Last night I sat down and watched Waiting for Superman a documentary looking at the state of US public education and the effect of what they termed ‘drop out factories’ on the system. Then this morning I read this about how we don’t blame soldiers for losing a war, we arm them with better weapons and training (they bring up the impending boomer-mass retirement that we’ve been threatened with too. I’m yet to see it. All it’s done here is create what seems to be a mass of trained teachers who can’t find work).
It seems oddly fitting now to have Ms Gillard announce a new “performance based pay” scheme just after I’ve been reading and watching about the very same things. I’ve been teaching for 4 and a bit years now, and I feel like I’m one of the few teachers who support financial incentives for good teachers. I do. Shocking I know. The biggest issue I have with the whole concept, however, is the same issues I had with Waiting for Superman. It made the overly simplistic solution at the end of the film that to create better schools is that teachers need to be better (and should be rewarded for being better), and how do we measure how awesome a teacher is? Why, standardised tests of course.
Proficiency in reading, proficiency in maths and proficiency in Science measured against some decided average or benchmark, tested every second year. That’s how we judge a good teacher and a good school. WfS decided that the Charter schools were the best they had as they had the most consistently high or improving results with kids from backgrounds that otherwise not have achieved these results. What are charter schools? Funded by the state, but independently controlled schools that appear to be gearing kids solely towards entrance in to College. Because after all, you can’t get a good job and live the American dream without going to college (have they read any of the higher-education ‘bubble about to burst’ stuff though?). Charter schools push kids to do well on tests. The tests that will allow them to take the courses they need to get into a good college that will give them the best scores on the standardised tests. They have longer hours and from the look of it, more emphasis on testing and being successful at these tests.
And then there’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy) that we have. NAPLAN are carried out every 2 years at grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. The kids sit them in May and teachers get the results in October, if you’re lucky and the school tells you about them, or lets you access a copy of the results (and more helpfully gives you some kind of training into reading the immense number of graphs and box-and-whiskers that you can access). I taught year 7 maths for 4 years, and NAPLAN usually falls at the start of term 2. That’s right, I’ve had the kids for 9 weeks after they’ve come from primary school. Usually they’ve already been tested with a number of other tests (On Demand, the electronic, adaptable tests as well as a number of written tests). We’ve covered a bit of Number and have spent time figuring out learning styles and classroom management. Then you spend a couple of weeks preparing for NAPLAN if the term isn’t too interrupted. And this test is going to form some kind of basis for something? How can it assess my teaching skills if I haven’t had the kid for more than a term? How can it help me identify a kid at risk if I don’t get the results til 6 months later? But that is going to form at least part of the ‘performance based pay’ bonuses that are going to be introduced.
I don’t know if they are going to emphasise improvement from one NAPLAN to the next or just compare it with the national or state averages. Either way I disagree with its use in those ways. It can’t really be used to assess the kid’s progress in the school because we all know that in individual teacher has a massive impact. I could be a great teacher in Year 7, give them lots of individual attention and they make massive steps from after NAPLAN to the end of year 7, but then go on to have a teacher they don’t get on with in Year 8 and go ‘backwards’ by the time they get to NAPLAN year 9? And how many kids take a test that they do every second year seriously? They know they won’t see the results for months and don’t see any established links to the content being covered in class at the moment. If we’re comparing with averages it again makes it unfair for teachers in schools that have high-ESL or NESB as they’re coming in below the state average. Who cares if I taught Cindy her times tables in one term and gave her the mathematical confidence that she can now approach algebra and measurement with confidence after coming into the class at the start of the year with a complete distaste for the subject. She didn’t make progress on a standardised test, I’m obviously not worth anything.
A teachers worth is measured by more than just one cohorts performance on a couple of standardised tests. A schools culture is more than a series of numbers and shaded boxes on a website. Sticking my head into a Chinese class next door to have a kid tell me that I’m the coolest teacher at the school. Having kids come up to me in the yard to tell me that they miss my classes. Receiving letters from past students telling me that they were glad that they took my senior class because I exposed them to more than just the Study Design. That I helped shape their career path. That I’m the only one they feel comfortable talking to. That I’m the only adult in their lives to ever tell them that they are good at something, that they can be something, that they matter. These are the reasons I teach (and maybe why i should be rewarded). None of which can be measured by a standardised test.
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