Extract from The Guardian
A new policy around year nine standards means more stomach-clenching tests and more anxiety in younger kids worried about making the grade
Just recently, my 14-year-old came home from school with news: he may not, he said, be able to get a Higher School Certificate or go to university. He would need to do very well in Naplan next year, much better than he’d ever done before, to be allowed to write that final exam.
Nonsense, I thought, impossible, and then I looked it up. He was three-quarters right. Announced by the New South Wales education minister, Adrian Piccoli, in a few paragraphs of a July press release on HSC “modernisation”, it said those who don’t achieve Band 8 in their year nine Naplan (a high level only achieved by about a third of the year’s cohort) will no longer be automatically eligible to sit the HSC.
Here I confess a vested interest. My son has dyslexia which makes it extra hard in tests like this. But while the plan does allow for further attempts to qualify in the form of online tests and there may be provisions for children with learning difficulties, there’s no question that linking Naplan to tertiary education moves the HSC pressure downwards, to younger children.
More stomach clenching tests for the half to two-thirds of kids who don’t make the grade first time around. More winners and losers. Already we are in an age when the HSC sees Ritalin outbreaks for kids who are not hyper, but just don’t focus quite as well as they might.
This kind of pressure at 14 is absurd. It is not only children with learning difficulties who are disadvantaged, no matter what the provisions. There are others, and they may lose heart: children from a non-English speaking background, or with anything that distinguishes them from the mainstream . Aboriginal children, for sure. Anyone who stresses over exams, or has an anxiety disorder will be put in their place too.
And, of course, there are the late bloomers. “What about them?” Professor Shirley Smith asked me recently. Now in her 80s, she was a great educator and is still a font of wisdom and common sense.
The aim, according to Piccoli, the generally well-respected NSW education minister, is to boost standards. The argument is that the new requirements will pick up the stragglers and lift their literacy and numeracy achievements. Literacy and numeracy, the two Gods of schooling. The quantifiables.
Yes, it will pick them up. Pick them up and label them failures at a vulnerable developmental stage and then (for those not shepherded through the system as I am determined my son will be) spit them out at the legal school leaving age.
Under the current system, everyone who finishes school, goes the distance, earns an HSC testamur. They may not get university entry, but they do get that prestigious piece of paper that shows staying power, or that may highlight strengths other than strictly academic.
One principal of a school in a depressed area I spoke to wondered what incentive there would be for those children now. How to keep them at school without the threat or promise of an HSC? In his school, not more than 10% of students achieve Band 8.
Is this what we want? Effectively a return to the school certificate without the certificate? Do we want a second tier of students who leave earlier with nothing to show (irony of ironies, the NSW school leaving age went from 15 to 17 in 2010, with the rationale that that “early school leavers are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed, earn lower wages and have poorer quality of life outcomes.”)
Do we want a punitive system which knocks the stuffing out of kids when they’re even younger? Which sidelines creativity, or the arts or other strengths? Are we acknowledging our failure, that in our society teachers cannot be relied on to identify individual needs in their classrooms?
When Naplan started in 2008, it was voluntary and parents were assured that it would be used only as a diagnostic tool, a convenient mass instrument to determine educational achievement and help students in need. That was the premise, the promise.
But the worst always seems to transpire in education, especially in the age of the internet, as we lurch backwards, anchors gone. Normalisation of the awful, the frog in the boiling water, and before we know it, this will be another tool wielded by floundering politicians. Another tool to classify, another lowest common denominator marker in the unfair race in which some schools and students already start out with such obvious advantages.
Piccoli says the vast majority of students will meet the standard by year 12. But as reported, disquiet is growing among parents to whom the news is filtering down. Some have started an online petition on change.org.
This haste is unseemly for such a big change. Like the old days, let’s at least canvass the full spectrum of opinion before moving on this – parents, principals and teachers, private and public school leaders and the Catholic sector, politicians and academics like Professor Smith. Let’s take a step back to before the education debate was totally hijacked by politics, and before educators and school leaders had to focus so much on markers and lobbying for funding.
Already the federal minister for education, Simon Birmingham, said of this year’s flatlining Naplan results that we need a “fresh approach”. NSW is opening the door and next thing we know, this travesty will go national and all those children who respond better to a carrot than a stick, all the tender educational theory about people learning better and being more rounded when not dragooned toward standardised tests will be side-lined as we march toward these inhumane standards.
Nonsense, I thought, impossible, and then I looked it up. He was three-quarters right. Announced by the New South Wales education minister, Adrian Piccoli, in a few paragraphs of a July press release on HSC “modernisation”, it said those who don’t achieve Band 8 in their year nine Naplan (a high level only achieved by about a third of the year’s cohort) will no longer be automatically eligible to sit the HSC.
Here I confess a vested interest. My son has dyslexia which makes it extra hard in tests like this. But while the plan does allow for further attempts to qualify in the form of online tests and there may be provisions for children with learning difficulties, there’s no question that linking Naplan to tertiary education moves the HSC pressure downwards, to younger children.
More stomach clenching tests for the half to two-thirds of kids who don’t make the grade first time around. More winners and losers. Already we are in an age when the HSC sees Ritalin outbreaks for kids who are not hyper, but just don’t focus quite as well as they might.
This kind of pressure at 14 is absurd. It is not only children with learning difficulties who are disadvantaged, no matter what the provisions. There are others, and they may lose heart: children from a non-English speaking background, or with anything that distinguishes them from the mainstream . Aboriginal children, for sure. Anyone who stresses over exams, or has an anxiety disorder will be put in their place too.
And, of course, there are the late bloomers. “What about them?” Professor Shirley Smith asked me recently. Now in her 80s, she was a great educator and is still a font of wisdom and common sense.
The aim, according to Piccoli, the generally well-respected NSW education minister, is to boost standards. The argument is that the new requirements will pick up the stragglers and lift their literacy and numeracy achievements. Literacy and numeracy, the two Gods of schooling. The quantifiables.
Yes, it will pick them up. Pick them up and label them failures at a vulnerable developmental stage and then (for those not shepherded through the system as I am determined my son will be) spit them out at the legal school leaving age.
Under the current system, everyone who finishes school, goes the distance, earns an HSC testamur. They may not get university entry, but they do get that prestigious piece of paper that shows staying power, or that may highlight strengths other than strictly academic.
One principal of a school in a depressed area I spoke to wondered what incentive there would be for those children now. How to keep them at school without the threat or promise of an HSC? In his school, not more than 10% of students achieve Band 8.
Is this what we want? Effectively a return to the school certificate without the certificate? Do we want a second tier of students who leave earlier with nothing to show (irony of ironies, the NSW school leaving age went from 15 to 17 in 2010, with the rationale that that “early school leavers are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed, earn lower wages and have poorer quality of life outcomes.”)
Do we want a punitive system which knocks the stuffing out of kids when they’re even younger? Which sidelines creativity, or the arts or other strengths? Are we acknowledging our failure, that in our society teachers cannot be relied on to identify individual needs in their classrooms?
When Naplan started in 2008, it was voluntary and parents were assured that it would be used only as a diagnostic tool, a convenient mass instrument to determine educational achievement and help students in need. That was the premise, the promise.
But the worst always seems to transpire in education, especially in the age of the internet, as we lurch backwards, anchors gone. Normalisation of the awful, the frog in the boiling water, and before we know it, this will be another tool wielded by floundering politicians. Another tool to classify, another lowest common denominator marker in the unfair race in which some schools and students already start out with such obvious advantages.
Piccoli says the vast majority of students will meet the standard by year 12. But as reported, disquiet is growing among parents to whom the news is filtering down. Some have started an online petition on change.org.
This haste is unseemly for such a big change. Like the old days, let’s at least canvass the full spectrum of opinion before moving on this – parents, principals and teachers, private and public school leaders and the Catholic sector, politicians and academics like Professor Smith. Let’s take a step back to before the education debate was totally hijacked by politics, and before educators and school leaders had to focus so much on markers and lobbying for funding.
Already the federal minister for education, Simon Birmingham, said of this year’s flatlining Naplan results that we need a “fresh approach”. NSW is opening the door and next thing we know, this travesty will go national and all those children who respond better to a carrot than a stick, all the tender educational theory about people learning better and being more rounded when not dragooned toward standardised tests will be side-lined as we march toward these inhumane standards.
No comments:
Post a Comment