High Stakes Testing is Everywhere!

The topic at the staff meetings now is the results from the school's state testing. Some interesting pieces are that the newspapers printed the school's results for Year 3 and Year 5. It has caused huge dismay with parents, and with the schools, of course. Many want to find blame. Many feel threatened. Many feel exposed. However, it has put a fire under everyone to pull scores up. Sound familiar?

The Teachers' Federation rep came to speak and told the staff that England and the U.S. has warned us to nip this runaway train in the bud. "They" have had struggles with this for years and want for Australia to learn from their experiences. Wow. There is something to be said for being a little behind the times. When arriving into the Sydney Airport from overseas, the saying goes, "We'll be landing in Sydney; please set your watches back 5 hours and 25 years."

We have spent our team collaboration time reviewing the testing results online and finding scores for specific students on specific answers in all the strands. It's fantastic to see where the trends are for the school overall. For example, math word problem solving was very low (again, sound familiar?). Future trainings were then put in place to refresh on best practices. Similarly, reading comprehension has suffered, specifically in making inferences and locating information. One can even read the questions on the test and see what the answers were by each child. It is helping us steer our instruction, without actually teaching to the test. That is, if no one was teaching pronoun references in text, it needs to be happening! If the children can't tell who the audience is for a cartoon text, a newspaper text, or an informational test, they need to learn this! Test or no test! At the moment, at least, it's serving to sharpen the instructional focus. Not a bad thing anywhere.