Play the ball, not the player

The rough and tumble of educational debate invokes a decidedly sporting trope this week. This week's title comes from advice given by coaches as to how best to play varying types of sporting codes based around the objective of getting a ball across a line or into a goal of some sort - basketball, hockey, varying football codes, for example. Philosophers refer to its inverted form - the ad hominem argument - as a weak form of debate, focusing on the characteristics of the messenger, and not the intellectual substance of the message. Oddly, at least one sporting form provides a useful lens to what well may prove an historic week in the history of NAPLAN (if you missed last week’s reflection, click here ).

Sport is a conundrum for those who don’t play or watch it, and you might therefore be scratching your head at this point as to its connection and relevance to educational debate. For example, for those who don’t appreciate golf, it seems like a futile endeavour which requires using an overly small set of hitting surfaces to smack a very modestly sized ball a long way away into a hole not that much bigger than the ball itself…eighteen times!

To those who dislike netball, it seems like a game designed by orthopaedic surgeons to generate future income. How anyone else came up with the idea that a player should run as fast as possible and then stop immediately without the benefit of taking any further steps appears baffling. The sound of a knee blowout is unforgettable!

Or take cricket, a game that in its test match format spreads out over five days, each of six hours play, and which might still end with no winner – a draw. And in its ultimate contest, The Ashes , there are five of these games that could all result in draws, leaving no winner after five full working weeks of cricket; the trophy is then retained by the country which won the previous series. To be fair, a series comprised only of draws has never happened, but there are five series where four of the games in each series ended in a draw (1899, 1926, 1953, 1964, and 1970-71) – altogether, that’s nearly half a year of game play in total without any clear winner!

And football, or as many in Australia might refer to it, soccer, can be the same. A full game of professional football lasts 90 minutes, or 120 with extra-time in some competition finals, and there is frequently no winner, which is broadly endorsed as the desired outcome of competitive games. 0-0. A lot of sweat, running, energy, commitment, and skill, yet nothing…two eggs. Perhaps it’s why so much is made of goal-scoring celebrations, given their rarity.

So, to our sport of the week – rugby – and its relationship to this year’s NAPLAN (we’ll get to that shortly). Over the last two weeks, Australia has hosted the current Rugby World Cup Champions, South Africa (copyright prohibits any photos from this, so this week includes a royalty free image which captures the essence of one part of the game relevant to this week's reflection). On both occasions, Australia lost, which I appreciate is likely to be of little significance to some of you.

To many casual observers, rugby can at times look like the concept of a pile-on, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as “an argument or attack by a large group of people against one person or a much smaller group”. Saturday’s rain-drenched rugby game in Perth resembled this, for those who might not be interested in the finer details of rugby’s tackling and rucking phases.

Hundreds of kilos of humanity seemed to flop on the ground and each other in dogged pursuit of a slippery white ball, all the while fumbling and sliding over a waterlogged Optus Stadium. It seems an inglorious way to earn more money than a Prime Minister or the President of the United States of America !

It's an analogy that appears fitting for this week’s similarly inglorious debate about NAPLAN. At one end of the field were the doomsayers lamenting the “pretty distressing ” results that make for “grim reading ”. In the shadow of the release only a few weeks ago of a Better and Fairer Schools Agreement , which will set down funding terms and conditions for the next decade, there were plenty piling on about the dismal state of Australia’s education system, its achievements, its teachers and their teaching strategies, and how to better use this funding .

Yet what was remarkable was the extent and scale of the opposition’s counter moves. It’s hard to recall when such widespread pushback on a negative narrative around education in Australia has been given so much concentrated voice. Here’s a few to check out from The Conversation : Sally Larsen (on how the design of NAPLAN creates some of these inaccurate claims ), Jessica Holloway, Ph.D. (on how to support less advantaged students ), and Sam Sellar (on how to productively use the data ) led the counter-ruck (a rugby term!).

The Australian Association of Research in Education pulled in Jim Tognolini and Jenny Gore , researchers of international renown in educational measurement and teaching, to remind us that the results are only those of “a particular day and a particular time”, that “it is the cumulation of a range of data” that is important, and that “students are more than their brains…[and their] social and emotional conditions…also need to be addressed”. Steven Lewis and Fiona Longmuir did extensive media interviews endeavouring to pilfer control of the political football away from the control of those pushing a negative mantra.

Even David de Carvalho , former CEO of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) , reminded a recent conference of Catholic educators that NAPLAN has limits which need to be seen as “just one source of information to support school improvement ”.

The scale and reach of this year’s counterpoints seem unprecedented and raise the possibility that the annual cycle of school and teacher pile-ons might not be just a flop in the mud.

Despite what a rugby ruck looks like to those uninterested in the game, there’s a lot going on of interest to those who play and love the game. So, too, with this year’s NAPLAN discussion. Perhaps the wider community might miss some of the technical points being made about teaching, measurement, and educational policy – like the quagmire of rugby players wrestling in the mud in the photo – but it shows there’s a lot of determined and committed spirit in the game.

We need sophisticated debate, and this week was an example of what this can look like. It rarely makes for good headlines, though, and it's why we should be collectively thankful for courageous colleagues who do this work. Fiona Longmuir captured it well : we need "to have the courage to have honest conversations about complex issues and do deep thinking about what we want for our children and young people.”

I'm sure there were a number of areas the Australian rugby coach was pleased to see from Saturday's game, as well as concerns still to address, but a headline like Wallabies slump to fresh failure is a rather blunt assessment of such a complex and technical game. I'm pretty sure it also doesn't engender an increase in enthusiasm from the players, as Longmuir and her colleagues have consistently found in their research on the work of teachers.

Education debate should not be reduced to a zero-sum win-lose game.