QUADRANT: THE SMART PLAY TO LIFT OUR SCHOOLS
By Jane Mueller. Published by Quadrant on 6 December, 2019.
By all accounts, 2019 has been an emotive year in our education landscape. Australia has been alive with disdain for apparent stagnant literacy and numeracy results. In our obsession, barely a week transpires without critics asserting their opinion about NAPLAN, teacher training, phonics, mobile phone bans, student suspensions, or school starting age; all claiming to be in the name of improving student achievement.
Australia is not alone. UK media outlets report ‘More than one in four children falling behind by age five’ and in the US it’s been asserted that scores are not improving despite ‘stronger academic standards, more tests, stricter teacher evaluations and laws that discourage schools from promoting third graders if they can’t read proficiently’. US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has labelled the current situation a ‘student achievement crisis.’
Educator and researcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, gifted the US with the statement, ‘If all that testing had been improving us, we would have been the highest-achieving nation in the world.’
