April 2010     The Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, has condemned a decision by the Australian Education Union to deny parents information about their kids’ literacy and numeracy by banning this year’s NAPLAN national tests.

The AEU National Executive has voted to order teachers to boycott the tests in an effort to shut down the My School website.

If successful, the boycott would mean parents of kids in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 would not receive national report cards and the My School website would be missing information for this year.

Ms Gillard said the decision was a clear indication that the AEU Executive was not interested in what is best for parents or students but rather imposing their ideology on school communities.

AEU Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos says: “Teachers cannot hand out the tests until something is done to stop the results beingused to publicly brand students and schools as failures in league tables.  That is damaging for students and school communities."

He says that : "the primary concern of teachers is the fact that nothing has been done to stop test data being taken from the My School website to create damaging league tables in which schools are ranked on test results alone." “We also have serious concerns that the NAPLAN results are being used on the My School website in a way that is misleading for parents.

Ms. Gillard said it was simply unbelievable that a union would ask its members to boycott tests that are used to help distribute $2.5 billion of new funding to schools. The new funding will be used to improve literacy and numeracy, provide assistance and training to teachers and help our most disadvantaged schools.

The Government intends to work with the States and Territories to ensure the tests are held despite the boycott. State and Territory Ministers will meet later this week in Sydney.

The boycott only affects state schools. State school principals and Catholic and independent schools have said they will run the tests.

The AEU Executive’s threats against the Government and bully tactics have put classroom teachers in public schools in a very difficult position pitting them against parents and the community.

Ms Gillard said she believes the majority of teachers do not support banning NAPLAN tests as they are an invaluable diagnostic tool for teachers to target the needs of individual students.

The majority of teachers also recognise that this year’s NAPLAN tests are more important than ever as they will be retesting students who sat the test two years ago, allowing us to look at where students are improving and where they are falling behind.

The AEU has met with the Deputy Prime Minister’s office a number of times in the past three weeks to discuss the issue but the Union’s plan to gut the My School website by removing vital information was not acceptable.

The AEU has been a consistent critic of the My School website and has called for such changes as removing a school’s result in areas including literacy and numeracy, radically altering the way schools are compared and for the Government to censor media reporting of the site.

The My School website has proved enormously popular with parents and the community. It has had 2.8 million visitors to date.

From information provided by the Minister for Education and the Australian Education Union, April 12, 2010

Register now to join the YourKidsEd e-mailing list for updates on new links and education information. It's FREE!!