Give those little reception kids a NAPLaN Test

The recent suggestion by Dr Peter Hill, head of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) that NAPLaN testing be extended to reception students should come as no surprise.

In the first place, the crude logic of NAPLaN would suggest that the identification of deficiencies in literacy and numeracy skills through a test conducted early in Grade 3 is really pointing the finger at problems in learning that occurred in Grade 2. Behind those problems are the ones that occurred in Grade 1, and beyond that in reception.

Secondly, the conducting of NAPLaN tests in reception establishes ACARA's preferred method for comparing the academic performance of schools, namely finding "groups of schools with students of similar abilities on commencing school" (My School Technical Paper p. 1).

Currently, ACARA's My School website creates so-called "statistically similar" schools using the very imperfect Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA). Comparison of "similar" schools is based on these very quickly discredited ICSEA values.

The ACARA Technical Paper acknowledged that ICSEA was a "proxy measure" in the absence of students' reception commencement abilities.

Hill's attraction to NAPLaN testing of reception students is that the data so obtained would enable the grouping of "similar" schools made up of students with similar NAPLaN results.

The subsequent tracking of "value-added" learning attached to the year level cohort, and within that to each student through an ID number (Gillard's "unique student identifier") has the attraction of removing the controversy surrounding some of the glaring anomalies created within the ICSEA groupings of "statistically similar schools".

It is the ideal political solution. Educationally reprehensible, but the likely way of the future of early childhood education.

However, we only have to look once more at the educational cesspit that is the United States, to see some malodorous emanations from the testing of reception students.

Let's just wave briefly out the window of the good bus Dullard at some obvious features of this deformed landscape: the narrowing of learning through fun that is embedded in good early childhood education, the rise of anxiety in beginning learners associated with "learning for the test", competition between reception teachers for improved NAPLaN results, the predations of commercial suppliers of preparation materials for reception NAPLaN success.

There may be more.

The worst, however, is retention at reception level.

We take social promotion for granted. With the exception of some special education students (who may be placed in a special class if they have severe learning difficulties, or accelerated one or more year levels if they are gifted and talented) the prevailing wisdom is that we keep students with their social peers.

This is not the case in the US. In some large urban centres, up to 50% of kindergarten students are retained if they fail to meet standardized assessment requirements. The pattern repeats itself in Grades 1, 2, 3 and so on.

This is a contested battlefield in the US. Sometimes the expense of having to retain students has such an impact on District education budgets that social promotion is reintroduced. Sometimes parental lobby groups are so effective in highlighting increased bullying and decreasing self-esteem associated with repetition of year levels that social promotion wins the day.

However, the Standardistos never give up and the current exponents - New York's Joel Klein, Washington's Michelle Rhee, Chicago under Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and most recently Detroit under schools Financial Manager Robert Bobb - have all succeeded in reversing earlier decisions favouring social promotion. The year that Klein ended social promotion for third-graders in New York City, 5,000 were held back. Of these, twenty per cent were forced to repeat Grade 3 a third time.

Most researchers agree that social promotion does not address the learning needs of students who lack basic skills. Similarly, most agree that neither social promotion nor retention leads to high performance. Holding students down is not an effective learning strategy if students merely repeat what didn't work the year before. The best solution is a system like Finland's, where intervention by specialists provides individual remedial learning to students who stay with their peers.