Grow Government by testing children

On the face of it, having educational standards for primary aged pupils seems like a good idea. Why not test all children to see if they are actually learning anything during all the hours that they have to attend school to see if they are actually gaining anything of value for the time? Sounds grand!

Except, I really wonder what the point of testing the children is?

If it's to help parents decide which school is better for their child, then they don't need test scores for the school to figure that out. Schools either have good reputations or they don't. You just have to ask around to find out if a school is any good, and then the ultimate test is if your child gets on with the other children and the teacher and is happy in the environment. Learning, quite honestly, at primary level is really incidental, something that is supposed to happen along the way.

The idea of testing every child from age 5 to 12 for literacy and numeracy immediately brings to mind an army of bureaucrats and all the associated office space, a massive computer system and a huge administrative overload for each school. As if teachers aren't gathering enough information on each child for the Government already. And as if the Government isn't large enough by now.

Maybe that's the point. This is a way of growing the Government without too many people making a fuss. Except for the teachers, and we all know they can be safely ignored due to their close interest in the subject.

The first time I heard of National's plan to test every primary school child, I was quite alarmed. It's one thing to test for an ability level, it's another to have an expectation of what a child should be able to do by a certain age. When it comes to music or swimming for example, there is no expectation of what a child should be able to do. It's accepted that some just learn faster than others. Some children will be doing laps at age 7 and others won't have that capability until age 12. But look at any competitive swimmer at age 16 and I doubt they'll have learned to swim at the same rate when they were at primary school.

In Finland, children do not learn to read until age 7 when they first start going to school. And their school days are initially only half a day long. Yet, by the time they are nine years old, those Finnish children consistently outperform all other OECD nations in the world in reading. Test a Finnish child at age 6 for reading, and you'll get a horrendous score. Test that same child at age 9 and the score beats the rest of the world.

So, why does National want to test five year olds? Why not wait until they are in high school?

When it comes down to it, one the greatest indicators of whether or not a child will read well is if a parent at home reads regularly to that child and how many books that family owns. In other words, does the family the child comes from value the written word or not?

Then the next indicator is the size of the school and classroom library. The larger it is, the better the children in that school are able to read and the better their reading scores. Give children motivation to read, and then give them access to books, read to them at school and let them have regular periods of silent reading, and you'll get success. Guaranteed.

So really, the Government would save primary school pupils and their teachers a lot of trouble by just asking each school what the size of their library and using that as a test of how well the children at that school are likely to be reading.

I don't blame the primary schools principals for getting into an uproar over this testing business. If the Government wanted to give parents choice over which school their child could attend, they should wipe out zoning, so that children aren't forced into their local public schools.

But, if the Government wants to expand itself, then collecting literacy and numeracy information on each child from age 5 is the perfect way to do it. Get NZ'ers used to having every little detail of their lives collected and collated by the Government, including whether or not they could tie their own shoes at age 5, or had to wait until age 10 before gaining proficiency. I'm sure some bureaucrat somewhere will write a report on it.

In the meantime, idiot journalists get in on the act of thinking testing is good for primary aged children: Deborah Coddington: Teach school big shots a lesson in parent power. Deborah thinks that testing is good for children and that parents should start a union to match the teacher's union. She also thinks that testing the children will expose the thick teachers. Except, here's a radical thought - why not test the teachers to expose the thick ones?