By faithadmin
I have written similar pieces to this in the past, so bear with me if you have read this before. At this time of year I begin to become a little frustrated, and perhaps start to feel professionally compromised. What about? Good question. About how our field of service, our industry, education, has become compromised in our country due to the over emphasis on standardised testing and the imminent league tables and articles that will inevitably follow in the papers and online.
Don’t get me wrong we will do okay. As well as expected, probably a little better.
Our students are currently completing NAPLAN tests, soon enough the papers will be full of league tables and ranks of which school came what position in the state. Faith will again sit somewhere in the top 20% to 30% as we usually do. We will land above the state averages and right in where you would expect us to sit on those tables given our demographics.
And that is exactly what frustrates me. In my opinion NAPLAN is a demographic study more than it is about the quality of schooling.
Our little local island state schools, where some of the poorest and most marginalised children in our community live with their welfare dependent families, will come right at the bottom, way down. It would be easy to think that their principal and their teachers are not very good at their jobs because their schools ranked so low.
Similarly, the local high-fee, selective enrolment private schools will land way up the top, they must be so good at their jobs, so much better than the hard-working state teachers on our local islands. The imminent commentary around these tests is very misleading. As I said above, I am frustrated as a leader in an industry that is so misrepresented by the publication of league tables and school rankings that will flow from the NAPLAN process. Governments should be paying more attention, the media more responsible.
Principals from high performing schools should use this day to cast a light on this blight on our country.
But they won’t, they will revel in it because they can, they will use it to encourage their kids, their teachers and their communities. I doubt they will use the opportunity to make a comment about the hard work and improvement of the teacher of the welfare kid who is giving so much of herself for a child that goes home to a dysfunctional home, in a dysfunctional suburb, who is already on a pathway to a life of struggle.
In my opinion NAPLAN data is largely irrelevant and a relic of a bygone era. NAPLAN became effectively useless the day the My School Website launched, because some schools immediately manipulated their participation to skew their public data. As a comparative tool, it has ceased to be little more than average.
Shane Altmann
Principal