The leadership team at my current school was kind enough to book a table of 10 for a resent presentation by the Australian College of Educators. It was at the Waterview Convention Centre at Homebush, which was very nice, and all the bigwigs, including some of those from CEO were there, as well, which wasn’t.

It was meant to be about the national curriculum and the relationship between the values and the national curriculum but the presenter, Professor Deakin Crick from the UK, didn’t really talk about that.

She began by briefly listing the curriculum values that the national curriculum will be based on – critical thinking, creativity etc etc, and then compared them (again, very briefly) with the values that other countries have adopted, like the OECD, or the UK, or the European Council, suggesting that there was more in common between them than there was differences. All pretty interesting stuff; one thing that Professor Deakin Crick did say that stuck with me was that she couldn’t identify any theoretical basis for these values of the national curriculum; rather it just seemed a random grab bag of what should be important in schools.

Professor Deakin Crick then went on to explain what she thought was important in education; she basically gave us a potted history of her research, which had 2 main factors (at least as I understood it.) The first factor was the dimensions of learning, or learning power dimensions. These are thinks like making meaning, creativity, resilience, critical curiousity and a number of others that are ways that Deakin Crick suggests we can encourage young people to not only be less passive in their learning, but to also become lifelong learning. Essentially, Crick’s research suggested that, for a lot of students, their ‘learning power’ decreased as their schooling progressed, which is pretty concerning.

The second part of Crick’s presentation focused on using narration as a central metaphor for curriculum delivery and interpretation; essentially, telling stories to learn. She gave us a number of examples, from both Australia and the UK, where students created stories with animals based on the learning power dimensions; for example, the platypus was meaning-making, or the wedge-tailed eagle was strategic awareness or something similar. The reason this metaphor worked and allowed students to develop these learning dimensions was because it allowed them to both tell their story and also to address complex issues through a relatively simple medium. I was especially captivated by the Taronga Breakout story from students in the Hunter Valley.

However, at the end of the evening, I was still left with a sense of despair; for all the rhetoric of grass-roots change and bottom-up support in the face of the authoritarian top-down approach, I personally am struggling to see  a way we, as teachers, can change the system. Decisions already seem to be made; essentially, the curriculum is signed, sealed and delivered, although I am sure there will be a few changes after the consultation process to prove that policy-makers listened to teachers.

It’s because I’ve seen it all before, and I don’t have any faith in pollies at the moment. I’m struggling with where to go to from here…

*fading muttering about neoliberal ideology and capitalist hegemonies*

But I’ll be back, with a new plan. As soon as I work it out…

I’ve got a friend, who I deeply respect for her wisdom and intelligence, not to mention the amount of experience she has had. Anyway, she was talking to me about all the changes that we’re currently seeing in education. She said, (and I might be paraphrasing a touch here), ‘Keith, when you’ve been in education as long as I have, and I’ve been in education a long time, you get to see things come around again – and I ‘m not talking once or twice, but even three times!’

She was talking, in this particular instance, about the ideas revolving around integrated curricula; that is, when two or more subjects are taught together in cross curricular units, perhaps linked thematically. For example, you might teach a unit called ‘Healthy Living’, and mix Food Technology alongside PD/H/PE.

Anyway, despite all the bluff and bluster coming from certain sources about how vital and important this new ‘innovation’ is, my friend reckons she’s seen it at least 3 times in the past. Added to that, the current Parramatta Diocesan obsession with agile learning spaces is hardly new, either; I’ve got an article from 1950 talking about why it would be great to employ flexible learning spaces. The difference? I couldn’t spot one.

This got me thinking though… what about technology? Are we seeing something new here with Web 2.0 technology, or is it just a different version of the new thing? For example, let’s think about making movies in class – great activity, right? Is it something that requires the current level of technology, or has there always been the possibility of making movies?

Are the laptops of today just the calculators of yesterday?

Well, it’s finally here. Unless you were living in a cave, I’m sure you noticed that this week saw the release of the Australian National Curriculum. Of course, it’s only a matter of time until I have newspapers banging on my door, asking for my opinion (ha ha), so I thought I’d share it with you first, for free.

And if you’d like to see the information about the curriculum, here’s a link.

Let’s break down my comments into a list:

• I like the idea of a national curriculum. I repeat, the idea. In countries that I’ve worked in, especially the UK, the reality is quite a bit different. The national curriculum in the UK is incredibly prescriptive; it does little to encourage innovation or critical thinking or even the development of skills, social or otherwise. Instead the emphasis is on an overwhelming amount of content – at the expense of skills, values and context. It hasn’t been a great success, despite what the pollies might say. Check out the UKs PISA scores.
• Secondly, take a leaf out the Discovering Democracy project – the last big government sponsored initiative in education. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on creating pretty resources and great little websites because, if you don’t have the support and understanding of the people who actually have to deliver the material, it is guaranteed to be a miserable failure.
• Time, time, time. This has been released now, in March, for implementation in February 2011. Let’s say consultation takes 3 months. That means in June or July, we should get the final version. That leaves very little time for staff to redevelop their lessons and unit plans. Personally, I can’t see it happening.
• Citizenship education? Where has that gone? I mean, its there in the national goals for schooling, but there’s precious little mention of it in the draft documentation.

Just a few immediate thoughts.

More to come later, after further examination.

I’m not sure this is related, but I certainly think that it’s appropriate at the current time.

I recently heard that the Rock Eisteddfod (and the JRock program) look like they might be canceled, due to a lack of funds. I heard about this on Channel 7 News, and I haven’t found anything on the ‘net or in the press, but I still think it’s worth a mention. Although this is being cancelled due to a lack of sponsorship money, I can imagine a future where these kinds of activities don’t exist at all – simply because school has become so focused on the NAPLAN testing agenda.

Let’s think about this for a moment: if, as a principal, you had to choose between directing your staff to spend time preparing students for NAPLAN or for the Rock Eisteddfod, which would you choose? Especially considering that, while, at best, you might get a bit of local press coverage for the Eisteddfod, your success or failure will be trumpeted in much-publicised detail on the myschool website.

Hmm? Not a hard question, I imagine.

I know there are principals and teachers out there who will say, ‘Be damned to these ridiculous dictates of testing. We will have an Eistedfodd team, and, by Jove, our parents will know us for the good school we are!’ But I think those kind of educational professionals will soon become few and far between.

Of course, it won’t stop with just an Eisteddfod. Excursions will go. Extracurricular activities will go. Enrichment activities will go. Personal, social, moral education will go.

You’ve been warned.

By Justin Ballis
A leaked Victorian Department of Education memo, revealed by two
newspapers this morning, has made a lie of official denials that
publication of data from the My School website will lead to the
narrowing of the curriculum and “suck the oxygen” out of primary school
classrooms.

The Australian reports that the memo directs teachers to “explicitly
teach” to the NAPLAN tests in order to improve overall literacy and
numeracy results in Victoria. This vindicates Federation warnings that
the publication of NAPLAN data would push Australia towards replicating
the failed English experiment with league tables.

The memo also formalises what President Bob Lipscombe feared would be
teachers’ natural reaction to being unfairly ranked by test results.

“Teachers aren’t fools. And if they are going to be judged by such
measures, as inappropriate as it is, you’re going to see [them]
teaching to the test,” he said of league tables. “You’ll see the very
things that they warned against in England, and most recently warned
against by Dr Ken Boston, former Director-General of Education in NSW.

“The very man who was previously in charge of education in this state
warned us not to go down the pathway they’ve followed in England. The
person who told us that in England up to 70 per cent of teachers’ time,
up to 70 per cent of students’ time – in the time leading up to the
test in England – is now spent coaching to the test.

“The very man who warned us that drama, music, art, excursions all
suffered enormously in the English education system as a result of the
distortions that occurred around league tables.”

According to The Australian, which obtained a copy of the memo, the
directive tells principals to appoint a NAPLAN coordinator and offers a
“blueprint for classroom approaches” that includes coaching skills for
passing the tests such as learning the “test question vocabulary” and
“skim and scan”.

The memo was emailed to all school principals in the Loddon-Mallee
region of Victoria two days before the launch of the MySchool website.

“We are now heading down the pathway that’s been followed in England,
where they’ve had league tables for the last two decades,” Lipscombe
said. “Despite those league tables being in place…there has been no
significant improvement in student outcomes. In fact, if you look at
the international measure of student assessment, Australia ranks well
above England in those measures.”

Boston, the former chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum
Authority in England, has been an unexpected ally of opponents to
league tables. “Despite their formal qualifications, many young people
[in England] are…deficient in the soft skills that form an essential
component of each individual’s human capital, some of them to the
extent that they are in fact unemployable,” Boston wrote in Britain’s
The Sunday Times last year.

“The present problem is not the result of inadequacies in the primary
curricul…The real problem is that teachers and schools aren’t able to
get on with teaching it. That is because the government’s approach to
the key-stage tests has sucked the oxygen from the classrooms of
primary schools.”

Lipscombe added: “It’s a sad day when we decide that that’s the example
we wish to follow, that’s the pathway we wish to go along. We are very
concerned now that we are going to see distortion of what’s taught in
our schools.”

The Victorian memo indicates that at least one state Education
Department is determined to repeat England’s mistake.

So the teacher bashing begins. I’ve been monitoring the debate pretty closely, and I’m afraid to state that I think the weight of argument is starting to swing slowly towards the pro-myschool people. Of course, as part of that, everybody who’s got an interest in education – which is pretty much anybody who ever went to school – will start to run down teachers. I’ve heard it before – ‘too many holidays’, ‘glorified babysitters’, only do it for the ‘easy lifestyle.’

The arguments of the pro-myschool camp seem to boil down to a simple statement: ‘Any information is good, even when it’s bad.’ I don’t think I need to point out the errors in that statement, but that’s certainly the way Janet Albrechtson presented it in the the Australian in an article entitled: Carry on with this revolution, Julia.Although I agree that its amazing such a partisan supporter of the liberal party should dare to praise a member of the left, the article was long on emotive arguments and short on facts. Desperately short on facts.

I’m sorry, Janet, but you’ve missed the point – again. This argument, despite what you think, is not about the unions protecting poor teachers. It’s about the fact that large scale testing has failed to improve the educational outcomes of students in almost every other theatre in which it has been introduced. Do your research – you’ll find out that increased testing and accountability in the US – also known as the No Child Left Behind policy has not improved results. Instead, some people think that children have shown less progress since the introduction than before. It’s a similar story in the UK – who’ve recently moved to abandoning the SATS for 14 year olds, because they’ve realised that large scale testing doesn’t work – and it certainly doesn’t increase accountability.

And even more importantly, tests like NAPLAN are specifically not designed to assess teacher accountability – or even the quality of the school. I thought most people would be able to work this out, simply by looking at the disclaimers on the mySchool website, which suggests that there is an error of more than 30 points in each of the scores! So even though the information is not valid, parents are going to use it to compare schools and make judgements on respective schools. I’m all for parents having choice, but I think this choice should be based on the correct data, not pseudo-data cobbled together by the government in a cynical exercise to win votes, and not really in the best interests of the students or their parents.

For further information, Janet, I suggest you examine the work of Professor Wu, who works at Melbourne University and is an expert in Large Scale Testing. Strangely enough, she has been explaining since last year that Naplan should not be used in precisely the way that it has been used.

And that’s before we even begin to examine the anomalies of the NAPLAN data gathering system itself. Let me give you an example. At a primary school next door to the high school I was teaching at, the principal would only enroll students who were 5 already into kindergarten. Then, when NAPLAN testing time came, he would ensure that the test was only given to the highest performing students. The parents of other students were browbeaten or ‘encouraged’ to not allow their students to take the tests. Is this fair? Do you think he’s the only one? How long before every principal is doing this? Again, I’ve seen it happen in schools in the UK.

I said it before, and I will say it again. This is not an argument about good teachers and bad teachers, good schools and bad schools. This is an argument about presenting all the facts, rather than mislabelling dodgy data as facts. As someone far wiser than me once said, ‘Let’s not confuse data that is easy to measure with data that is important to measure.’

It’s been pretty hard to miss all the coverage of the MySchool Website that Julia Gillard and the Labor Party have been promoting. In case you have missed it, here’s a brief summary, from the Australian:Justine Ferrari in the Australian.

In summary, it’s basically a way for parents to compare the schools they are sending their children to with schools that are supposedly similar, and therefore to establish which school they should send their children to.

Here’s some of the commentary from the papers:Ferrari, again, Ben Jensen and Joel Klein
I’ve got a few issues, but let’s start off with the most obvious one. Julia Gillard thinks this is a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a card-carrying member of the Australian Labor Party, and I have immense respect for Julia Gillard, and especially the work she undertook dismantling Work Choices. But, and here’s the crucial difference, Work Choices was essentially an industrial relations issue – which, as an industrial relations lawyer, she was more than qualified to do. But since she left Unley High School upon graduation in 1978, Gillard has had nothing to do with schools. She’s not a teacher. She doesn’t hold a degree in education. Her only qualification that explains why she is capable of making these decisions is the fact that she’s the minister for education (and everything else, I think…)

Having taken that into account, let’s consider what this might actually happen: firstly, it will be very difficult to actually compare schools in the local area – rather, you will probably compare schools in different areas because myschool has judged that they are ‘similar’ schools, so I question the value of it for parents. Even if this is possible, what will happen, I imagine, is that there will be a rush to perceived ‘good’ schools in the area – which means ‘bad’ schools will become understaffed, underfunded and eventually closed down, which will mean that these students will then have to go to ‘good’ schools, which will end up in them becoming ‘bad’ schools – vicious cycle anyone?

And then you have to think about what this might mean in the future. In England, it meant OfSTED, which meant inspectors visiting schools and assessing whether schools were satisfactory or inadequate, based simply on a few observed lessons and reading the paperwork. This hasn’t lead to any sustained improvement in results and now OfSTED is failing its inspections: OfSTED fails Inspections.

It’s easy to shoot holes in this solution. It is harder, however, to think of solutions, but here’s one. It’s a fact that better trained teachers mean better achieving students. In some Scandinavian countries, teachers need a master’s degree before they can even start teaching! Look at their results in international tests. I believe they get paid better, on comparison, too…

It’s a thought.