useful faculties such as creativity). The fact that results are still not improving should be a cause for further concern.
According to a study published in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy reporting a survey of more than 200 year 7 and 9 teachers across NSW in 2017, ‘nearly 60 percent disagreed with the statement that NAPLAN provides important information on the literacy skills of students’.
‘NAPLAN’s out of control,’ said Chris Presland, president of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council: ‘The problem with it goes beyond teaching to the test, there’s certainly an over-obsession with data and pressure on schools to perform because of the comparative nature of the data.’
A visit to a bookshop, educational supply store or even the local newsagent will reveal dozens of different publications all designed to improve a student’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy) result. Whether any of the material tested by NAPLAN is of value to students is never debated, but it is now, by default, part of the curriculum. In April 2018, MIT professor emeritus Les Perelman undertook a comprehensive review of the NAPLAN writing test and concluded it was ‘by far the most absurd and the least valid of any test that I’ve seen’.3
Why has it taken a visiting American professor to tell us this?
The US has seen similar results with its national testing program; after a decade-plus of the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) test, results indicate no changes in the ‘achievement gap between poor and wealthy students and gains on achievement tests are small, even after extensive time has been allocated in schools across the nation for direct preparation for the tests’. (David C.Berliner, 2014)
In Victoria, the My School website appears to suggest that one of the main criteria for selecting a school should be NAPLAN results. The system encourages students to move from lower NAPLAN-scoring schools as if this will magically improve educational outcomes. As previously mentioned, the students remaining in the lower-scoring schools will supposedly somehow have any deficiencies identified by the test rectified by means unspecified. This is an unlikely outcome as the school concerned will most likely forfeit some of its funding through loss of student numbers and quality teachers who may have elected to move elsewhere rather than continue in the environment of a school depleted of funding and its most talented students.
In Australia it can be difficult to find an educator who is not caught up in the standards movement—though I suspect many are not there by conscious choice.
The movement is, at its core, the idea that the best we can do is ensure every student has a minimum standard of certain skills. Apparently, it follows that if they have these skills they can work out the rest from there. I have witnessed situations where teachers have worked countless hours trying to fit the government-recommended curriculum into the allotted hours for a given subject, only to be told that the entire subject had been scrapped by the school or, worse, that much of the content was now deemed unnecessary as it was not relevant to the VCE examination (and therefore the ATAR score) component of the subject.
A recent report from libertarian think tank the Centre for Independent Studies pushed back against criticism of NAPLAN, stating: ‘A test cannot be blamed for a lack of improvement—this would be analogous to blaming a thermometer for a hot day or criticising scales for a lack of weight loss.’ (Joseph, 2018) The report at no point addresses exactly how looking at the thermometer (or scales) with greater frequency can improve results. The assumption is maintained that if we teach the ‘basics’, whatever they may be, creativity and all other necessary capacities will follow.
Acclaimed educationalist Sir Ken Robinson addresses this need for the basics. ‘The old systems of education were not designed with this world in mind. Improving them by raising conventional standards will not meet the challenges we face now.’ (Robinson, 2015)
NAPLAN suits politicians and administrators for whom it is expedient to make sweeping generalisations about the education system, students or teachers to justify spending or cuts to spending.
Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg recently spoke of the problems of standardised testing in Australia: ‘… wherever standardised tests are running the show it narrows the curriculum and it kind of changes the whole role and meaning of going to school from general useful learning into doing well in two or three subjects. And it often makes teaching and learning very boring when the purpose is to figure out the right answer to a test.’ (Pasi Sahlberg, 2018)
The NAPLAN test, a supposed ‘snapshot’ of the entire country’s students in the same week, does little to encourage hard work and diligence in students. Instead it confronts them with challenges for which they have not had the opportunity to prepare. They do not know which elements of mathematics, English or science will be tested (although this does not prevent the detailed study of material like that contained in previous NAPLAN tests). Essentially this sends the message that, while it may identify ‘naturally talented’ students, nothing else—determination, persistence, grit, the ‘growth mindset’ and so on—matters.
The modern roots of the standards system lie with US President George W. Bush and his 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. It supported standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and measurable goals could improve individual outcomes in education. The Act required US states to develop assessments in basic skills. To receive federal school funding, states had to give these assessments to all students at select grade levels. This involved all students sitting a test each year.
Bush’s unpopular program was followed in 2010 by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, essentially doubling down on the same shaky ideas, as if somehow tightening up the components could alter the outcomes. It increased the stress on testing, meaning that now not only would schools and governments be held accountable for results, but teachers could be given a bonus for ‘excellent’ results or even fired if students’ results were not deemed satisfactory. This unleashed a witch-hunt-like fervour for attacking teachers (American teachers are already among the most poorly remunerated in the developed world), epitomised by a Newsweek cover story declaring: ‘We must fire bad teachers’.
GERM WARFARE
Sahlberg has dubbed this mania for standardisation the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM for short) and is obviously dedicated to wiping out what he regards as a menace to the world’s educational wellbeing. Of course, if you take the fetish for more testing, more standardisation and study theory to its extreme, good test results can be obtained, as South Korea, with one of the world’s highest secondary-school graduation rates, has discovered. School there starts at eight in the morning and continues until nine in the evening, when most students head to private tutoring academies known as hagwons for an hour or two before going to bed and repeating it all the following day (a law has been passed limiting the hours hagwons can operate until no later than 11pm; and a dedicated police squad regularly raids hagwons suspected of breaking this law). Hagwon teachers can earn enormous salaries and it is common for families to go into debt paying fees for this private tuition. The best known of these, Andrew Kim, takes in a whopping US$4 million a year lecturing to some 150,000 students online at the equivalent of US$3.50 an hour, in addition to writing hundreds of books, textbooks and workbooks.
‘In Korea, your education can be reduced to a number,’ a South Korean student told Amanda Ripley while she was researching her book The Smartest Kids in the World. ‘If your number is good, you have a good future.’4
Students absolutely loathe the system (although they seem to loathe the mainstream education system even more), possibly because the teachers in the latter are under great pressure to maintain student numbers—indeed their entire wage depends on it—so they administer a perpetual series of annual tests, the results of which determine entrance into the top universities, thus ensuring success in career and later life. Many believe hagwons are the key to South Korea’s vaunted PISA scores. The world’s highest-paid teacher, Andrew Kim voices great discomfort at the inequity of the system, despite profiting immensely from it himself.
‘I don’t think this is the ideal way,’ he told Ripley. ‘This leads to a vicious cycle of poor families passing on poverty to their children.’ He added that, in his opinion, Finland’s was a much better model to follow.
Kim said he planned to work in teacher training from 2017 (Ripley’s book was published in 2013) and to improve the mainstream system for his then 6-year-old son. Ripley said that she didn’t find anyone, including the head of the South Korean education system, who thought they had a good system in place, despite the country’s impressive PISA results.
The case of a teenage student named Ji who murdered his mother to prevent her attending a parent-teacher night and seeing his results (which were actually quite good, but she was incredibly demanding) drew attention to this system, and much public sympathy for Ji from many South Koreans who understood the pressures a student faces in that country. (Ripley, 2013)
India recently experienced a number of suicides for the same reasons: ‘TWENTY students have died by suicide in India this past week after the Board of Intermediate Education (BIE) announced their exam scores. The Khaleej Times reports the exams have been marked in controversy after there were discrepancies in the results.’ Nearly 1 million students took the exams between February and March, and nearly 350,000 failed, causing widespread protests from parents, student groups and political parties. One student named Sirisha failed biology and set herself on fire at her home in the Narayanpet district on Saturday after her parents went out to the fields, according to the Khaleej Times. On Thursday, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao ordered the recounting and re-verification of the answer sheets of all students who failed and urged them not to die by suicide, adding failing the tests didn’t mean the end of their lives. (David Aaro, 2019)
The pressure to perform academically is also high in Japan, with reports that in 2014, for the first time, the most common cause of death of Japanese aged 10 to 19 was suicide.
According to the cabinet office, September 1 is historically the day when the largest number of children under 18 take their own lives. Of the 18,048 children who killed themselves between 1972 and 2013, on average 92 did so on August 31, spiking to 131 on September 1 and reverting to 94 on September 2. September 1 is the start date for the second semester of the school year. In addition to the competitive nature of Japanese education and society in general, ‘The bigger issue is the competitive society where you have to beat your own friends’.
Sahlberg has a very different take on this type of competition for grades: ‘Many people think that in today’s highly competitive and fast-changing era, children need to learn how to compete and become winners. However, my point is the opposite. The best way for students to adapt to competition and change is to teach them to cooperate, because in such a complex and ever-changing environment, creativity and adventurousness are more necessary, and these qualities can be nurtured and born only in an environment that encourages cooperation. So as an educator, I would not encourage students to study for the sake of competition and to win. On the contrary, I want to give them a relaxed and cooperative environment so that they will have the precious qualities and opportunities to make mistakes as well that they need to face challenges in the future.’ (Sahlberg, https://pasisahlberg.com, 2018)
Pasi Sahlberg is aware of the stress problem related to Australia’s standardised NAPLAN tests: ‘I heard some teachers telling how children are experiencing stress-related crying, vomiting and sleeplessness over the high-stakes standardised tests.’
In September 2018 news surfaced at a government inquiry of a Canberra fifth-grade student attempting to take his own life during a NAPLAN test. Reports detailed how Shane Gorman, the principal of Wanniassa High School in the capital’s south, said a teacher had found the student attempting suicide in the schoolground after walking out of class during a NAPLAN test.
‘People don’t realise the stress it puts on kids,’ Mr Gorman told an ACT inquiry into standardised testing. ‘Indeed, principals across the country are reporting a rise in incidents of mental illness, particularly anxiety in students which the schools are not resourced to deal with.’ (Cook, 2019)
In a move that hopefully signals the start of a shift in attitude to the GERM in Australia, the ACT Government established the inquiry into standardised testing to ‘examine its effectiveness and how it affects the mental health of students as well as the morale of teachers, as part of a push to change how data from those tests is reported’.
Mr Gorman said the student walked out halfway through the test—leaving a note—and then went to take his own life.
‘He was going to end it,’ Mr Gorman said.
Mr Gorman appeared alongside the ACT’s education union secretary Glenn Fowler, who told the inquiry public reporting of NAPLAN data caused stress for students.
‘If doctors said, in near unanimity, that a practice did more harm than good for their patients, would they be ignored for nine years?’ Mr Fowler said.
‘NAPLAN data should be removed from the My School website now and in perpetuity.’ (Evans, 2018)
Without being overly dramatic here, it is worth remembering that the Australian Capital Territory is the smallest (in size and second smallest in population) state or territory in Australia and the only reason this case was brought to public attention is that the ACT held an inquiry into standardised testing.
The conclusions of this and other inquiries into NAPLAN and standardised testing will need to find a way around the Australian Council for Educational Research which administers, monitors and creates the materials for NAPLAN. For reasons many find obvious, it cannot be expected to oppose a system of which it is such an integral part.
I contacted ACER to ask about its NAPLAN review methods. There was no response. Their website makes it clear that their focus is on educational measurement: ‘Our mission is to create and promote research-based knowledge, products and services that can be used to improve learning across the lifespan.’
It is a mystery that an educationalist of the standing of Pasi Sahlberg should be resident in Australia working at the University of New South Wales and as an adviser to the Gonski Institute yet not have any role to do with ACER.
It (NAPLAN) just wouldn’t work in our (Finnish) system. Stressed kids are not learning and stressed teachers are not teaching. I wish and hope [Australia] provides more room for teachers to do more of the stuff that teachers do best and remove a lot of the rote and mechanical assessments and grading papers.
— Linda Liukas, Finnish education author
1 The National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is an annual national assessment for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. All students in these year levels are expected to participate in tests in reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy.
2 Educational neuroscientist Dr Jared Cooney Horvath explains how long periods of stress (as a third or fifth grader might see the NAPLAN tests) impact learning. Cortisol, the stress hormone that kills neurons in the hippocampus, has free rein to damage our gateway to memory. This withers away our ability to access previously formed long-term memories, and makes it difficult to learn new information. Cooney gives the example of being trapped somewhere with no possibility for escape (a possible scenario for us in primitive times); in this situation it makes a lot more sense to block out as much of the negativity as possible and simply survive until the ordeal is over. This is what the long-term stress response does: it helps prevent memories from forming during helpless situations. (Horvath, 2019)
3 Despite this, I am aware of at least one school (and I’ve no doubt there are many others) which has developed rubrics based on the very same NAPLAN language analysis test Prof. Perelman was referring to in a case of not only allowing NAPLAN to dictate the curriculum (which it was never designed to do and it has never been suggested was an appropriate approach to take with it) but actually taking the worst elements of NAPLAN and introducing them into the mainstream curriculum.
4 Interestingly, it is unlikely that someone like Charles Darwin would have achieved an impressive score in today’s test formats: ‘So poor in one sense is my memory that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or line of poetry.’ He continues, ‘What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.’ (Duckworth, 2017)
