Unfortunately throughout the broader community, issues often get confused and highly complex matters are at times simplified which lead to misunderstandings of critical issues.

When I speak about the challenges associated with standardized tests and ranking schools based upon academic results, from time to time I receive a response such as the following.

"Oh, so you don't believe in assessment", or, "so you are against accountability", or "so you don't care about children achieving".

I have been an educator nearly three decades and no one needs to convince me of the need to have rigorous curriculum to teach explicitly in literacy and numeracy, to ensure quality of teaching and learning or to assess children in their learning and to monitor their achievements.

The issue is not so much, "to test nationally on a standardized test" but rather, to consider the highly complex reality that all children reflect diversity; diversity in culture, language, ethnicity, personality, learning, thinking, biological maturity, opportunity, experiences, socio economic demographic, the type of schooling, family life, values and extra curricula activities. Some children have additional needs, or health and/or disability issues.

These differences I witness each day as I work with teachers and students in primary and early childhood programs across Australia. From Arnhem Land to inner suburban capital cities, the children and families I meet reflect such a range of diversity in backgrounds and experiences.  For me, this reinforces so starkly on almost a daily basis that any Government which attempts to reassure parents that we can assess student achievement and the quality of teaching by the literacy and numeracy results ranked across our vast country really are misguided or naive or both.

In most media commentaries and political discussions the debate about national or state testing has sadly shifted away from whether this type of testing is appropriate and meaningful and accurate to simply how are the best ways to implement it and report it publically!

We have stopped openly questioning the reasons for such testing that has swept the western world in recent years. Now in the community it has almost become acceptable and understandable when principals and teachers justify teaching to the test for a month prior to the test so their students will do well on the test.

We have almost become so bludgeoned and inundated by the political influences and trends to attempt to "measure" the quality of learning or the intelligence of a community by scores and data that whether or not standardized testing is actually a meaningful tool hardly gets a mention these days.

It's almost as if educators who speak or write about it are labeled "radical" or anti government or anti assessment.

To have returned to a grading system in Victoria of ABCDE and for that to be rationalized by educators and governments that because "parents" expect it and want it" is as simplistic and irresponsible as saying to parent; "yes, let their children over eat and have lots of lollies and chocolates because that's what children expect and want".

Surely in the 21^st century we have a responsibly to share with parents the enormous amount of research about the individual nature of teaching and learning. Surely we are capable of explaining and re-educating parents as to what meaningful reporting and assessment actually should look like.

My own experience with parents is that when they have been informed, explained and they understand the nature and breadth and significance of a range of meaningful assessment processes, they are better able to understand that labeling a child by a grade or letter is a simplistic, almost insulting way of treating parents and children.

The assumption that now exists that standardized tests are here to stay is alarming.

It continues to perpetuate an assumption that the quality of a life, of learning and of a child's education can be summed up and recorded and advertised and used as some kind of yardstick in the public arena for everyone in the country to read and make judgments upon.

I hear these comments all the time already from many in the community.

"That's not a good school", "that school always gets great VCE results". "That school....."

How does a community judge a school?

How do we as adults try to remember that successful education is not just a score at the end of VCE.

Success itself is so much more than that.

What about the musical, the arts, self esteem, identity, relationships, positive communication?

How do we "measure" these things?

Do we ever hear of teachers teaching to the test of self esteem?

Where are our priorities as a country?

We need to separate politically motivated attempts to measure the quality of an education with what we know is true and meaningful and productive.

In my work with schools I can move from a school in a morning that has 90% refugees and few English speaking families to a school 30 minutes drive away in a high SES, all English speaking families and it is no surprise that on simplistic measurement lines of data, the children in one school will be "performing" better than the other. No prizes for guessing which school would be gaining the greater results!

But what does the 'score" really tell us?

Does it measure how richly and skillfully the teachers in the school with refugees have worked to build trust, to heal wounds, to help relationships to introduce rich oral language and promote a strong sense of identity and culture. Does it measure how far those children have grown and achieved within their own experiences from the start of a school year to the end?

No, a standardized score will not capture that growth, those amazing aspects of learning and life.   A standardized test and publically released score of that school and those students will rate poorly against the other school.

And so what do we then assume? That the teachers in the school with refugee students are less effective, less skilled than in the school where the other children scored well?

And what of the common practice that when a cohort of prep children receive a particular percentage of scores for their benchmarking, the leadership of a school then decides that the next cohort the following year has to reach an even higher benchmark?

This is despite the fact that the next cohort may consist of a totally different group of children, needs and experiences.

There is a reality that standardized national testing and ranking and league tabling ignores; to be educated is so much more than a score.

Leaders in Australian education (similar to the USA) have significantly moved away from the understanding that the 'successful education' of children is a holistic, multilevel, complex range of skills and experiences. We are so obsessed with the measurement of literacy and numeracy; other significant aspects of learning are being lost.

I have attached at the bottom of this editorial an executive summary of the latest significant research from the USA which acknowledges that the current trend in standardized testing and formalized literacy and numeracy in the early years of school are at the expense of other important aspects of early learning and has been a total failure including the academic.

It is time we started to open the public debate again ....... a debate related to quality education and meaningful assessment, teaching and learning.