CURMUDGUCATION: How Dr. Perelman Helped Save Australia

CURMUDGUCATION: How Dr. Perelman Helped Save Australia

How Dr. Perelman Helped Save Australia

(Note: If you're not in the mood to read the whole piece, skip down to the bold quote at the end-- it'll be worth it.)

Longtime readers know that Les Perelman is one of my heroes. Retired in 2012 from teaching and administration at MIT, he has continued his work in the world of education, most notably repeatedly poking holes in the balonified field that is robo-grading. Software that can assess writing is the Great White Whale of testing companies; it would let them offer measuring instruments beyond crappy multiple-choice items without the cost of actual human beings to score writing samples. Not a year goes by without some ed tech firm announcing that they have a super-duper piece of software (nowadays infused with magical AI powder) that can score a piece of student writing. They have been wrong every single time, and likely will continue to be wrong for a long, long time to come.

I have followed many of Perelman's exploits, but somehow I missed his adventure in Australia. And even if you don't think about Australia very often, it's worth noting this adventure because Australia is buffeted by some of the same winds of reformster baloney that blow across US schools.

Australia has had, since 2008, something called the National Assessment Program--Literacy And Numeracy aka NAPLAN. It's a national Big Standardized Test, what PARCC dreamt of becoming when it grew up.

NAPLAN had been sniffing around at the idea of scoring with software since 2012; in 2017, the New South Wales Teachers Federation commissioned Perelman to take a look. The results were not pretty.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) was sad; they had done a report back in 2015 asserting, among other things, that the automated essay scoring "met or CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: How Dr. Perelman Helped Save Australia