that might be true, but it’s certainly got worse (unfortunately, I don’t know of any real data on the issue — I’m not sure if it exists or if anyone really wants to find out). I can understand why it is done in Year 12 (even if detrimental to overall learning), but if it infiltrates lower years more and more, it will certainly be bad news. Indeed, this problem (I’ll call it a problem!) is so endemic now that it is really a pain for us in universities, since the expectation many students have is that what they do should have essentially the same structure. Thus, they often have no expectations to do anything more than memorize a list of facts that you tell them, and that the entire course should be structured around helping them memorize these. Quite depressing really.

I’d like to see more transparancy but don’t know that the Myschools website is the way. I’ve a sister who teaches primary school and her house is like a resource centre for school. She is so devoted to teaching (early childhood) and loves working with kids. She switched to the teaching ‘career’ as a mature aged person, and brings a great skill set but this year has no job this year – contract last year but the school lost a few kids. I don’t understand why she’s out of work when I’ve observed some fairly uninspired & tired teachers at my own kids school. Does anybody notice which teachers demonstrate real commitment to the job?

In the past I wished the parents had a bit more say on staff – our school had a great principal – a really gentle, good-humoured fellow, he’d worked in the Torres Strait as a younger teacher and it had made an impression on him – he put up the aboriginal & TI flag next to the Aus flag, and he told great stories to the kids at ‘parade’, organised a farm with chooks and a simulated ‘creek’ play area (before water restrictions!). He was replaced on retirement by the most boring straightlaced principal you can imagine. There were a lot of crestfallen parents who’d been attracted to to the school by the atmosphere created by the former principal. That had an effect on people wanting to be involved as it was all ‘quiet down the back’ and Anzac Day overkill. I also remember being really crapped off that our keen reading kids were terrified of this one librarian at school who seemed to be an absolute sociopath. How the hell did she get in there?

Sorry, I know I’ve rambled right off the topic. p.s. re NAPLAN, I don’t think it is the best indicator, my daughter is quite reasonable at maths but didn’t do very well in the NAPLAN…

FAIL!

… some schools simply get kids to memorize essays to write at exam time …

conrad @ 20, this was happening (to some extent) when I matriculated more than 40 years ago.

What is there stated goal? To reduce the variance in the distribution? Increase the mean? What?

Actually, in the short term, apart from the opportunity cost (which I imagine is pretty big — more bureaucracy, more testing etc.), I don’t think it will do much damage — it seems the worst that can happen is teachers get unnecessary grief from parents and parents move their kids somewhere else. I can’t see why the latter of these will really make much difference and hopefully the first one dies down quickly.

Alternatively, in the long term, if schools start doing yet more mindless teaching to the test (which already happens a lot in Year 11 and 12, where some schools simply get kids to memorize essays to write at exam time), then it will do real damage. That negative effect might be compensated by a positive one if the tables forces the government to do something about some schools that really are performing poorly, and the something the government does is actually meaningful (which I doubt — the problems are intractable in the short term).

In the longer-longer term, if the government deliberately tries to victimize teachers/schools, then obviously that will make less people want to go into teaching (declining standards of those entering teaching is already a problem), and that no doubt will drop the overall standard of teaching.