My School sheds a welcome light

BEFORE NAPLAN and My School were introduced by the federal government, state departments of education routinely collected data on student and school performance.

In those days, only a few privileged insiders were allowed access to this information. Parents and the public were kept in the dark.

Yesterday, an inquiry into NAPLAN and My School was announced due to claims of negative impacts. These are some of the most common questions and concerns.

Why not just test a sample of students to measure standards? One of the best aspects of NAPLAN is that it finally provides all parents with an objective assessment of their child's literacy and numeracy skills, not just in the context of their class or school, but against clear standards.

Do the tests tell teachers anything they don't know? In an ideal world, no, but objective information is helpful. The usefulness of NAPLAN as a diagnostic test has been criticised because of the delay in providing data. The real value for teachers is not in the individual results, but in the cohort results. Schools look at cohort performance on each question and identify areas of strength and weakness in teaching.

Why test only "narrow" skills like literacy and numeracy? These are the fundamental skills of education that unlock the rest of the curriculum.

Extensive national testing in other areas is unnecessary. Individual schools can certainly choose to test more, though.

Why not test students every year? Arguably, a brief Year 1 test of key concepts would be useful, but otherwise the current regime of three days of testing every two years is sufficient. Again, schools can administer their own tests in other years.

Why publish the results? It is undeniably wrong not to publish the results. If governments gather important information about schools and students, it should be available to everyone. The My School site simply gives parents easy access.

NAPLAN results could be published in school annual reports instead, but this is not materially different from putting all the data in one place; it just makes parents work harder to get it.

Why not just publish the gains made between testing years, rather than the mean scores? Publishing mean scores, gain scores and score distribution gives a better picture of school performance. There is a "ceiling effect" whereby the consistently high-achieving schools would look like poor performers if gain scores alone were published.

Conversely, low-performing schools could have a decent gain score, but still be below acceptable standards.

Do the tests "make" teachers "teach to the test" or even cheat? Teaching to the test is not always bad, if the test is a good one. Some preparation is also necessary. Few Year 3 students would have been in a testing situation before. It is certainly problematic if schools are spending too much time on NAPLAN preparation, but parents should be aware of this and raise it with the school.

The claim that tests "cause" cheating is as valid as saying shops "cause" stealing.

What about anxiety among students and teachers? There is anecdotal evidence and some survey data of teachers saying that students find the tests stressful. The extent and impact of this is not at all conclusive, nor is the cause - tests, teachers or parents.

Is NAPLAN a "high-stakes" test? Not by the usual definitions, so international comparisons are contentious. NAPLAN results do not determine teacher pay or promotion, do not influence student retention decisions and do not attract sanctions of any kind. School funding has been positively affected through National Partnership grants to low-performing schools.

The most serious consequences are school reputation and, potentially, enrolments. Yet schools with abysmal NAPLAN scores have not had mass exoduses. NAPLAN does not dictate all parents' school choice.

And, unfortunately, some parents have no choice.

It therefore behoves governments to investigate chronically poor schools, not to hide them from view again.

NAPLAN and My School have been hard-won victories and one of the few policy achievements of the federal Labor government.

That some politicians have declared themselves open to curtailing My School is disappointing, but not surprising; secrecy is in the nature of governments.

The best outcome from an inquiry would be to clear the air. It would be a great shame to return to the bad old days when parents were the last to know.

Jennifer Buckingham is research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.