Politics and Literacy again: From the President of LDA

In December 2008, after a long campaign depending largely on the efforts of Mr James Bond, who is himself dyslexic, the NSW Parliament passed an amendment to the NSW Education Act 1990, the aim of which was to ensure that the Minister for Education may provide or arrange special or additional assistance for an additional category of government school children with special needs, namely, children with significant learning difficulties in basic education areas (whatever the cause). Details of this initiative are provided in Dr Pye Twaddell’s article ‘Children at Risk’, in this issue of the Bulletin. It is one thing for such legislation to be passed in Parliament; it is another thing for it actually to have a beneficial effect on the children at which it is directed. Hence Mr Bond and I requested a meeting with Mr Brian Smyth King, Director of Disability Programs for the NSW Department of Education, and asked him two questions. Our first question was: “Are there new policies or actions that NSW DET will be embarking on as a consequence of this new legislation?” His answer was: “No”. Our second question was: “Will NSW DET be writing to NSW schools explaining what this new legislation means for children with significant learning difficulties?” His answer was, again: “No”. This was sufficiently disappointing that a second meeting, with Mr Smyth King and Ms Deonne Smith (General Manager, Access and Equity, NSW DET), Mr Bond and me, was arranged.
This did not provide different answers to our questions. It is hard to see how the passage of this amendment to the Education Act will ever achieve its aim (which is to improve the lot of NSW schoolchildren with significant learning difficulties) if the NSW Department of Education will not be responding to the new legislation.
Another article in this issue of our Bulletin which also deserves comment is the article, also contributed by Dr Twaddell, on the national assessment of literacy and numeracy program instituted by the Commonwealth Government about a year ago.
Two of the reasons why this is important are (a) parents, naturally, want to know how well their children are learning to read and are able to do arithmetic, and this can only happen if literacy and numeracy are assessed and the results of these assessments provided to parents; and (b) studying the trends in such assessment data over the years might tell us whether the literacy and numeracy of Australian primary-school children is improving or declining – important information.
Unfortunately, this national assessment program has been implemented in a way which defeats both of these aims, because the assessment results are not reported in terms of absolute levels of achievement in literacy or numeracy: they are reported in terms of Bands. For example, for Year 3 children there were six Bands, from 1 (worst) to 6 (best).
Now, if you were a parent and were told that your child’s assessment put him into Band 3, would that be informative? No, because no information is provided as to how proficient at reading children are whose scores put them into Band 3. Band 3 performance might represent excellent reading, or it might represent very poor reading; there’s no way for a parent to know, and hence aim (a) is not achieved.
And now suppose that over the years we find that the proportion of readers in Band 1 goes down and the proportion of readers in Band 6 goes up: is this good news? Does it mean the literacy standards amongst Australian primary school children are rising? No, that conclusion cannot be drawn, because it might instead be the case that the assessment scores identifying the cutoffs for each band are going down, which would make the proportion of children in Band 1 go down and the proportion of children in Band 6 go up even if literacy levels were not increasing: indeed, they could even be declining. So aim (b) is not achieved.
Again, what’s needed is what the national assessment program will not provide – details about the actual scores the children achieve before these scores are massaged into uninterpretable Bands.

Professor Max Coltheart

From the LDA Bulletin, Volume 41, No 1, March 2009