NAPLAN: teachers’ union enlists US academic in bid to scrap test

The NSW teachers’ union has recruited a prominent US academic to critique NAPLAN, in a bid to have it scrapped.

NSW Teachers Federation president Maurie Mulheron.

The NAPLAN test has come under renewed attack by the powerful NSW teachers’ union, which has recruited a prominent US education academic to critique the assessment program in a bid to have it scrapped ahead of the upcoming federal election.

Amid calls by some states for the national literacy and numeracy test to be reviewed, the NSW Teachers’ Federation has seized upon stagnating student results to campaign for an overhaul.

The union, which represents 67,000 teachers across the state, has commissioned Massachusetts Institute of Technology ­director Les Perelman to write a report comparing NAPLAN with tests in other jurisdictions, with the aim of “dismantling the existing regime” and replacing it with alternative assessments that “respect teacher judgment, connect to the curriculum and … benefit all students and school communities”.

NSW Teachers Federation president Maurie Mulheron told The Australian that Dr Perelman — who was last year hired by the union to critique a controversial plan for automated essay scoring, or robot marking, of the test — ­believed NAPLAN to be one of the worst tests he’d come across.

He declined to say how much Dr Perelman was being paid. “NAPLAN is an unsophisticated, expensive and imprecise test ... devised by politicians who deliberately set out to exploit ­parents’ concerns and fears about schooling,” Mr Mulheron said. “Ten years on and there’s been no improvement in student’s results.”

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which administers the test and the MySchool website that publishes the results, dismissed the union’s criticism as being “unfounded” and “disappointing”.

ACARA president Steven Schwartz said blaming NAPLAN for stagnating results was like “blaming the thermometer for a fever”. “What NAPLAN has done is give us a national report card that tells us where education is going that can also be used to identify pockets of really good practice,” he said.

“It’s also been very useful in that it measures ­students at grades 3, 5 ,7 and 9 so we can look at the growth that’s ­occurring and see which schools are adding value to the students.”

The latest NAPLAN figures released last August, showed little improvement in literacy and numeracy since the test was introduced under Julia Gillard’s Labor government a decade ago. In some categories, such as writing, skills have reversed.

Centre for Independent Studies senior research fellow Jennifer Buckingham said it would be a shame to lose NAPLAN, which “provides a level of information we didn’t have before”: “No assessment is ever going to improve standards or outcomes — it’s how we use the data that matters.”

Education ministers from NSW, South Australia and Queensland have suggested a review of the test could be on the cards. But it is understood that proposals for a review were rejected by the Education Council last year. Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham yesterday backed NAPLAN. “What parents tell me is they want to see more information on student and school performance, not less,” he said.