(Download) "English in the News: Tom Rank Surveys Media Coverage of English (Media Studies)" by English Drama Media * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: English in the News: Tom Rank Surveys Media Coverage of English (Media Studies)
Author : English Drama Media
Release Date : January 01, 2009
Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
Pages : * pages
Size : 56 KB

Description

Good riddance to the SATs chief ... and his yacht club' was how the Mail on Sunday greeted the departure of Ken Boston from QCA in December. Yes, a great deal has happened since our last issue, which went to press just before 'the totally unexpected announcement of the abolition of SATs for 14-year-olds,' as Jenni Russell wrote in the Guardian on 16 October. Or, in the Sun's characteristic headline: 'SATs yer lot'. 'This was a U-turn of the most remarkable kind,' Russell commented. 'The blind defence of the testing system despite a wall of evidence about its failure has been the defining and depressing characteristic of the schools policy for a decade.... It is a welcome change of perspective from a minister who has insisted until now that SATs are essential.' If Ed Balls was insistent, it was in the face of voices from organisations like NATE and from teachers such as the former Head of English who told Jenni Russell how the focus on SATs had distorted the entire secondary curriculum in the first three years: 'You have to worry about it because it's how you're assessed. Year Nine was just a lost year. You do nothing but SATs texts and practice from October to May, and what you're focusing on is so limited and boring that by the end, the kids are so discouraged and demoralised that it's a real struggle to get them back again.' Mike Baker, writing for the BBC website, quoted Patrick Valente, a Year 9 pupil who had told him 'the tests made students like himself feel like league table fodder'. Baker concluded by mischievously suggesting: 'Perhaps the best way to get rid of the tests at age 11 would be for a group of primary teachers to win the contract for next year's test marking, to then make a mess of it, and so force ministers into another precipitate decision next year.' So in a perverse way, perhaps we should be grateful to the contractors ETS for lifting this burden from secondary schools, despite the great financial, educational and personal cost to those involved. It does seem that something of what Mike Baker wished is coming true, as just before Christmas the BBC website announced that 'Four in five failed trial tests' that were to have replaced Year 9 SATs. The reasons for the failure of these single-level tests were said to be 'highly technical', though John Dunford of the Association of School and College Leaders showed that a literary analogy can make it all plain to anyone who knows a hawk from a handsaw: 'My caricature is you can get a Level 3 by doing Paddington Bear well or Hamlet badly.'