will not meet the challenges we face now.’ (Robinson, 2015)
NAPLAN suits politicians and administrators for whom it is expedient to make sweeping generalisations about the education system, students or teachers to justify spending or cuts to spending.
Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg recently spoke of the problems of standardised testing in Australia: ‘… wherever standardised tests are running the show it narrows the curriculum and it kind of changes the whole role and meaning of going to school from general useful learning into doing well in two or three subjects. And it often makes teaching and learning very boring when the purpose is to figure out the right answer to a test.’ (Pasi Sahlberg, 2018)
The NAPLAN test, a supposed ‘snapshot’ of the entire country’s students in the same week, does little to encourage hard work and diligence in students. Instead it confronts them with challenges for which they have not had the opportunity to prepare. They do not know which elements of mathematics, English or science will be tested (although this does not prevent the detailed study of material like that contained in previous NAPLAN tests). Essentially this sends the message that, while it may identify ‘naturally talented’ students, nothing else—determination, persistence, grit, the ‘growth mindset’ and so on—matters.
The modern roots of the standards system lie with US President George W. Bush and his 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. It supported standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and measurable goals could improve individual outcomes in education. The Act required US states to develop assessments in basic skills. To receive federal school funding, states had to give these assessments to all students at select grade levels. This involved all students sitting a test each year.
Bush’s unpopular program was followed in 2010 by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program, essentially doubling down on the same shaky ideas, as if somehow tightening up the components could alter the outcomes. It increased the stress on testing, meaning that now not only would schools and governments be held accountable for results, but teachers could be given a bonus for ‘excellent’ results or even fired if students’ results were not deemed satisfactory. This unleashed a witch-hunt-like fervour for attacking teachers (American teachers are already among the most poorly remunerated in the developed world), epitomised by a Newsweek cover story declaring: ‘We must fire bad teachers’.
GERM WARFARE
Sahlberg has dubbed this mania for standardisation the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM for short) and is obviously dedicated to wiping out what he regards as a menace to the world’s educational wellbeing. Of course, if you take the fetish for more testing, more standardisation and study theory to its extreme, good test results can be obtained, as South Korea, with one of the world’s highest secondary-school graduation rates, has discovered. School there starts at eight in the morning and continues until nine in the evening, when most students head to private tutoring academies known as hagwons for an hour or two before going to bed and repeating it all the following day (a law has been passed limiting the hours hagwons can operate until no later than 11pm; and a dedicated police squad regularly raids hagwons suspected of breaking this law). Hagwon teachers can earn enormous salaries and it is common for families to go into debt paying fees for this private tuition. The best known of these, Andrew Kim, takes in a whopping US$4 million a year lecturing to some 150,000 students online at the equivalent of US$3.50 an hour, in addition to writing hundreds of books, textbooks and workbooks.
‘In Korea, your education can be reduced to a number,’ a South Korean student told Amanda Ripley while she was researching her book The Smartest Kids in the World. ‘If your number is good, you have a good future.’4
Students absolutely loathe the system (although they seem to loathe the mainstream education system even more), possibly because the teachers in the latter are under great pressure to maintain student numbers—indeed their entire wage depends on it—so they administer a perpetual series of annual tests, the results of which determine entrance into the top universities, thus ensuring success in career and later life. Many believe hagwons are the key to South Korea’s vaunted PISA scores. The world’s highest-paid teacher, Andrew Kim voices great discomfort at the inequity of the system, despite profiting immensely from it himself.
‘I don’t think this is the ideal way,’ he told Ripley. ‘This leads to a vicious cycle of poor families passing on poverty to their children.’ He added that, in his opinion, Finland’s was a much better model to follow.
Kim said he planned to work in teacher training from 2017 (Ripley’s book was published in 2013) and to improve the mainstream system for his then 6-year-old son. Ripley said that she didn’t find anyone, including the head of the South Korean education system, who thought they had a good system in place, despite the country’s impressive PISA results.
The case of a teenage student named Ji who murdered his mother to prevent her attending a parent-teacher night and seeing his results (which were actually quite good, but she was incredibly demanding) drew attention to this system, and much public sympathy for Ji from many South Koreans who understood the pressures a student faces in that country. (Ripley, 2013)
India recently experienced a number of suicides for the same reasons: ‘TWENTY students have died by suicide in India this past week after the Board of Intermediate Education (BIE) announced their exam scores. The Khaleej Times reports the exams have been marked in controversy after there were discrepancies in the results.’ Nearly 1 million students took the exams between February and March, and nearly 350,000 failed, causing widespread protests from parents, student groups and political parties. One student named Sirisha failed biology and set herself on fire at her home in the Narayanpet district on Saturday after her parents went out to the fields, according to the Khaleej Times. On Thursday, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao ordered the recounting and re-verification of the answer sheets of all students who failed and urged them not to die by suicide, adding failing the tests didn’t mean the end of their lives. (David Aaro, 2019)
The pressure to perform academically is also high in Japan, with reports that in 2014, for the first time, the most common cause of death of Japanese aged 10 to 19 was suicide.
According to the cabinet office, September 1 is historically the day when the largest number of children under 18 take their own lives. Of the 18,048 children who killed themselves between 1972 and 2013, on average 92 did so on August 31, spiking to 131 on September 1 and reverting to 94 on September 2. September 1 is the start date for the second semester of the school year. In addition to the competitive nature of Japanese education and society in general, ‘The bigger issue is the competitive society where you have to beat your own friends’.
Sahlberg has a very different take on this type of competition for grades: ‘Many people think that in today’s highly competitive and fast-changing era, children need to learn how to compete and become winners. However, my point is the opposite. The best way for students to adapt to competition and change is to teach them to cooperate, because in such a complex and ever-changing environment, creativity and adventurousness are more necessary, and these qualities can be nurtured and born only in an environment that encourages cooperation. So as an educator, I would not encourage students to study for the sake of competition and to win. On the contrary, I want to give them a relaxed and cooperative environment so that they will have the precious qualities and opportunities to make mistakes as well that they need to face challenges in the future.’ (Sahlberg, https://pasisahlberg.com, 2018)
Pasi Sahlberg is aware of the stress problem related to Australia’s standardised NAPLAN tests: ‘I heard some teachers telling how children are experiencing stress-related crying, vomiting and sleeplessness over the high-stakes standardised tests.’
In September 2018 news surfaced at a government inquiry of a Canberra fifth-grade student attempting to take his own life during a NAPLAN test. Reports detailed how Shane Gorman, the principal of Wanniassa High School in the capital’s south, said a teacher had found the student attempting suicide in the schoolground after walking out of class during a NAPLAN test.
‘People