Students are bound to be the biggest losers

Trouble has been brewing between the Australian Education Union and federal Education Minister Julia Gillard for some time. It started to simmer in November 2008 when Gillard unambiguously stated her intention to increase school transparency and accountability at an education forum in Melbourne. Now, almost 18 months later, it has reached boiling point, with public school teachers threatening a moratorium on administering the literacy and numeracy tests that are the bedrock of the federal government's transparency agenda.

This stand-off came about after Gillard implemented a robust national testing program: the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy. This is no small feat. True to her pledge of transparency and accountability, the results of NAPLAN tests for each school have been published on the MySchool website, making available to the public for the first time comparable academic performance information about all schools. These reforms will be the core of Gillard's legacy as Education Minister.

The NAPLAN tests are largely viewed favourably in the education community, including by teachers, but the AEU has set out to thwart Gillard's plans to continue publishing the results online. Talk of boycotting the NAPLAN tests began as early as January this year. The AEU's campaign has been framed in terms of opposing not the tests per se but the school rankings, or “league tables'', which it says are harmful to schools. The AEU wants to block the publication of league tables at all costs. Although the union is calling for Gillard to negotiate a resolution so the NAPLAN tests can go ahead, it is difficult to see where either party would be willing to compromise.

Legislation prohibiting the publication of school rankings in NSW failed resoundingly as soon as data became available. That approach holds no promise. The only way to stop league tables is to suppress publication of the data.

Since Gillard shows no sign of considering this, the next avenue open to teachers unions is to sabotage the NAPLAN data by refusing to administer the tests, and that is what they intend to do.

To describe the NAPLAN moratorium as sabotage is not an overstatement. Even if the tests proceed without teacher participation, they will be contaminated. Primary school children in particular are unaccustomed to formal testing and are easily affected by changes in environment, such as the presence of unfamiliar adults. This can affect their performance in the test.

If the NAPLAN tests are not administered under normal conditions this year, it will not just be 2010 data that are affected. The consequences will be felt for years to come. A question mark over the data for 2010 will affect the years 3 to 5 growth scores of the present Year 5, and will flow on to affect the years 3 to 5 growth scores of the present Year 3 cohort in 2012. The same goes for the years 7 to 9 growth scores for 2010 and 2012. Lack of confidence in the growth score data for 2010 and 2012 will make it difficult to draw any conclusions about trends in the data over an even longer period.

The NAPLAN data now on the MySchool website represents the average performance of a single cohort of students at a single point in time. This data does provide solid evidence of gross disadvantage, such as the dreadful literacy and numeracy scores in remote indigenous schools, but does not tell us much about the effectiveness of most mainstream schools. Although parents still have an undeniable right to this information, growth scores are the key to making MySchool meaningful. As Ben Jensen of the Grattan Institute has pointed out, a public school teacher boycott of the NAPLAN tests is a counterproductive strategy that will make obtaining this information difficult, if not impossible.

A lot of schools have worked very hard to improve their NAPLAN results during the past year. Critics will write this off as “teaching to the test'', but that is an unfair portrayal.

NAPLAN results are provided to schools in great detail and allow them to drive improvements in teaching and learning. They can identify the exact areas in which their students require more or better instruction, which test questions posed problems for which students and why, and work out ways to help them. For those schools that were anticipating the 2010 NAPLAN results as affirmation of their efforts, a teacher boycott will be a huge disappointment.

The potential for misuse of schools data is far outweighed by the benefits of the NAPLAN tests for students. The stand-off over the tests is a no-win situation and the biggest losers will be students.

 

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.