The latest NAPLAN school test results are out and suggest that overall literacy and numeracy skills of Australian students have stalled.
According to these results, national reading and numeracy scores increased by just 0.4% and 1.3% respectively across all year levels between 2013 and 2016, whereas writing scores dropped marginally by 0.2%.
The poor results has prompted federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, to call for changes in the way that school funding is allocated. From The Guardian:
“Today’s results show that, despite significant funding growth, we are not getting sufficient improvements in student outcomes,” Birmingham said.
“This Naplan data clearly shows that while strong levels of investment in schools are important, it’s more important to ensure that funding is being used on initiatives proven to boost student results”…
Meanwhile, federal school funding had increased by 23% in the same three-year period, Birmingham said. The results meant more needed to be done to ensure funding allocated to schools was being used effectively, he said, and that teacher training was improved.
Back in April, Birmingham used “incredibly flimsy evidence” to justify not proceeding with agreed Gonski funding increases to public schools, claiming that there was no correlation between funding and school results.
The Grattan Institute’s, Peter Goss has hit back, claiming that the NAPLAN data did not provide an accurate picture of the impact of funding on the performance of schools:
“The only real way to do a high-level analysis on the impact of funding on performance is to look at schools that have had a boost in funding over time and see whether that has boosted their results when spent well, or to compare schools from similar backgrounds but with different levels of funding and to see whether those that are better-funded are doing better in comparison,” he said.
“Those analyses are both worth doing, but neither approach has really been done. However, international evidence is that for disadvantaged schools, increased funding can make a real difference just on its own.”
I am skeptical of national testing like NAPLAN, as it creates incentives to “juke the stats”, as illustrated brilliantly on HBO’s The Wire in Season 4 (watch this short clip).
A few years back, lecturers Arathi Sriprakash and Tony Loughland from the University of Sydney also penned a harsh rebuke of NAPLAN in The Conversation, claiming that the test “severely narrows the school curriculum, compounds disadvantage and creates undue anxieties for young students”, as well as a pre-occuption with scoring well in the test above all else:
When schooling is focused so heavily on preparing for high-stakes tests, it is not surprising that teachers have to resort to “defensive pedagogies” – teaching strategies that ensure good examination results. This is made worse by relentless preoccupations with “teacher effectiveness”, where performance is measured by student outcomes. Teachers do more than teach to the test, but the scope for this is diminished under high-stakes scrutiny.
With national testing there’s the inherent risk that children will be taught the test so that the school/teachers look better, rather than actually improving children’s education.
Making NAPLAN results a key determinant of school funding certainly gives rise to such perverse incentives.
