MySchool and the NAPLAN - literacy and numeracy

Schools, and the schooling system, are often criticised for stifling creativity and failing to give space for kids to grow and develop their own interests. At the same time there is a sense that good, conservative skills like sound literacy and numeracy are no longer taught – that today students are taught maths and English lite.

These two things might seem at odds to begin with. On the one hand, parents complain that kids are forced to conform to a set criteria which doesn't recognise their child's true potential. On the other, the complaint is that kids cannot perform normal functions like reading, writing, and maths probably because education is too soft and directionless. Some parents are worried that their kids are being forced into a box while others worry that their kids could not get a job because their education is too far outside of it.

In reality, there doesn't need to be a conflict. Proper basic literacy  helps people to develop a sense of themselves and their relationship with the world, as long as the emphasis of this literacy is on communications. This is understood by some policy makers.  One of the better things about the latest incarnation of the Victorian curriculum was the emphasis on integration. This means that students would learn to approach things from a variety of viewpoints. Kids might look at relevant things that they can engage with, like 'body image' for secondary students, from any number of angles. They can look at healthy eating and living in Science and Home Economics and crunch out the figures and statistics that doctors use to determine genuine ailments in mathematics. While they do this, they can write personal stories of what this information means to them in English, or else think beyond themselves and prepare a persuasive speech or satire to get their message out. Art and drama help to give new means of expression with which to communicate the difficult, ideologically layered response to the possible meanings of the human body. Taught in an exceptional way, this curriculum would produce students who can not only read and write and add up, but who could interact and relate to the community and the world around them confidently and through a variety of means.

I have a story from teaching in the territory that gives an example of this. Working in a remote Indigenous community school I saw first hand the material and psychic poverty that poor numeracy and literacy contributes to. However, in an environment where most kids aren't necessarily expected to turn up to school every day from home, teachers spend a large amount of time and energy on trying to engage students in what they were learning. If they enjoyed being there the kids would turn up because they wanted to.

However being engaging could be difficult, because the basic numeracy and literacy the kids needed to learn is 'traditionally' taught through repetition.  This most often means sitting at a desk on plastic chairs with a sheet of paper and a pen. What kid would turn up for that if there's a choice of riding their bikes around town and getting into mischief?

I asked some experienced teachers what I should do.  On their advice I decided to take my grade 5s and 6s out on a field trip. It so happened that my being there coincided with the centenary of the community's founding as a mission. So I asked the kids 'what places are important to this community's history, and to it now.' I threw google maps up on the wall and we tagged the places they identified. I told them that because I was a visitor there I wanted them to take me to these places so I could learn about them. We wrote a letter asking permission to the principal on the board as a class. This was the basic literacy part – we had to get it right. But the class had an incentive to do it, and the kids joined in. It was a great way to learn about basic grammatical structure in a way that made it obvious that it was helping them to communicate, rather than to pass a test.

The principal wrote back allowing us to go (I had checked with him first). We got in, drove around and took photos. The kids told me stories about the places that they had learnt from their community, and we made pictures. We uploaded the written stories and the drawings and paintings onto the Google site.

Some interesting things happened. First of all, the kids opened up. I was used to getting one or two word answers to my questions from these students who spoke English as a Second Language. But now that they were interested in what they were doing, and in teaching me – since they were speaking to communicate, not just because that's what you do at school – they spoke to me at length. Some kids spent all their lunch break with me telling me things and looked disappointed when I told them I had to go to class.

Secondly, I learnt a lot about what kind of knowledge these kids had. They told me how to prepare a bush fowl and how many people it would feed, how to use dried grass pods as instruments and about the traditional rituals they used these instruments at. They told me the dream-time stories about the places we were traveling through. They were clearly very knowledgeable, just not in a way that shows up in standardised testing. But now, as their teacher, I could see the potential in them. At the same time, they had built their literacy skills.  

This is why it's a bit disappointing to find out that the NAPLAN test is being used as an authoritative source of data for making decisions about school funding and the proposed national curriculum. I don't have an a priori problem with the test itself, but as things stand it is set up to do more harm than good. The first reason is that teachers are already stretched. They have a lot of curriculum to cover in a short space of time, yet every week we hear new experts upset that this or that important thing isn't covered in school (be it nutrition, fire safety or mortgage management). When such important things are already being left out, how does it help to take three full mornings of class time from a teacher? It is disruptive to their planning and the continuity of their lessons, unless teachers plan around it.

And arguably worse, this is exactly what teachers do. Knowing that their school's funding is linked to their test results, teachers would perversely being doing their students a disservice if they failed to teach to the test. Rather than three mornings off, students spend weeks just learning how to pass this pen and paper test. The results of these trends are then artificially inflated year by year as teachers and students are better prepared for what to expect from them, and how to teach to them. It gives the illusion of true improvement in literacy and numeracy which can then be spun as a good news story for politicians.

And this is worse still for students at many private schools. Schools whose enrollment numbers depend on the perception that they will give their kids a competitive advantage in life and getting into university will have to do anything to be ranked highest in myschool.com. This means taking away from their well resourced and often very innovative methods of teaching to have kids sit down for weeks on end with a pen and a blank sheet of paper.

But is this testing literacy and numeracy at all? Only if the assumption is that no matter what, it's the score at the end of the day that counts.  But if we believe this, we are fooling ourselves and our children into seeing statistics but not asking 'what does this statistic mean?'  This is not good numeracy. Likewise, we may bring up a generation of children whose spelling and grammar is impeccable, but who cannot use it to communicate or interact with the world. These two things need not be mutually exclusive, and no test that does not test for both could be said to be truly testing literacy and numeracy.