Talking about persuasive writing

 

And, to give perfectly equal limelight, I should mention too that I’m also presenting on persuasive writing techniques for English teachers at a couple of Nelson Secondary sessions. Persuasive writing is pretty important in the Victorian Certificate of Education English course and, of course, is now included in NAPLAN (national testing). So that’s been keeping me busy too.

If you’re in Melbourne and you want to come along, details are here.

Read Full Post »

NAPLAN knows…

I started off all indignant when I ripped Miranda Devine’s latest piece of folksy wisdom out of the Herald-Sun on Thursday but in the end you just have to laugh at the dross that comes out of the conservative media’s best and brightest day after day as if someone is paying them to do it!

Devine’s latest take on the NAPLAN tests is as fine a piece of persuasive writing as you’ll find, resonating with power. Here’s a bit from the opening:

It is accountability time.

After failing the 20 per cent of children who leave school functionally illiterate, we finally see the truth.

Which students have sat through two years of boring lessons without learning to read and write? NAPLAN knows.

Which teachers are adding little value year on year to the students in their classroom? NAPLAN knows.

Which schools are failing to improve their students’ test results? NAPLAN knows.

NAPLAN knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Just like the shadow did! How do they think of this stuff. Has Devine been channeling 1930s pulp fiction? You be the judge!

 

Read Full Post »

NAPLAN’d Out

It’s been a big week, chock-full of NAPLAN testing, among other things. Three mornings of more paper-shuffling than you can poke a 2B pencil at.

And is it worth the effort? Mine, my team or the students? I doubt it. I’ve blogged about NAPLAN before: about teaching to the test, the new lows of league tables, and the fact that other places like England  have begun to reject the national testing agendas we’ve turned into an industry.

And, there’s plenty of arguments against going down the NY schools pathway that Julia Guillard has latched on to with such enthusiasm.  This SMH article described how testing has actually failed NY schools, or this City Journal article, Can NY clean up the testing mess? that describes Campbell’s law:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Or, as this National Times article put it:

The big question is why Australia would want to emulate a country like the US where academic performance standards are, on average, much lower and where educational opportunity for many children depends on the luck of a lottery draw.

Even Kevin Donnelly has changed his mind about this stuff, as he writes here in The Drum: and says, among other things:

• Testing has failed to raise standards in England or New York and is now seen as counter-productive. Diane Ravitch’s most recent book, The death and life of the great American school system, details the flaws with NY’s model of standardised testing and high-risk accountability.

According to the US national test (NAEP), NY’s results have flatlined. In the UK, notwithstanding national tests and league tables, standards have also failed to improve and the Rose Report, evaluating primary school curriculum in the UK, argues against an over-emphasis on one-off basic skills tests.

• The curriculum has been narrowed and the focus is on basic skills instead of higher order thinking. Subjects like music, art, physical education and history fall by the wayside as teachers and schools focus on drilling for literacy and numeracy tests.

• Schools and teachers are adopting suspicious ways to get better results – poor students are excluded from tests, weak students are told to stay at home, teachers cheat by helping students in the classroom.

• US and Australian test experts agree that standardised tests like NAPLAN are unreliable, invalid and cannot be trusted (it’s lies, damn lies and statistics).

I’ll leave the last word to some of the kids who sat the test this week. Yes, I know that re-tweeting is easy, but so is pretending you’re actually doing something about learning by giving every student who happens to be the same age in Australia exactly the same test.

Read Full Post »

Meanwhile, on another island…

Not sure what it is with my latest habit of titling my posts with old references to film and TV (the title here is from my old fave ‘Gilligan’s Island”) but it just seemed to fit.

Just as we are sitting the students down to NAPLAN testing, news from the old dart is that those tests are being boycotted for the very same reasons many teachers have reservations about NAPLAN here.

The BBC report said:

Many head teachers say that the tests damage children’s education because they encourage teachers to “teach to the test”, so that other subjects are squeezed out of the curriculum.

And the league tables, they say, humiliate schools and do not show what they and their pupils really achieve.

The industrial action is being taken by the National Association of Head Teachers and heads and deputies in the National Union of Teachers but members are free to stage the action or not.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the NAHT, said it was wrong that a whole school should be held to account by a set of tests taken by one year-group.

“Of course schools need to be held to account. But they need to be held to account for what every child is doing in the school and the breadth of the curriculum, not just narrowing it down to English and maths.”

and from the GUARDIAN:

In Camberley, nine primary and junior schools that are members of the Surrey Heath Confederation of Schools had pupils sit old papers.

In a letter to parents, they explained: “We have no objection to testing and assessing children, but firmly believe that this should be done at a time, in a place and in a manner that is right for the children and that testing should underpin teacher judgment, not override it. Our objection relates to the way the government uses the test data, much of which is flawed by inconsistent marking.”

David Harris, the headteacher of one of the schools, Ravenscote junior school, said: “Obviously the children and staff have prepared all year for the Sats and what we wanted to do was provide a solution. Our problem is not with the testing, the issue we have is how the results are used.

“The schools in our confederation are doing an amazing job with the children they’ve got. But they have children with different needs and from different social backgrounds, and Sats don’t appreciate those things.”

Secondary schools could get a better picture of the performance and needs of individual pupils in next year’s intake by talking to teachers and hearing their personal assessments than through Sats results, Harris added.

Meanwhile, on this island…

Read Full Post »

League tables reach new lows

The Australian newspaper today took the NAPLAN testing to league tables to new lows today when it published a list of the Top 100 Schools in Australia based on the NAPLAN results from last year. Just a couple of weeks before this  year’s students are due to sit their NAPLAN tests, the Australian upped the ante, following its News Limited stable-mate The Herald-Sun, who earlier published front page news on ‘How Your School Ranks‘. At the same as the AEU has proposed boycotting the forthcoming tests because of the dangers of league tables and the simplistic judgements that follow, the timing of this article is pretty much designed to whip up as much interest and frenzy as possible.

The Australian article opens:

MONEY still buys the best education in Australia, with elite schools in NSW and Victoria dominating a list of the nation’s top 100 schools prepared exclusively by The Weekend Australian.

Read Full Post »

Strike-breakers!!

It’s so silly it’s now almost funny. This week the Australian Education Union decided (for some pretty good reasons) to boycott the forthcoming NAPLAN national tests in literacy and numeracy because of the league tables which (inevitably) emerged from the publication of data on the MySchool site last year.

The response from the Minister for Education was to suggest that parents be brought in, effectively as strike-breakers, to supervise the tests. I’m not sure what the old shearer’s who helped form the Labor Party in the first place, would think about all this. Probably have a chuckle. Certainly most of the parents aren’t all that keen on the idea.

Here’s the AEU’s take on this. There’s a swag of other videos on the site. I can’t find the Gillard statement anywhere. I was going to blog about the growing scandal around the school funding, but enough it enough! I’d love to be talking about curriculum and learning but education is now pretty politicised in this country.

Read Full Post »

How your school ranks

Well you’ve got to say that the Herald-Sun delivers on its promises! This from out and about yesterday.

Read Full Post »

Rank schools, says the Herald-Sun

The Herald-Sun hasn’t waited long to get its teeth into the eduction debate about school achievement. The new MySchool website (which I blogged about late last year) was launched today, but it already doesn’t go far enough for the high standards of the Melbourne tabloid. I hope to talk more about this later, particularly Ms Gillard’s remarks that parents should ‘badger’ schools and teachers until they improve. Meanwhile,  I reprint today’s editorial in full below.

Rank schools to get results

THIS morning, subject to the vagaries of technology, parents will be given information to help them make one of the most important decisions in their lives: where to send their children to school.

Needless to say, it will also be one of the most important decisions in their children’s lives.

It comes as fees at private schools are increasing and more parents are considering whether to send their children to a public school.

But, cost aside, which school parents choose should be based on a range of priorities, which includes where a school ranks in academic performance.

The My School website will allow parents to make some comparisons between schools within their immediate area.

But it doesn’t go far enough. Many teachers and principals, as well as Education Minister Julia Gillard, think ranking schools will hurt underperforming schools.

The opposite is the case. Government and teachers must ensure these schools improve, not hide their inadequacies.

The argument that publishing so-called league tables will only stigmatise the poorer performing schools is a false one.

Comparing the nation’s schools would make the Government and education authorities accountable.

Parents themselves face an impossible task in forcing change at mediocre schools. They need to be able to point to the information provided by full disclosure of every school’s performance to demand improvement.

The information on the My School website today is a significant move in the right direction, but falls short of clearly ranking the nation’s 10,000 schools.

Read Full Post »

My School

It’s not written as a web 2.0 marketeer might put it; perhaps it would be “mySkoole”, lower case  in a nice pastel colour but this innocuous looking site will soon develop teeth. It’s the Federal Government’s answer to questions about transparency and accountability, and it’s a limited one word answer called ‘Tests’.  Look out for how the Herald-Sun translates this into league tables when it goes live. Oh, and Victoria will have one too.

My School

Read Full Post »

Teach to the test

Why is that our current governments, both state and federal, seem to look to the rest of the world for the very worst of educational practice? From NY to New Jersey the current government fad is accountability and transparency, but only in such a dumbed down way that we can use in a 6 second TV sound-bite.

This time round the State Government in Victoria is looking to link teacher pay with student performance in national tests for literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN). Students results would form part of a ‘scorecard’ (we all understand what a scorecard is, right?) that might lead to up to $7000 in bonus payments.

What could happen; teaching to the tests? (which are narrow, shallow and statistically dubious)

Full article is in the AGE HERE

Read Full Post »