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! [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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How your school ranks

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

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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States squabbling over test benchmarks

It had to happen of course; that the new spirit of national cooperation and cooperative revolution would get stickier and trickier when it got down to the details. Like the NAPLAN (National Asessment of  Literacy and Numeracy) benchmarks and where they might be placed. Last week the Herald-Sun gave some glimpse of that behind the scenes [...]

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