Ian’s blogomatic

I spent Wednesday at the Department’s ‘Vacation School’ in a session with Gavin Morris on the School Improvement and Accountability Framework. This could have been a pretty dry subject but Gavin put a lot of effort into connecting it with frontline teaching, and revealed his passion for government education in the process. My particular interest in this topic is that I’m reading the lay of the land for the new political future of public school teaching, and I’m pretty sure it is league tables and assessment of schools purely on standardised test results. This push is just too tempting for politicians.

My issue with it is that the test results to not encompass all of the things that schools do, or at least should do. There is no NAPLAN result for a school where the students and teachers treat each other with respect, no NAPLAN result for a school where a kid picks up a piece of rubbish that is not theirs and no NAPLAN result for a school where people look out for each other. If we use standardised test results to judge schools and teachers I have no doubt we will get better test scores, I’m just not sure if that will indicate more successful students or better scores.

I am happy that an increased emphasis on testing is showing that our standards have slipped because this matches my personal view. Maths books written for year seven in the 1970’s have suitable content for high school students now. Where the blame for this lies is an interesting question, and my first guess is Curriculum Framework, with it’s emphasis on developmental progress rather than achievement levels, is the major suspect. The lack of teacher support embodied in the Framework (whereby every teacher in the state have to write their own syllabus each year) is another likely factor.

I’m also happy that the tests are soundly written, at least in my mathematics area. The question of whether they are valid is a little more complex. They are written against someone’s idea of what maths should be taught rather than the WA curriculum, however there is a massive overlap so this is not a particular concern. Presumably as the National Curriculum and supporting documents are rolled out there will be a prefect match of curriculum and test content. One hopes that the WA DET exemplars, that are to be used for grading now levels are gone, are aligned with the National Curriculum so they don’t have to be re-re-invented.

The session looked at the high-level analysis tools embodied in Schools Online (part of the DET’s public web and intranet). These are the tools administrators can use to assess teaching if they don’t want to walk into classrooms. According to Gavin, teachers should be allowed to use these tools, but the access needs to be granted by line managers. We discussed several distributions of student results comparing a schools performance against the state results and against “like” schools. The like schools are chosen by the schools Socio-Economic index which takes into account single-parentness, parent occupation etc and is a good indicator of school performance. Some attendees seemed concerned that remoteness or school size were not taken into account, but according to Gavin these turn out to not be major factors in school performance.

I’m glad I did this course. Gavin was a persuasive presenter discussing a topic of considerable interest to me. It is always good the meet people from Central Office that are passionate about teaching and it’s importance and I’ve gained some insights into the forces outside my classroom that will affect my students and teaching over the next few years.