Testing Times in Australian Schooling: session 1

1. Testing Times in Australian Schooling: session 1 Professor Bob Lingard, The University of Queensland, MYSA, 27 April, 2010

2. The message systems of schooling • Curriculum, Pedagogy and Evaluation (Bernstein, 1971). • Sit in symbiotic relationship to each other - meaning? • Change in one affects the others. Examples? • High Stakes national census testing as policy steering mechanism.

3. Sociology of the curriculum • ‘How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’. (Bernstein, 1971, p.47) • ‘From this point of view, differences within and change in the organization, transmission and evaluation of educational knowledge should be a major area of sociological interest’. (Bernstein, 1971, p.47) • ‘Formal educational knowledge can be considered to be realized through three message systems: curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation’. (Bernstein, 1971, p.47)

4. NAPLAN and its effects • Write down one positive and one negative effect of NAPLAN. • Write down one negative and one positive effect of My School website, including Like School measures.

5. NAPLAN and middle years • Testing 3, 5, 7 & 9. • Impact on middle years? • How deal with potential impact?

6. Queensland Principal Newsletter • As parents already know, the information My School provides is just one source of information about any school. My School doesn’t, for example, for our school or any other, give information about things such as: the quality of the relationships between teachers and students; the number of sporting or cultural opportunities available; whether a school allows grade-skipping for its gifted students; how many pathways are available aside from traditional ‘academic’ ones; how well technology is used for learning; the care that welfare staff put into individual students; state and national honours students have won; how well the staff work together... and so on. • We want to work on all these things...as well as our numeracy and literacy, which are keys to all other learnings. (Queensland Teachers’ Journal, 12 March, 2010, p.9)

7. Globalized policy discourse • ‘A key purpose of assessment, particularly in education, has been to establish and raise standards of learning. This is now a virtually universal belief – it is hard to find a country that is not using the rhetoric of needing assessment to raise standards in response to the challenges of globalization’. (Stobart, 2008, p.24)

8. Globalization and education policy • Globalization:effects on education policy; enhanced influence of international organizations (e.g. OECD in Global North; World Bank in Global South); globalized education policy discourses, global commensurate space of measurement (e.g. OECD’s PISA, IEA’s TIMSS, PIRLS, Educational Indicators); human capital theory, ‘economization’ of education policy, knowledge economy discourses.

11. Global testing: the OECD’s Programme on International Student Assessment • 1999: OECD Report: Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills – A New Framework for Assessment. • 2000 –first PISA; then every 3 years; measures applied knowledge and skills of 15 yr olds at end of compulsory schooling, literacy, maths, science, problem solving (read p.134). • Australia: high quality/low equity (cf Darling-Hammond, 2010, USA). • Novoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003): ‘global eye’ and ‘national eye’, comparison as a form of governance. • Global field, commensurate space of measurement.

12. The New York Times, 10 March, 2010 • Headline: ‘Many Nations Passing U.S. in Education, Expert Says’ • Andreas Schleicher: Director of PISA at OECD. • Read excerpts and discuss. Relevance to Australia?

13. The New York Times, 21 February, 2010 • Headline: ‘Obama to Propose New Reading and Math Standards’. • Read excerpts and discuss. Relevance to Australia?

14. Australian national policy developments in schooling • Rudd government: elected 2007: strengthening of national approaches in schooling despite federal political structure. • ACARA, NAPLAN, national curriculum, National Partnerships, My School website, COAG. • My School website (28 January): NAPLAN comparisons averages and like school measures; politics of. • NAPLAN: high stakes testing; Bernstein’s (1971) 3 message systems (curriculum, pedagogy , evaluation). • Emergent national system of schooling cf development of national statistical systems and creation of nation (Desrosieres, 1998). • Policy borrowing without policy learning (‘reference societies’) (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). • Need for post neo-liberal forms of rich educational accountability.

15. Queensland Case: effects of NAPLAN • Radford Report (1969): no public examinations since 1971: e.g. senior school assessment school –based, teacher moderated, plus ‘Core Skills Test’. • Late 1990s: progressive changes in schooling policy: QSRLS research, productive pedagogies, rich tasks and New Basics reforms. • 2008 NAPLAN results in Queensland: Masters Report and recommendations. • Queensland Government Green Paper: A Flying Start

16. Global/Australian policy contexts of new education accountabilities • Education accountabilities linked to New Public Management (NPM) and restructuring of the state. (‘What is counted is what ultimately counts’.) • ‘NPM – ‘steering at a distance’ through data; ‘Policy as numbers’: ‘global eye’ and ‘national eye’ (Novoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). • Global policy convergence; economisation of education policy. • ‘Performativity’: Ball (2006, p.144): struggle over who controls the field of judgement. • ‘When a measure becomes a target, it seriously distorts the measure’. • Erosion of trust and effects on teachers’ professional lives.

17. Performativity • ‘Performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as a means of incentive, control, attrition and change – based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performance (of individual subjects or organisations) serves as a measure of productivity or output or displays of ‘quality’’. (Ball, 2006, p.144)

18. Struggle over who controls the field of judgement • ‘The issue of who controls the field of judgement is crucial. One key issue of the current educational reform movement may be seen as struggles over the control of the field of judgement and its values’. (Ball, 2006, p.144) • Relevance to contemporary Australian education policy?

19. ‘Policy learning’ as the basis for ‘policy borrowing’ • Reference societies. • Two case studies: England & Finland.

20. Case Study 1: England • SATS (Key Stages 1, 2 & 3); GCSE gold standard: 30% of students receiving A-C grade. • Making Good Progress (2006): ‘contextual value-added’; focus on absolute attainment (school and pupil) and individual pupil progress. • Effects: ‘triage’ effect in schools; rejection of mixed ability teaching and use of tight streaming; deprofessionalised teachers; effects on curricula (reductive) (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000) (Alexander, 2010).

21. Case Study 2: Finland • Counterpoint to England; outstanding achiever on PISA (high quality & high equity). • Sahlberg (2007): Finland contrasted with global education reform trends: flexibility not standardisation, emphasis on broad curriculum, ‘intelligent’ vs ‘consequential accountability’, high support at classroom level, teachers high status, teaching highly respected profession, Masters degrees for teachers, no high stakes testing. • Low level of social inequality overall: low Gini Coefficient of Inequality. • Educational funding (Singapore).

22. What does the research tell us? • Effects of social class or socio-economic background on student performance at school; Gini Coefficients of Inequality. • ‘Economic capital’ and valued ‘cultural capital’ relationships. • School factors: teachers’ pedagogies most significant (see Hattie, 2009). • School factors: Townsend (2001, p.119): 5-10 % of variance in student performance to do with school and 35-55 % of variance due to teacher effects. • Australia: National Partnership Low SES Schools and ‘Like Schools’ measures on My School website: recognise research evidence, BUT…

23. Implications of the cases and research for Australia? • Policy - national (Gillard: National Partnerships: Teacher Quality, Low SES Schools, Literacy and Numeracy). • Recognition of significance of family socio-economic background in policy frames and recognition of central importance of teachers/teaching, but...

24. Beyond the neo-liberal social imaginary • Despite global financial crisis and evidence of more state intervention and regulation, social policy (including education policy) stills remains trapped within a neo-liberal social imaginary (see Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). • Despite stinging critique of neo-liberalism by Australian PM, Rudd (2009).

25. Prime Minister, Rudd • ‘The great neo-liberal experiment of the past thirty years has failed…the emperor has no clothes. Neo-liberalism, and the free market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy’. (Rudd, 2009, p.23)

26. Prime Minister, Rudd • ‘With the demise of neo-liberalism, the role of the state has once more been recognised as fundamental. The state has been the primary actor in responding in three clear areas of the current crisis: in rescuing the private financial system from collapse; in providing direct stimulus to the real economy because of the collapse in private demand; and in the redesign of national and global regulatory regimes’. (Rudd, 2009, p.25)

27. Prime Minister, Rudd • ‘Social justice is also viewed as an essential component of the social democratic project. The social-democratic pursuit of social justice is founded on a belief in the self-evident value of equality, rather than, for example, an exclusively utilitarian argument that a particular investment in education is justified because it yields increases in productivity growth (although ,happily, from the point of view of modern social democrats, both things happen to be true)’. (Rudd, 2009, p.25)

28. Summary & Conclusion • National developments in schooling (NAPLAN, ACARA, My School website etc): situated against: considerations of a restructured state, globalized education policy discourses, policy borrowing and learning, and hybridised social-democratic/neo-liberal policy frames. • Emergent national system of schooling, enhance policy convergence across state systems in Australia. • Role of Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in national schooling agenda and link to national productivity agenda. • Why ‘borrowing ‘ from England and New York? Why these reference societies? • Need for new, richer forms of accountability in education.

29. Rich, intelligent accountabilities • Recognise the responsibilities of all actors; • Acknowledge the broad purposes of schooling; • Challenge view that improved test results on NAPLAN are necessarily indicative of improved and more socially just schooling; • Reject the top-down, one-way gaze on teachers as a sole source of and solution to all schooling problems; • Recognise the centrality of informed teacher judgement and quality of pedagogies to achieving better learning outcomes for all; • Need for ‘informed prescription’ and ‘informed professionalism’ (Schleicher); and • Recognise the need to address poverty.

30. Accountabilities • Linda Darling-Hammond (2010, p.301): In addition to standards of learning for students, which focus the system’s efforts on meaningful goals, this will require standards of practice that can guide professional training, development, teaching, and management at the classroom, school, and system levels, and opportunity to learn standards that ensure appropriate resources to achieve the desired outcomes.

31. Return to opening questions • NAPLAN and My School website. • Rich accountabilities at school site.

32. The New York Times, 12 February, 2010 • Headline: ‘Experts say schools need to screen for cheating’. • Discuss. Relevance to Australia?

33. References • Alexander, R. (ed) (2009) Children, their World, their Education, London, Routledge. • Ball, S.J. (2006) Education Policy and Social Class, London, Routledge. • Bernstein, B. (1971) On the classification and framing of educational knowledge’, in M.F.D. Young (ed) Knowledge and Control, London, Collier-MacMillan. • Darling-Hammond, L. (2010) The Flat World and Education, New York, Teachers’ College Press. • Desrosieres, A. (1998) The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. • Gillborn, D. and Youdell, D. (2000) Rationing Education, Buckingham, Open University Press. • Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning, London, Routledge.

34. References contd • Lingard, B. (forthcoming) Policy borrowing, policy learning: Testing times in Australian schools, Critical Studies in Education. • Novoa, A. and Yariv-Mashal, Y. (2003) Comparative research in education, Comparative Education, 39 (4), pp.423-438. • Rizvi, F. and Lingard, B. (2010) Globalizing Education Policy, London, Routledge. • Rudd, K. (2009) The global financial crisis, The Monthly, February 20-29. • Sahlberg, P. (2007) Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach, Journal of Education Policy, 22 (2), pp.147-171. • Steiner-Khamsi, G. (ed) (2004) The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, New York, Teachers’ College Press. • Stobbart, G. (2008) Testing Times: The uses and abuses of assessment, London, Routledge. • Townsend, T. (2001) ‘Satan or Saviour?’ An analysis of two decades of school effectiveness research, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 12 (1), pp.115-129.

35. Contact for the Powerpoint • r.lingard@uq.edu.au