NAPLAN Banned?

‘NAPLAN’ or ‘the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy’ is a unified ongoing annually test for Australian students on their literacy and numeracy level. The result of all schools is published in a website called MySchool which allows visitors to view and compare the result of students in different schools. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) states that the NAPLAN tests “broadly reflect aspects of literacy and numeracy common to curricula in all States and Territories”. It aims to give an objective and fair result of educational outcome of all primary and secondary schools in Australia.

However, only five years after the NAPLAN test first announced, an article from the Daily Telegraph reporter Bruce McDougall reports that the Coalition of Australia will consider banning the publication of NAPLAN results if it wins Government on September 7 (which they already did now). The reason is that there is a series of problems about the NAPLAN result. One of these is that the NAPALN only focus on two major aspects of the whole education system which is not enough to accurately reflect the education qualities of every school and moreover, the data sets which have been published in MySchool website can be misleading when it comes to parents choosing schools for their children as a comparison tool ranks the school purely based on NAPLAN result.

In my opinion, the just like the concerns mentioned above, there is a lack of social justice in the NAPLAN result. NAPLAN only offers a very limited statistic data in limited areas of study. However, its importance has been overly emphasised to represent the overall education quality of every single school within Australia. According to Gewirtz (2012), one of the two dimensions of social justice is distributional justice (p.470), which is defined by Rawls (1972) as ‘a proper balance between competing claims’ (p.7). In a highly theoretical education system, all schools should have equally distributed facilities and teaching staffs, as well as student resources. There should not be ‘bad school’ and ‘good school’. Although it not possible to do, we should still trying our best to approach. However, the data in NAPLAN has an unbalanced view. This can influence parents’ decisions on which schools they send their children and thus cause more problems with imbalanced distribution of student resource, especially in public schools.

It is not absolutely necessary to banned NAPLAN test completely, but it is worth rethinking how should we deliver better social justice in our education system.

 

References:

McDougall, B. (2013) Coalition will consider banning publication of Naplan scores. Daily Telegraphy. Retrieved on 9/9/2013 from: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/special-features/coalition-will-consider-banning-publication-of-naplan-scores/story-fnho52jp-1226708623403

Gewirtz, S. (1998) Conceptualizing social justice in education:mapping the territory, Journal of Education Policy 13(4), 469-484

RAWLS, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press