It’s not the results of NAPLAN that are the problem. It is NAPLAN testing itself. These standardised tests contribute to the maintenance of a deeply unequal system.
The release of NAPLAN results in August prompted an avalanche of responses from politicians, commentators and researchers all with a take on how to understand the continued ‘declining results’ in the national standardised testing program.
The federal minister for education Jason Clare responded the morning the results were released, noting the inequities in the system: “There’s about one in ten children who sit these tests that are below what we used to call the minimum standard. But it’s one in three kids from poor families, one in three kids from the bush, one in three Indigenous kids. In other words, your parents’ pay packet, where you live, the colour of your skin affects your chances in life.”
He also said, “The results showed why school funding talks were crucial — not just to supply extra money, but to reform classroom practices.” Jordana Hunter and Nick Parkinson from the Grattan Institute agreed: NAPLAN results laid bare stark inequities within our education system. And “high quality teaching and support”’ leads to almost all students learning to read competently.
Other perspectives
But other perspectives, from experienced education researcher Jim Tognolini warns “there is only so much ‘growth’ that can occur across one or two years of learning”. And Gore, another experienced researchers, argues: “Students are more than their brains . . they learn in social and emotional conditions that also need to be addressed.”
Calls for evidence-backed solutions to the problem have also abounded. While it is important not to dismiss the role of evidence in addressing these problems, there is also room to consider how a structural analysis that takes into consideration some different theoretical lenses, might both reveal different insights on the problems and different possible solutions.
Take, for example, the decline in the mental health of young people. On the same morning (and on the same radio station), Jason Clare responded to the NAPLAN results, Patrick McGorry, Executive Director of Orygen and lead author of the Lancet Psychiatry Commission on Youth Mental Health report revealed findings that the ‘mental health of young people has been declining over the past two decades, signalling a warning that global megatrends and changes in many societies are increasing mental ill health.’
Correlations
It is worth noting that the global trend in standardised testing and comparison also emerged over the last two decades. The correlations of a number of these issues is significant: NAPLAN results have been declining; youth mental health has been declining; school exclusion and refusal has been increasing; the disruptive and distressing effects of global warming have been increasing; global inequality has been increasing; surveillance capitalism has been increasing; and we are currently watching a genocide live streamed to our phones while students and staff are discouraged from talking about it.
When viewed together these trends point towards a global system of inequity, in which as noted above the unequal schooling system in Australia is but one component. This means the inequities in the education system cannot be fixed by providing more funding and supporting better quality teaching (although these things are of course, incredibly important), but require a closer look at the broader system of inequality. And what we find when we look at that system is that inequality is required in the system.
Capitalism and colonialism, systems that our societies and schools have grown out of, and continue to inform their operations, are based on maintaining gaps between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, between those who ‘succeed’ and those who ‘fail’.
The system must be reckoned with
While Jason Clare and others might be concerned about such NAPLAN gaps in achievement of the poor, those who live rurally and First Nations students, the system that produces these gaps must be reckoned with if a solution is to be found.
Anthropologist Jason Hickel, based in Barcelona, points out ‘capitalism is predicated on surplus extraction and accumulation; it must take more from labour and nature than it gives back…such a system necessarily generates inequalities and ecological breakdown.’
Further, he notes ‘what makes capitalism distinctive, and uniquely problematic, is that it is organised around, and dependent on, perpetual growth.’ And he shows how this perpetual growth has relied for centuries on colonial appropriation of land and resources, enclosure, enslavement and exploitation, and cheapening of labour to underpin capitalist growth.
This is the system that schooling sits within. Thus the white, wealthy, urban families that Jason Clare points out, have children who achieve on the NAPLAN test, demonstrate the colonial, capitalist system working as it is designed to.
Unequal by design
US education researcher Wayne Au, argues high-stakes testing (such as NAPLAN) is unequal by design and operates to standardise inequality. Au explores how ‘the data produced by the tests are used as the metric for determining value, which in turn is used for comparison and competition in the educational marketplace.’ He also outlines how high-stakes, standardised tests ‘perpetuate institutionalized racism and white supremacy, and they are functionally weaponized against working-class communities of color’.
This leads, therefore, to a situation in which it’s not so much about which evidence-based teaching strategies are working but which schools in the unequal market system have the capacity to extract test results from students that produce the greatest market value. That is, the results in Australia that get recorded on the MySchool website and enable the marketing of their school as a higher achieving school. The recording of other attributes of the school community on the MySchool website also contribute to the institutionalised racism and classism that Au outlines.
I’d argue this then gives some schools more power in the market system and allows them to accumulate surpluses. Surpluses might be in the form of more teachers wanting to teach at their school which can lead to smaller class sizes (particularly in the teacher shortage) or it might be in the form of more students wanting to attend their school which leads to greater resourcing when resources are attached to student enrollments. More research is needed to understand this phenomenon.
Organised abandonment
Through these processes of extraction and accumulation, violence also occurs. North American theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that certain racialized and impoverished communities are subject to ‘group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.’ In other words, the capitalist state deliberately under-resources particular groups so that they are more vulnerable to premature death. Wilson Gilmore calls these practices ‘organised abandonment.’
There are welcome calls for better funding of disadvantaged schools. But the long-standing practice of under-funding public schools in poorer communities in Australia is an example of organised abandonment,entrenches inequality in ways that increased funding alone will have little chance of shifting.
A different possible solution to the problem is to abolish standardised testing and the MySchool website and undo the market based system of schooling. If we are serious about addressing academic achievement, mental wellbeing, poverty, racial discrimination and global warming we must build an education system that is anti-colonial and anti-capitalist. This requires abolishing harmful systems of competition, extraction, accumulation and corporate growth and investing in systems of deep care for, in Jason Hickel’s words, ‘human needs (use-value) through de-accumulation, de-enclosure and de-commodification.’
Sophie Rudolph is a senior research fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research and teaching involves sociological and historical analyses and is informed by critical theories. She is currently working on a DECRA project investigating the history and politics of racialised school discipline and exclusion in Victoria.
Thank you Sophie for a terrific piece. Of course, Schooling in Capitalist America and many earlier works last century struggled to undo the system created for schooling. For a brief, wonderful time, schooling in Australia was more like what you are arguing for, in part because we were less middle class but also because public education was heavily invested in. More than that though, a number of practices were called into question for their damaging impact on children, including competition. Comprehensive schools were dominant and a mix of children created wider learning opportunities for all. I wish you well with a bright future to continue to focus on the structural problems left by Julie Gillard in terms of NAPLAN.
A fantastic article! Thank you so much for this thoughtful analysis, Dr Rudoloh. This is an article all educators should read (and all Education Ministers too!).
I’m a teacher and I’ve read it. It’s a bizarre non-sequitur argument and has solidified my prior view that educational academics are completely out-of-touch with the practice of teaching and actually very bad at basic argumentation. Thanks for the recommendation John!
Thankyou. There has been much attention in Queensland on Radio talk back and political comment.
On a practical note, no mention was made that in the past three or so years, schools have been closed for extended periods, months in some instances in Victoria due to COVID. Teachers who had COVID could not attend school, thus, lack of continuity in learning approaches in classes. Children and families have been unwell with many parents staying at home, working and trying to be the teachers; some of whom admit they would not and did not take on the role of teacher. Where schools were supposed to do online learning, it was the first time many teachers engaged in such an approach, learning ‘on the go’ albeit experimenting with that which works. Other schools provided wads of paper for children to do fill-in exercises, not the best approach for learning.
In all, some children missed a year of learning, returning to school to carry on as if nothing had happened. Therefore, for many children in Year 5, they had not had 5 years and a prep year of learning for which the standardised test is designed.
Consequently, the test was ‘testing’ for learning which had not occurred.
The data has to be situated in the context of the time apart from the important issues mentioned in this well scaffolded article.
As an ex President of AARE and one deeply concerned about the ideological, structural and systemic forces that create inequity and injustice, I must commend the work of the AARE research community and the their efforts to inform the public and policy makes of causes and the realities of families and children who basic human rights to education and health are not being met. Happy to share some of my research and publications. I should add I worry about the longer term consequences of injustice and inequality, – As Deputy Director General of UNESCO, I have seen too many countries fall apart and beset by conflict because of the systemic injustices built into the existing order and the vested interests of those in power.
Emeritus Prof Colin Power AM