The Tail Wagging the Dog? The Effect of National Testing on Teachers ‘ Agency

Australia introduced national testing in literacy and numeracy in 2008 in order to ensure that all children reached basic benchmarks. In January 2010, school results were published online, making these tests high-stakes, especially for schools likely to have poor results. In 2009, a research project was conducted on what supported and hindered teachers in a school in a low socio-economic area to take up mathematics professional development opportunities. This paper explores the impact of national testing on perceptions of teachers ’ agency, particularly the constraints it imposed on taking up these opportunities. National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy In 2008, as part of a push to gain greater control over the schooling sector, the Australian Federal Government replaced tests done by individual Australian states with the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). NAPLAN was designed to determine whether Australian students had reached minimum standards at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2011) and thus contributed to the rhetoric about ‗raising standards‘, particular for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Donnelly, 2009). In January 2010, the Federal Government opened a website, My School, which compared NAPLAN results for individual schools against schools with students from similar socio-economic backgrounds (Jensen, 2010). Hence, these tests became high stakes (Lingard, 2010), with teachers in schools in low socio-economic areas concerned about the impact on their reputations as educators (Lange & Meaney, 2012 forthcoming). In the previous State-based tests, comparisons of school performance had not been possible. My School marked a major change in the influence of accountability practices on mathematics teaching in Australia, and was indicative of the increased trend towards the abstraction and quantification of education (Hardy & Boyle, 2011). However, the use of multiple choice and short answer questions and a focus on achieving minimum standards means that NAPLAN assesses only a limited type of mathematics: recalling factual knowledge, such as the names of 2-dimensional shapes, and completing computations (for examples, se