The National conference of the Australian Education Union announced that it will call on members to boycott the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). This is because NAPLAN results are being used as the primary indicator of school performance. The corporate media has, and will use this information to develop crude league tables of winners and losers. The Deputy PM Gillard has said that this is not the intention of the government, meanwhile she refuses to ensure that these media interests will not construct such league tables.
Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/my_new_wintercoat
The government says it seeks greater transparency and accountability while it conducts a campaign to misinform parents. A feature of all current governments over the past decades has been their persistence in shifting debates away from substantive concerns related to social equity and justice. Governments have accepted the arguments and support of the corporate sector’s disparaging view of public education. The persistent message being fed to the public over recent decades is that there is an education crisis foremost in the public system. This ignores the fact the OECD has consistently ranked our schools in the top 10 in the world. These results have been achieved without high-stakes testing and the publication of data. Why are we mimicking Britain and the United States who have never managed to achieve these standards?
Dr Kevin Donnelly formerly the Chief of Staff to Kevin Andrews, when he was federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and a member of the Liberal Party, and once an advocate of the Gillard approach, has had to publicly admit that the research does not support it, far from it. “Instead of raising standards, helping schools be more effective and better supporting teachers, making test results public has been counter productive and unhelpful. New York schools are graded annually on an A to E basis and results are made public. Instead of academic standards improving, under the stewardship of Joel Klein, results have flat-lined and based on the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests there has been little, if any, improvement. … Such are the concerns amongst educational experts in the US that late last year a group of test experts from the National Academies’ Board of Testing and Assessment wrote to the Secretary of Education warning about the dangers of using tests to hold schools and teachers accountable.”
Blame the teachers and not the institutions for any social inequity
Social inequity generally, and the mal-distribution of funds and resources to public education specifically, have been hidden by the claim that teacher quality is the primary and ultimate determinate of good learning and academic performance. Every self-respecting teacher is aware of this responsibility. To even raise issues of equity that impact on provision is to invite suspicion upon us of hidden agendas and vested interests. The small handfuls of teachers who stand-up to raise these issues are often accused of wanting to hide their own inadequacies, but taking a stand should not be considered lightly as it is more likely to bring you the possibility of disciplinary action rather than an accolade. Parents need to make themselves aware of the employment and working conditions of their school’s teachers. The most draconian aspects of the Howard Governments WorkChoices remain in place under Fair Work Australia – equally ironical both. It is likely that state and federal governments will attempt to use this industrial legislation against teachers if they think they can get away with it.
NAPLAN data will be posted on to the new Federal Government’s ‘My School’ sites. These sites are meant to provide parents with information about the schools in their area so that they can make ‘informed’ choices. There are a number of concerns around this issue of choice. The government is promoting the idea amongst parents that the NAPLAN is a reliable measure of a schools general and academic performance. For parents to base a decision on this alone would be erroneous. NAPLAN represents in total, generously, 15 hours of performance out of a total of 10 years of schooling. Even if the information were reliable it would not make sense to believe that such a tiny fragment of data were sufficient to base any reasonable decision on.
Does this government have a real concern for children’s wellbeing; is more to do with meeting demands emanating from corporate boardrooms?
Let there be no mistake, this current campaign being launched against public school teachers and their schools by this federal government is extremely sinister and destructive for all concerned – primarily children. Politicians and their departmental bureaucrats have demonstrated scant concern for our children’s quality of life and the connection these qualities have on learning. The minister has been rudely dismissive of teachers’s concern for student wellbeing. Those of us who acknowledge and consider the impact of detrimental social conditions and family circumstances for children and their families outside of school, in the understanding that they can impinge on productive learning, have had been accused of inventing excuses for bad teaching.
Gillard’s current plan has nothing to do with improving community support for public education, but everything to do with the government realizing its own political ends by using misinformed parents and using them as her shock troops against their children’s teachers and schools. The PM’s recent threats of declining living standards if we do not work longer and harder, to ensure greater profits and bonuses, to line the pockets of business executives, underlies this governments contempt for ‘working families’ and their concerns for a reasonable quality of life. Our communities and schools are already suffering because of the changes wrought by a deregulated and market driven working-life balance. Longer, erratic, fragmented, and anti-social working hours are the significant factors affecting detrimentally the lives of parents and children.
The right of children to a connected curriculum that engages them, because it is meaningful and purposeful for them, and their right to a humane and empathetic learning environment that is responsive to their needs, is being undermined. The minister is either ignorant, mischievous, or both, when she says that NAPLAN is diagnostically necessary for improving teaching and learning. Under her tutelage some parents already assume that NAPLAN testing is more about testing teachers and holding them to account rather than ‘providing information about the child ’. The shift of emphasis from the whole child to regimes of testing and assessment has nothing to do with addressing an individual child’s concerns. When politicians make demands and pronouncements we need to exercise our critical faculties and consider what it is driving their objectives.
Foremost, the provision of education is determined by the demands of the corporate boardrooms and their domination over economic decision-making. Government finance departments, at their behest, have more say over what is possible, rather than the identification of genuine social and learning needs and remedies. Secondly we know that a politician’s vision is, at best, as long as a parliamentary election term. This only encourages politically expediency and populist solutions aimed at appeasing their electorates. The crowning example is the battle lost for a fully funded, universal and secular public education system. The limits of parliamentary politics and sectarian interests could not prevent religious interests interfering in the creation of such a universal public system. The elite schools, educating the children of the wealthy, have most benefited from this arrangement. In contrast, the majority left behind in relatively poor government, and the new non-government schools that Howard’s government gave licence to, are equally denigrated and forced to squabble over the remainder of an inadequate pot of money. The league table spin-off and NAPLAN is the coup de grace in this continuing long running argument against public education.
The Federal Government has definitively taken up the cause of ‘extreme capitalism’; that of capitalist corporate power.
‘Productivity’ has become the business and politician’s euphemism for ‘corporate profits’ at our expense. We know the ‘trickle down‘ from the wealthy theory is a furphy but we do know that many of them take part in criminal activity. This underbelly of business activity didn’t stop Mr Rudd’s personal embrace of Mrs Pratt. Far from ignoring ‘old battles’ Gillard and the government, despite their public charade of improvement and equitable provision, have at least dropped the façade of parliamentary democracy ‘governing for all Australians’, and definitively taken up the cause of capitalist corporate power.
The minister in addressing corporate business groups says it as it really is. ‘In today’s world’, she told a gathering of the Australian Industry Group, ‘the areas covered by my portfolios – early childhood education and childcare, schooling, training, universities, social inclusion, employment participation and workplace cooperation – are all ultimately about the same thing: productivity’. …. Further to the point ‘I’m going to be ignoring the old battles between unions and employers, public and private schools (taxpayer-funded-non-government-schools), the trades and universities and welfare and work’ … ‘Instead, I’m going to be measuring policies against the all-important criteria of how effectively they increase national productivity.’* Is this really how parents see the best and brightest future for their precious children – everything directed toward making us reliable grist for the corporate-body breaking-profit-machine.
There is a suggestion that the reason that Ms Gillard is being so tenacious, apart from pursuing her campaign for the top job as the reincarnation of Baroness Thatcher. It is this, Mr K Rudd did a deal with Mr ‘Mass’ Murdoch in exchange for his editorial support for the election of an ALP government. Murdoch is a keen advocate for turning the government schools of the working class into giant testing stations. Murdoch is also an advocate of the New York model of ‘no child left untested’ overseen by one J. Klein. Klein’s approach to dealing with an overburdened and under funded dysfunctional system is to further denigrate and bully teachers, close schools and instruct for the test, and then keep testing. For a while he also claimed that he had improved standards. However, the truth, which has been widely broadcast, is that the New York solution has been a crashing failure.
Why does Mr Murdoch have so much influence? This can be only understood with some insight into the ALP ministers and backbencher mind set. They generally believe that it is the Murdoch press that makes and breaks governments. A true indication of how little faith they have in parliamentary democracy, and their profound contempt for the electorate. The parliamentary process obscures where real power lies, in the corporate boardrooms, and veils the politician’s obsequious servitude to the interests of the capitalist corporations.
Yes to more transparency and accountability; what is the Government hiding?
The real question is, what are Australian governments hiding when they correlate testing and measuring a child and creating school league table comparisons, with good education? Are they fostering a lie when they argue that gathering and comparing data is the best way to improve educational outcomes for children, improve teaching, and school cultures? Where is the money to truly support children who are having difficulties, whether they are social, emotional or academic? Where is the money for school libraries and librarians, science and art rooms? Where is the money to properly maintain and clean schools and care for gardens? Why is it so difficult to incorporate the creative arts, music, and dance into the core of the curriculum? Why is it that these essentially human activities no longer have anything to do with literacy and numeracy, and good learning generally?
What is certain is that these, and many more questions are not being asked, let alone answered, while the government has got parents believing that real concern is expressed by leaving no child left unmeasured, and thereby turning learning into an act of receiving all that which is transmitted from a teacher in accord with the object of tests. These unreasonable pressures, on both children and teachers, undermine aspirations toward improved practices and enlightened pedagogical approaches that consider your child as a person rather than a wing nut to ‘value-add’ on. One letter writer asks of the minister “have you thought about how damaging your insistence on publishing test results is on higher-achievers in so-called ”underperforming” schools? Why not focus on ”underperforming” students who can drag down a median score in an otherwise good school, and support them and their families with intensive programs and coaching?” In reality, support personnel and programs are woefully under resourced, and are being further reorganised and diminished.
There is a choice, an education worthy us of us all, as creative citizens, or that of mass education suitable for testing the masses of thoughtless automatons, teachers and students both.
The view of education implied by the likes of Ms Gillard is a default setting for a second-rate mass education standardised for the mass of the working class. Nothing that this government is advocating for school improvement assists to raise the sights and standards of teacher moral and professional learning. Much of the vitriol aimed at schools and their children’s teachers is confused with the lack of accountability of the various departments and governments. No one wants to be an incompetent teacher, and no one wants to work with incompetent teachers. While we all aim for the very best, the ideal, as teachers we also have to mindful of our children’s needs, work cooperatively with colleagues and the school community’s expectations (which are often different and not always as high as teachers), and work within (and around) the limits of government departments – teachers cannot do what ever they feel like, even if they consider some things detrimental to good learning.
Generally speaking, if you carry out diagnostic tests it is because you are attempting to identify a specific problem in order to develop the means to provide a remedy. NAPLAN testing, despite the claims of the minister, does nothing of the sort. Apart from threats, the government has no clear strategies to provide more time and money, or the resources and support necessary for improving teacher courses, or raising our collective vision, or our personal development intellectually. The Government has not for example stated how it might provide the means to assist parents and schools to overcome any disadvantage that compromises student performances at school. These very real concerns are being ignored and require sensitivity and subtlety if lasting solutions are to be found.
While the classroom teacher is critical to student achievement the government’s current devious and misinformed lurch for control over teacher practice by enforcing accountability misses an important point. Robert Rothman writing for Harvard’s Education Letter, ‘Behind the Classroom Door’, reminds us that “policies continue to focus primarily at the school level: using schools as the unit of performance, identifying “failing schools,” and more recently targeting “turnaround schools” for special intervention. One of the best-kept secrets in educational research, it seems, is the fact that differences in the quality of instruction from classroom to classroom within schools are greater than differences in instructional quality between schools.”[i]
Nothing can overcome these concerns except a serious recognition that real solutions amount to time and money, and a serious plan for ongoing professional learning. Returning to the now quaint idea that a school principal would an informed pedagogue rather than the person now most removed from such concerns would be a small step forward. Academics who generally never see the inside of a classroom, and have no actual understanding of working in schools and education departments, should be engaged in, and by schools to assist in our reflective practice. Expectations and demands on teachers have moved a long way from grade 3 students being able to write one sentence with a capital letter at the beginning and a full stop at the end as it was in 1956. Although official attitudes toward, and support for teachers has remained much the same as it was then.
Holding the line; all good people come out to support a united front to stop the government
For all these reasons parents cannot allow themselves to be directed by the opinions of Deputy PM Gillard –most of all because she has demonstrated conflicting interests and political agendas that do not correspond with improving public education. She has no understanding of school realities, and even less knowledge of pedagogy. Parents who believe she is doing the best for them should not believe or rely on anything she says. If parents wish to participate constructively they must take responsibility too, and fully engage with their school communities so that they can have the opportunity to appreciate the significant concerns of the education profession. It is erroneous to believe that it is only the teacher unions that have concerns. There is wide spread consternation at every level of the profession about the direction the government is taking.
If the intention is to improve our public education systems then pitting parents against teachers is a malicious and counter-productive move. Rather than seeking constructive dialogue with educators, teachers, and union representatives, the Federal and State Governments have flatly refused; consistent with every other area of government, they are taking corporate managerial prerogatives to the highest degree. Using Commonwealth funding as the whip, Gillard is able to wield control over the states through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). This thereby ensures the states are with her on this confrontational path. Support for the boycott will need to be actively campaigned for, and will by no means be an easy task. A critical element will be ensuring that school principals actively encourage the campaign in their schools. Teachers are less likely to support a boycott if parents and their principal are not behind it too.
The Deputy PM has said disruptive action would be detrimental to education. However, in the short term it is her actions that are disruptive and in the long term her proposals are not only detrimental, but the negative effects will be felt over generations. The evidence is overwhelming; increased regimes of testing, and using the results of testing as the primary criteria for evaluating teachers and school performance is both erroneous and counter-productive academically and pedagogically. These politically driven, populist counter-reforms are not unique to this country. The minister has chosen to follow the example of two education systems, the USA and the UK, which are failing as a consequence of similar counter-reforms. There is overwhelming international evidence that inform us that short sighted political directives have little to do with improving education but are rather part of a clumsy web of overtly draconian controls imposed primarily on teacher workforces in the public education sector.
Now is the time for all good people to unite in opposition to all governments’s narrow-minded education counter-reforms and continued enforcement of social inequities. A stand against NAPLAN and league tables is just the beginning. What we need know is a serious discussion and debate within the profession about how we might build it to improve it. Academics, and educators must add their voices to those of the classroom teachers and education support staff. We must all take a stand to ‘hold the line’.
* Quotes from Tom Dusevic, The Great Gillard experiment, The Best Australian Political writing 2009, MUP.
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