NAPLAN is an ideological tool.
Bolstering self-constructed and immature caricatures of reality.
We assume that the statistics tell us more than what they possibly can.
- Greg Thompson
When searching through my emails the other day I accidently happened upon a brief conversation I had with Tom van der Linden from the Netherlands in 2023, where I thanked him for his powerful explorations of the philosophical themes in some of the films that have made the greatest transformational impact for me.
Guided by this thread of chance, I ventured to YouTube to watch some of his more recent film explorations.
Whilst trawling through his channel I noticed a new video where he interrogates Citizen Vigilante, an apparently mediocre film that has gained traction amongst certain far-right groups and individuals, most notably Elon Musk.
If you’re interested, I will leave it up to you to look into the film or watch van der Linden’s essay for a full picture of the movie, but something stood out to me in this examination that seems to resonate with much educational discourse and debate.
In analysing the way the film portrays Europe1, van der Linden says:
When it comes to the actual issues being portrayed here, such as mass immigration and integration and even questions of our desired national identity and democratic constitution and so on I actually do believe these should be up for sociopolitical debate.
I think we should be able to talk about this.
But again, what we see here just isn’t that.
Citizen Vigilante is more like the observation of a 15-year-old who just discovered 4chan, it’s a reflexive revolt against a self-constructed and immature caricature of reality.
It’s not questioning or even engaging with anything really. It’s just an expression of undigested sentiment.
This got me thinking about the challenge of using evidence in education—a field that is so personal, emotive and ideological—in a way that reliably reflects the realities of teachers at the coal face.
Here we go.
Self-constructed and immature caricatures of reality.
This idea of the self-constructed and immature caricature of reality is something that is very known to those who engage with educational discourse, maybe now more than ever.
It is where explicit teaching becomes caricatured as solely “drill and kill”, diverse forms of project-based and inquiry learning are dismissed as poorly conceived “discovery”, and opportunities for teacher agency and professionalism are portrayed as risky.
I’ve done it, and you probably have too.
We’ve arguably been educated and socialised into a way of being—physically and virtually—to prefer isolation. To silo ourselves from the uncomfortable confrontation of someone else’s reality. We can’t engage with one another respectfully in debate, so instead of dialogue with the other, X has taught us to construct our own version of them and attack that instead.
This is why I agree with Michael W. Apple’s call that we should have more, not less, evidence. It is in the taking on of the experience of someone other than ourselves that we gain a truer sense of a broader reality.
But what does any of this have to do with NAPLAN?
Undigested sentiments.
Every year when NAPLAN results are released, we’re flooded with commentary and crisis narratives to draw our attention, increase impressions and stir up panic regarding the state of Australia’s education system2.
The problem is that most of the time, these seem to be based more upon assumptions of the reality of schooling and teaching across Australia than any sort of rigorous evidence.
In the last few years for example, we have seen NAPLAN used to claim that teachers and schools:
spend too much class time on “faddish” teaching practices, activities and games,
do not focus lessons on the explicit teaching of new concepts and skills,
aren’t effectively identifying struggling students in reading and mathematics, and
Such claims demand evidence, yet there is often very little that can be produced to support them apart from drawing spurious correlations with NAPLAN results.
The problem, which Margaret Wu’s research has shown us, is that NAPLAN cannot be relied on for much3.
Wu also reminds us that anyone who attempts to make a judgement of school and teacher effectiveness based upon NAPLAN scores is making a conjecture:
If you are a teacher or a principal, and anyone alleges that you have not performed your work effectively based on NAPLAN student scores, you have a good case to challenge the accuser(s). NAPLAN results simply do not provide unequivocal evidence that someone has not done their work effectively, even when the results are presented together with other school characteristics.
Yet, it seems every year claims are made by politicians, think tanks, and in the media about the quality of the teaching profession that give the impression of reality, which could more accurately be described as “undigested sentiments” based upon weak inferences from NAPLAN.
NAPLAN and reflexive revolts.
In the end, instead of a means of engaging the profession in dialogue and collaborating on solutions, NAPLAN is used as a legitimation tool to impose policy power upon teachers and schools based on assumptions of the way things really are.
The unquestioned inferences made from simplistic NAPLAN reporting stir up reflexive revolts; against certain pedagogies, practices, initial teacher education institutions, education academics and in some cases, the teachers themselves.
The danger with reflexive revolts is that there is a risk of rushed and poorly thought-out policy decisions that result in lasting, harmful effects upon schools, teachers and students.
Do we really know enough about the state of education from NAPLAN to make appropriate policy directions or—such as in the case of Citizen Vigilante—are we using NAPLAN results as a way of “dramatising an already preconceived worldview about it”4 in order to impose our ideological5 perspectives upon the system?
Past evidence suggests the latter to be true, with pre-packaged solutions and media stories developed well in advance to capitalise on the fear that NAPLAN reporting attempts to induce.
That being said, I am hopeful considering the growing acknowledgement of harmful NAPLAN reporting practices.
As NAPLAN results are set to be released in the coming weeks, we will soon see.
Till next time,
From 10:30 of the video if you’re interested.
This post being no exception.
For a much less generous take on NAPLAN, you can read Graham Wright’s thoughts on it here:
Another quote from van der Linden.
When I refer to ideology I am talking about the assumptions, beliefs and values we have regarding education’s purpose that lead to political action. It represents the assumptions we hold in relation to what we believe education, teaching and schooling should do.
With regard to NAPLAN, I like to remind people of the old saying, "There are lies, dammed lies and statistics."
The problem with statistics is you can present them to prove any particular point you want to make.
I completely agree. One of the biggest concerns is that NAPLAN has increasingly shifted from being an assessment intended to inform learning to a tool used for accountability and comparison. As O'Neill (2013) argues, the secondary uses of assessment, such as ranking schools, can create perverse incentives, where the focus shifts from fostering meaningful learning to improving measurable outcomes.
When schools and teachers are judged primarily on test results, it is understandable that attention is directed towards what is measured, even if those measures provide only a partial picture of educational quality. This risks narrowing curriculum, distorting teaching priorities, and reinforcing simplistic narratives about what is happening in classrooms. If we genuinely want to improve education, we need to be cautious about drawing broad conclusions from a single assessment and instead use multiple sources of evidence that reflect the complexity of teaching and learning.