A testing culture dominates school education in many western countries. Economic rationalism has demanded more accountability and this has impacted on schools.
So how has this happened in education? I believe the first stage was to undermine teacher judgement. School based assessments were seen as unreliable – you only have to ask employers about the drop in spelling standards and hark back to a past golden age when everyone could spell perfectly. This was attributed to underperforming teachers and modern methods of education which clearly are not as effective as those of days goneby.
So having created a crisis in education, politicians aided by the media, can ride in as knights on their white chargers to save the day (and win votes hopefully). The solution is – we need a test – in fact lots of tests. The data for these tests can be turned into graphs and create league tables. Such data must be more reliable and valid than teacher judgements. The standards movement in which standrards were developed to support teacher judgements are not enough – only a test will do!
Underperformance in tests did not necessarily mean more resources. In some countries, schools that underperformed were closed down – a problem in Alaska when the nearest school could then only be reached by helicopter! Interestingly it is generally in poorer communities that schools are closed down.
The effects of testing regimes has been to narrow the curriculum as teachers feel the pressure to teach the test. Initially with all this pressure schools might improve their results but after only a couple of years, the results will more than likely level out, as it has in in countries such as England and the USA. Yet Australia still wants to follow in their footsteps. Sample population testing as is practised in Finland is much more powerful in producing data about how schools are performing without narrowing the curriculum and putting so much pressure on students and teachers. It supports governments to allocate resources and form policy.
In Australia in seems we can only look forward to more tests and performance pay for teachers based on how their students go in these tests. This will create even more inequality in society as the low performing schools become residualised and parents with economic capital send their students to richer private schools.
