Many private schools begin summer holidays today. State school pupils have another two weeks to go and around the country they will be bringing home their end-of-year report cards in the new federally-designated style – Brendan Nelson’s beloved A-E ranking.
Of course, the NSW government (there are wide discrepancies between states – I’m a NSW parent so I’ll write about that) is putting the best possible spin on it and “owning” the policy. A couple of weeks ago we – and presumably all other parents of children in years 1 to 10 – received a letter from Premier Iemma and the Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt about the new reporting style. It boldly opened:
Parents have the right to know how their children are performing at school.
That word “performing” gives the game away. Oh yes, there are still plenty of “achievements” to be “assessed”, we’ll be given an idea of how our children are “progressing” and “faring”, but really, when it comes down to it, A to E is about performance rather than learning per se.
I’m not such a utopian that I never compare myself or my offspring to others. But I don’t think six year olds should be subject to the language of the ever more cutthroat workplace, viz “performance indicators”. Children develop unevenly within themselves and at different paces in comparison with each other. The huge range of what is “normal” in babyhood still applies to 10 year olds. Basic skills tests in year three and five already exist to assess how individual pupils and schools are doing (high schools, of course, are assessment-driven). So why the need for this kind of ranking?
Nelson, when he was Education Minister, would have had us believe that he was beseiged by parents clamouring for letters (preferably A and B) to put after their children’s names. I’ve so far not met any of these parents. If they are out there, they’re bound to be disappointed with the new report cards – the vast majority of pupils will get Cs for all subjects. C equals sound – the pupil has met expectations for learning in that area. C does not equal average, dull and ordinary, but parents are bound to interpret it that way. An A-E scale forces you into that kind of interpretation.
When I look at a report card, I glance at the ticks and bars and graphs (and now letters), then turn to the comments. It’s the detailed comments from an involved teacher which most interest me. The risk of the A-E ranking is that busy parents will think they’ve been told all they need to know – that their child is summarised in a letter. The irony is that this scale could lead to parents being less informed and less involved, rather than more.
I think you will find that a lot of the comments on report cards are also cut-and-paste from a standard list: an A level kid gets this comment etc. Of course, you may have a committed teacher who actually bothers to make the effort to write a descriptive ‘word picture’ about your child and how they have done during the year, but I wouldn’t bank on it.
The whole argument around marking or not marking kids report cards with letter grades seems so silly – if you have a question about your kid’s performance, if the written comments are too ‘polite’ for you to understand, GO AND TALK to the teacher!
I couldn’t believe Kevin Donnelly on Insight a while back, claiming that he and his wife were unaware of how badly their son was reading until they got a letter grade of “E” – hello, perhaps try going to parent/teacher nights? Reading the comments that teachers take hours to write so that they have a nice mix of honestly critical and encouraging?
And really, how many parents are going to now say “ooh, my child is under-performing in this horrid state school, they’re only getting “C’s”! My darling is more talented than that!”
Yet another blow for the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Maybe I’m a cynic and nonparent, but I suspect parents want a brutally honest Darwinian appraisal of their children…
…that always shows that their children are performing above average, and will get extremely peeved if their children are not performing above average.
That these goals are fundamentally incompatible doesn’t seem to dawn on a lot of parents and is thus fertile ground for opportunistic federal politicians, with no actual role in delivering primary education, to exploit.
As a parent I want to know, at the earliest opportunity how competent my child is in all of the areas of study at school. Euphemisms and weasel words do not do the child or the parent any favors.
There’s actually a piece of software that writes report cards for you – even more sophisticated than the system Megami suggests. You enter the appropriate code and out pops the requisite phrase. I caused a great furore in one school by insisting on writing my comments in my own words, individualised to each student.
You Canadians may not be aware, but at least one primary school in Melbourne is refusing to implement the new system.
JB Priestley once commented that every time he gets his child’s report card he thanked god that no-one is writing a report card on him.
What about we all send our own report cards on his performance to that unprincipled careerist Nelson? He was originally going to join the ALP when he first went into politics, then when it became apparent that his career prospects were better in the Libs he joined them as a small-l liberal. Then when Howard triumphed over Peacock he became a social conservative.
I couldnât believe Kevin Donnelly on Insight a while back, claiming that he and his wife were unaware of how badly their son was reading until they got a letter grade of âEâ? – hello, perhaps try going to parent/teacher nights?
Yes but, but, I couldn’t see the problem with the existing reports. Let me explain the Victorian system to those who don’t have kidlets.
It gives you a kind of horizontal graph with three main areas (this is off the top of my head, I should go and find one, but hell it’s Friday and hell no I won’t go! I have my beer and LP and I’m just not!) One bandwidth is where they’re expected to be at for their age and grade. One bandwidth is where the next grade is expected to be at, and one is the previous grade. You have a dot for each subject to show whether little tarquin is exactly spotton, forging ahead, or way behind.
I found this perfectly clear and found nothing wrong with it. (Teacher’s comments were obviously original, too. ) Am I weird or something? Do Donnelly and I inhabit a different universe?
We use various graphs to plot progress in Business (ah yes! the B-word in which all Goodness Resides!) all the time.
Scepticlawyer, I guess the education department was worried if the students had any original utterances written by you, the little buggers might be off selling them on eBay or something.
Helen,
I’m in NSW, and the report from my “kidlet”‘s school last year was pretty much the same as you describe. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first, but one of the neighbours (a secondary teacher herself, but with primary aged kids) explained it to me. Maybe I’m missing something, but the new report seems to be just a revised implementation of the same thing.
Perhaps the perceived advantage of the earlier system was that it made it harder for parents to say things like “my little Johnie got an A, what did your little Stevie get?”
Ah, I see that I’m mistaken.
My daughter’s school hasn’t used the A to E scale at all. It used the alternative Outstanding, High, Sound, Basic, Limited scale.
I agree. If you have to rely on a report card to enlighten you about your child’s ‘basic’ achievements, you are not on the ball.
A report card confirms or denies what you already expect or know. That expectation is developed over time through a variety of means. including talking to the teacher, viewing homework, talking to your child etc.
Donnelly was obviously too busy at the fish and chip shop to care about how his child’s progress. I will let his wife speak for herself (if she is allowed}. He should try to be a responsible parent.
Currently, it seems to me, that he is saying: do as I say rather than do as I do.
PS I thought he was talking about his daughter rather than his son?
We got our kiddies reports from the NSW state public school they attend. Youngest is in kindergarten, oldest was her first year at a public school after we wasted our time with private schools for the preivous 4 years.
The report cards? Didn’t matter a damn. All I know is that the eldest one now has a much better understanding of maths from the PUBLIC SCHOOL where all the Maoist thinking is done. All I can say is this: the teachers make the difference, and having a school that is physically close by where you can talk to your teacher on a regular basis will beat the most expensive school in Australia. We were stupid – we bought the whole private school is better meme like a couple of suckers. It just isn’t so.
Reports mean little – they are just as much a reflection of parents as they are of the kids. Take an interest, make sure they’ve got uniforms, iron the damn things. Make sure the kids are clean and fed before school. Help them with their homework. Send the liberal party to the bottom of the ocean for denigrating the public school system.
Couldn’t agree with you more David Rubie. My kids go to a school where the report is picked from a comment bank and the kids are ranked on their exam marks and then graded on their achievement of outcomes, which are all derived from assessment tasks – the only real value the teachers get to put is on ‘effort’, which they rank A to E.
If you don’t talk to the teachers you don’t get a sense of what your kid is really like at school, or where their strenghts and weaknesses lie.
Martin B, thanks for that article. I noticed a reference to the NSW Teachers Fed winning a reprieve in a case against the new rankings – I’ll investigate further.
So, Helen, you have stood us up, for your beer and your LP. Is this true?
I am forced, as you will understand, to report back to Central Committee, and I don’t believe you will get a good hearing.
.. but apols for off-toppicking a very good thread.
This whole A-E Howardian 1940′s view of the world. The sooner we are done with the baby-boomers the better.
Perhaps one of the advantages of A-E grades plus comments over just teacher commentary is that it is less likely that parents read into a teachers comments what they want to see (eg they read it with the prior knowledge that their kid is smart) rather than what the teachers are trying to tell them.
Though the graph method that Helen described sounded like an even better method than just fixed grades,
And just one ad-hoc observation – one pretty consistent theme I’ve seen in people who have performed well academically is a background of parental involvement and encouragement. Look at those students who end up going to uni who come from schools where that is very rare – they almost always have families who place a high value on education. And in many cases their siblings also end up going to university. No school system, public or private, can be expected to fully compensate for lack of parental involvement and interest.
Perhaps Mark Latham was onto something?
Baboon, I don’t know what baby-boomers have to do with it. Most of the teacher unionists are baby boomers (as, I suppose, am I, though I don’t like the term) and they’ve fought hard against A-E.
The baboon is cheekily (buttockilly?) joking about a conversation we had in person, shortly before FX Holden had me admitted to the Eye and Ear Hospital using his special key.
Neither political party has delivered us a baby boomer prime minister. Our day is yet to come.
Be afraid, whippersnappers…
First we bring back the cane. When I look at some of the hooligans on the blogosphere making with the l****** f*****-f******, I begin to yearn for conscription…
You keep inventing us as the boogyman? We’ll become the boogymen. Then you’ll learn what power really means.
Ditto, except for the uniform ironing (Hills Hoist and sunshine is fine).
If the report card tells you something you didn’t already know, you’ve not been paying attention.
WTF, wbb? Howard’s no baby-boomer in age, and is most certainly not in his mindset (which is definitely that of the boomer’s parent’s generation – the very thing that the boomers rebelled against).