‘Quality’ at a cost: the politics of teacher education policy in Australia

ABSTRACT

Amid this global landscape for education and policy, this paper focuses on the subject of teacher quality through the lens of teacher education reform and one particular Australian policy initiative: The Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE). Introduced by the federal Australian government in 2016 as a gate-keeping mechanism for students entering teacher education, we apply a four-dimensional framework to analyse LANTITE’s role as a reform measure aimed at improving teacher education, and its impact on shaping understandings of ‘teacher quality’ and ‘quality teacher education’ in relation to the broader field.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• policy
• Australia
• assessment
• quality

Teacher quality as a proxy for quality education

‘Teacher quality’ often emerges as a central issue for debate – both political and academic – for how education systems might be reformed to better address challenges faced by modern economies and social structures undergoing constant global change (Australian Government Department of Education & Training [AGDET], 2016; AGDET, 2015; Dinham, 2013; Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017; Sayed & Ahmed, 2015; Scholes, Lampert, Burnett, Comber, & Hoff, 2017; Thomas, 2003; Ulmer, 2016). With education outcomes having an increasingly direct impact on where nations sit relative to each other in an era of ‘informational capitalism’ (Ball, 2013, p. 1), education policy has been instrumental in keeping pace in the global education race. Global benchmarks – such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) focused on literacy, numeracy, and science – now assume ‘the world’s premier yardstick for evaluating quality, equity and efficiency of school systems’ (p. 11). This, in turn, creates a globalised culture of performativity that many nations use to navigate their approach to education policy, and understandings of what is valued from education as an endeavour and public good.

This paper focuses on the subject of teacher quality through the lens of teacher education reform and one particular Australian policy initiative: The Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE). Introduced by the federal Australian government in 2016 for students entering teacher education, we apply Cochran-Smith, Piazza, and Power (2013) four-dimensional framework to analyse LANTITE as a reform measure to improve teacher education, and understand its impact on shaping understandings of ‘teacher quality’ and ‘quality teacher education’ in relation to the broader field.

The first section of this article outlines Cochran-Smith et al.’s (2013) ‘politics of policy’ framework, including a rationale for the importance of policy analysis as a tool to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions that, in turn, impact the everyday practices of teachers and students within schools in often unintended ways. With this as our framework to structure the remainder of the paper, the main focus of the article then concentrates on Cochran-Smith et al.’s first three elements – Discourse and Influences, Constructions of the Problem, and Policy in Practice – to deconstruct LANTITE as one key policy initiative that currently informs teacher education reform in Australia, especially with regard to student teacher selection. The concluding section addresses the final element of their framework, Impact and Implementation, to consider not only LANTITE’s consequences for practice, but how its understanding of teacher education also carries implications for the discipline, policy, and the profession more widely.

‘Politics of policy’ as a framework for analysing policy formulation, practice, and consequences

The significance of Cochran-Smith et al.’s (2013) framework is its theoretical orientation to teacher education policy analysis through discourse, arguing such an approach helps to better recognise the influence of ‘the histories of particular localities’ and ‘the values of the people expected to put policies into practice’, in contrast to conventional rationalist approaches that instead assume policy-making to be largely ‘linear and top-down’ (p. 8). Underpinned by a view of policy and policy-making as complex, messy, and shaped by the critical relationship between power and knowledge, the framework draws on Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge relations (Sharp & Richardson, 2001) and Ball’s (1997, 2013) approach to policy sociology to provide a comprehensive, interrelated focus on not only what is said in policy, but who is entitled to speak. Within teacher education, pre-service teachers and teacher educators often have little say or influence over the policy reforms that shape their domain of practice, despite bearing the greatest impact of these policies.

The approach, which Cochran-Smith et al. (2013, p. 9) named their ‘politics of policy’ framework, is organised around four interrelated dimensions to systematically interrogate policy formation, execution, and impact:

1. Discourse and influences: The larger political and economic issues, trends, and influences that shape policy.

2. Constructions of the problem of teacher education: The actors behind policies and how problems and solutions are framed and discussed.

3. Policy in practice: The way in which polices are interpreted both individually and collectively.

4. Impact and implementation: The outcomes of the policy in terms of the power relations involved.

Central to Cochran-Smith et al.’s theorization are the concepts of ‘policy cycle’ (Bowe, Ball, & Gold, 1992) and ‘policy web’ (Joshee, 2007), both of which assume a strong connection between policy-makers and policy implementers (e.g. teachers). Attention is therefore directed to how and where policy is made within different contexts, with particular interest in understanding the compromises and settlements that arise between differing interest groups (Lall, 2007). The ‘policy as a web’ metaphor also highlights the interrelationship that exists between policies, with any one single policy therefore having to be understood within ‘the full range of policies’ (Joshee, 2007, p. 174). Finally, in the same way that Ball understands policy as both discourse and practice (Ball, 1993), Cochran-Smith et al. (2013) also appreciate policy as more than the codified text handed down by policy-makers (the ‘big-P’ policy), to also include ‘little-p polices’: policy as ultimately enacted and practiced, being dependent upon a ‘process [that is] on-going, interactional and unstable’ (p. 8). Such a view accords with a sociocultural account of policy (Cross, 2009), where agency exists in all phases of the policy cycle. As Apple (2004) asserts, ‘all texts are “leaky” documents … subject to “recontextualization” at every stage of the process’ (p. 32).

Methodologically, again consistent with Ball’s (1993) orientation to policy as both text and discourse, we draw on already well-established techniques from discourse analyses in the field of policy sociology (Taylor, 2004). This involves going beyond the immediate linguistic features of texts, to instead view discourse as a form of social action associated with those texts, and observing the connections between discourse and the structure of society and its influence on political and/or social change (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). The Cochran-Smith et al. (2013) ‘politics of policy’ framework sees texts, which shape the dominant discourses of the day, as not being neutral or value-free, but as instead being constructed from and mediated by dominant social power structures that work to create (and/or maintain) those texts a legitimate, valued, and powerful ‘normative’ account of the policy problem (and solution being offered). Procedurally for our analysis, we draw on a ‘web’ (Joshee, 2007) of intersecting texts which framed the policy initiative before its implementation (e.g. key policy texts foregrounding the introduction of the LANTITE), texts which communicated the policy initiative itself, and texts which discussed the initiative after its implementation (e.g. newspaper and research articles). We also drew upon research on more established basic skills tests in the United States (e.g. Praxis I, licensure tests, etc.) to explore the potential impact on teacher education and the actors involved (e.g. Goldhaber, Cowan, & Theobald, 2017; Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010; Graham, 2013; Memory, Coleman, & Watkins, 2003). We then analysed these texts using the elements developed by Cochran-Smith et al. (2013) to interrogate the discourses, social structures, and actors involved in the co-construction of these texts. This enabled a systematic, structured analysis, while maintaining a sense of how each element was interconnected with the others in terms of policy formulation, production, implementation, and influence.

LANTITE discourses and influences: a discourse of inputs

In their own analysis of policy in the United States, Cochran-Smith et al. (2013, p. 12) identify what they describe as a ‘discourse of outcomes’ (see also Sirotnik, 2004) shaping what counts as ‘quality’ in terms of teacher education in North America. This discourse, they explain, is one that ‘[reflects] the ideological shift to neoliberal and human capital perspectives’ and diverts attention from substantive issues around the quality(ies) of teacher education programs themselves, such as faculty qualifications and expertise, course structures and content, and the extent to which institutions are committed to reworking programs to align with current professional knowledge and standards (p. 12). Instead, quality is redefined on the basis of quantifiable proxies: measurable outcomes based on what these programs ultimately produce, ‘student test scores […] job placements, and retention rates’ (p. 12).

Australia, like the US, has been similarly influenced by neoliberal governance with a heavy focus on increased productivity through economic rationalism, the re-organisation of human capital, and compliance-based regimes of accountability (Beeson & Firth, 1998; Connell, Fawcett, & Meagher, 2009; Mendes, 2003; Walsh, 2011, 2014). As well-documented within existing literature, themes such as managerialism, measurement, audit-cultures and alienation feature prominently throughout Australian education policy discourse, mirroring analyses of policy in education throughout much of the OECD (Connell, 2013; Davies & Bansel, 2007; Davies, Gottsche, & Bansel, 2006; Marginson, 2002; Olssen & Peters, 2005).

Yet the discourse surrounding LANTITE is different. While a ‘discourse of outcomes’ is evident within the Australian policy context writ large (Comber & Nixon, 2009; Kleinhenz & Ingvarson, 2006; Klenowski, 2011; Lingard, 2010), LANTITE, as a response to a more specific policy problem, as it concerns teacher education, is driven by what we suggest is a ‘discourse of inputs.’ This metaphor, of inputs and outputs, resonates with others who have found it helpful for framing drivers in contemporary policy settings (e.g. Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017). Whereas the former attributes success (or failure) of teacher education programs based on their outputs, a discourse of inputs reframes quality – and with it, the question of ‘where do teacher education programs fail?’ – as a problem with teacher selection: who universities admit into their programs in the first instance.

In a fiscal environment where Australian universities have struggled with decreased public funding (Klopper & Power, 2014; Lazarsfeld-Jensen & Morgan, 2009; May, Peetz, & Strachan, 2013), teacher education has been slighted as a ‘cash-cow’ that is able to offer easy-to-fill places, on the cheap. Zyngier (2016, p. 32), for example, laments that ‘cash-strapped, second-tier universities are using teacher education programs as cash cows in the uncapped tertiary education market, filling their lecture theatres with low achievers.’ Dinham (2013) similarly contends that teacher education programs are often the largest undergraduate professional course in Australian universities, thus providing a significant source of income. He suggests that minimum entry scores, in some universities, are set far too low to meet financial targets, and ‘when universities experience an overall shortfall in student applications, this “load” is often shifted to teacher education, further driving down entry scores’ (para. 3).

Such views accord with a perception of teacher education courses more generally, with an Australian Office of Learning and Teaching review (Lloyd, 2013) citing the US experience and Harvard University Professor Katherine Merseth’s claim that ‘the dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years’ (Ramirez, 2009, as cited in Lloyd, 2013, p. 43). With teacher education in Australia and the United States providing such a significant income source for universities, the conflict between securing financial gains and allowing entry only to those applicants who meet a certain standard becomes problematic. Universities must, therefore, negotiate quality by balancing a discourse of inputs which is concerned with ensuring only a certain candidate profile can enter teacher education, with the costs involved in being selective.

A discourse of inputs as it relates to teacher education is therefore tied up with related concerns about taking responsibility for who, how, and how much funding can be afforded to higher education. Australia, in contrast to the US, has no pathways for teacher preparation other than those funded federally through the university sector. Recent attempts to shift teacher education beyond universities, such as Teach for Australia, have had rocky introductions (Crawford-Garrett & Thomas, 2018; Wilson, 2014). The influence of government regulation over all stages of the teaching profession (through state institutions such as the Queensland College of Teachers and the Victorian Institute of Teaching), along with the establishment of larger, national statutory authorities (such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership), has only further consolidated a perception of government responsibility for managing the quality of new teachers.

This is why a purely outcomes-oriented discourse in the Australian context is problematic: evidence of improvement – such as higher levels of student achievement, job placements, and increased retention rates – requires significant investment in ‘internal fixes’, and these come at a cost. There are examples of how Australian universities have attempted alternative models of teacher education compared to existing program structures, such as the clinical-based Master of Teaching at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, which scores 90% on student preparedness rates against a benchmark of 40% for standard programs (Melbourne Graduate School of Education, 2011). Similarly, Central Queensland University’s Bachelor of Learning Management (BLM), which also adopt a strong school-based model (Ingvarson, Beavis, Danielson, Ellis, & Elliott, 2005; Lynch & Smith, 2013; Smith & Lynch, 2010) and scores significantly higher than other Queensland teacher education programs on external evaluations of graduate perceptions of readiness (Ingvarson et al., 2014). First year BLM graduates also perform significantly higher than non-BLM graduates on a range of different teaching standards (Ingvarson et al., 2014). The problem is not an absence of solutions that might help improve outcomes, but that potential solutions, like those described above, are costly.

Rather than a discourse of improving outcomes across the board – requiring, in turn, across-the-board investment on scaling costly innovations evidenced as being effective – the focus, instead, has been on LANTITE to screen those who are admitted into these programs in the first instance. A discourse of inputs shifts attention from the complications (and cost) of reworking the internal complexities of teacher education, to ensuring quality is more carefully addressed at the outset, through better processes of teacher selection.

LANTITE’s constructions of the problem of teacher education: low quality teachers = low achieving students

Situated within a discourse of inputs, this paper argues that the construction of the problem of teacher education in Australia relies on the perceived decline of Australian student outcomes on international and national tests being indicative of a lack of teacher and teaching quality. However, in constructing this ‘problem,’ there are not only uncertainties about how quality is being defined, but also inconsistencies between how the problem is construed in policy documents and how it is addressed in the policy implementation of the LANTITE as practice.

With increasing policy and media focus on the need to improve the ‘quality’ of education in Australia to ensure strong student outcomes (AGDET 2015, 2016; Dinham, 2013; Thomas, 2003; Ulmer, 2016), what counts as ‘quality’ is still highly contested (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017; Sayed & Ahmed, 2015). Scholes et al. (2017), for example, argue that teaching, teachers, and context are all integral to the notion of quality education. Yet quality in education is often discussed in terms of either teacher quality or teaching quality, with no mention of the contexts that shape both teachers and teaching. Although teacher quality denotes a focus on the innate qualities of individuals and the practices they enact (Mockler, 2018; Scholes et al., 2017), teaching quality is often used to discuss more general improvement in student outcomes. This suggests, however, that both teacher and teaching quality are linked to student outcomes: a ‘high-quality’ teacher is expected to produce positive student outcomes. Darling-Hammond (2015) argues ‘the quality of teaching, most would agree, is signalled by how well students are learning’ (p. 132). Consequently, quality in schools becomes something considered objectively calculable, bringing rise to standardized, de-contextualised, and often narrow measures of teacher and teaching quality (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017; Sayed & Ahmed, 2015; Scholes et al., 2017).

With test scores declining against international and national standardized benchmarks (AGDET, 2016; Baroutsis & Lingard, 2017; Gardner, 2017), concerns about teacher and teaching quality in Australia were first raised in a series of policy documents leading up to the introduction of LANTITE. In 2011, the Australian Institute of Teachers and School Leaders (AITSL) developed the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, arguing that teacher quality was essential for education reform as teachers have ‘a direct impact on student achievement’ (p. 1). The introduction of these professional standards was significant for two reasons. First, they established a foundation to identify – and quantify – the skills, attributes, and knowledge that pre-service teachers need to produce positive student outcomes (Scholes et al., 2017). Second, teacher accreditation, which had previously been the responsibility of states/territories (Bourke, Ryan, & Lloyd, 2016), was now brought into a broader national reform agenda (Savage & O’Conner, 2015).

Three years later, however, a report from the newly created federal Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG, 2014) argued that the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers were not being effectively implemented, and recommended significant changes, both structural and cultural, to improve initial teacher education. TEMAG’s report outlined 5 key proposals with 36 recommendations, with frequent references to ‘impact,’ which was cited ‘40 times’ and ‘data/datasets’ cited ‘82 times’ (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017, p. 6), suggesting an overwhelming focus on measurable evidence as its basis for identifying teacher quality and classroom readiness.

With teacher quality and classroom readiness the focus of the TEMAG recommendations, the Australian government response enabled AITSL to become a key player in overhauling initial teacher education program accreditation, entry requirements, fieldwork requirements, and ways to determine graduate quality (AGDET, 2015). It was the introduction of a literacy and numeracy test – TEMAG’s proposal for a way to more rigorously select who enters teacher education – that is the focus of this paper. Arguing that teaching requires ‘both academic and personal qualities to engage students and foster learning’ (Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, 2014, p. xiii), TEMAG’s proposed solution to select students on their academic skills was through a test of literacy and numeracy (e.g. LANTITE) and a form of assessment that would identify desirable personal attributes (e.g. CASPer, discussed later). The intent of the TEMAG recommendation was to focus on the suitability and selection of high-quality candidates to ensure that only the ‘best people’ would enter teacher education programs (2014, p. x).

The problem with teacher education, from this particular perspective, is that teacher education programs are not attracting high-achieving (and thus high-quality) students into the profession. This suggests a cause and effect relationship. If universities fail to attract high-achieving students into teacher education programs from the outset, the effect is low quality teaching from graduates, which then results in low achieving students in schools. It is important to note that school outcomes are often discussed in terms of PISA, which measures competency in English, Mathematics, and Science. This makes the cause-effect relationship even more salient given that the selection technique to determine high quality teachers is a test of literacy (English) and numeracy (Mathematics). Pre-service teachers who demonstrate competency on a literacy and numeracy test are presumed to produce students who can do the same. Gore, Barron, Holmes, and Smith (2016) acknowledge that although pre-service teachers with a strong academic background make an important contribution to supporting their own students’ learning, they also argue that other factors, such as ensuring teacher candidates represent the cultural diversity of our classrooms, should also be taken into account.

However, this discourse of inputs and selection to improve teacher education seems undermined in the Australian government’s implementation of the LANTITE in 2016. Although TEMAG argued for selecting more suitable teacher candidates as one of its five key proposals, the ‘soft’ introduction of LANTITE means that universities can request students to take it at any time up to final course conferral. In other words, LANTITE’s original emphasis on selection was lost as the policy shifted from a focus on selecting suitable students on entry into teacher education, to instead requiring pre-service teachers to pass the test before graduating (AGDET, 2015). Allowing pre-service teachers to reach their final year of teacher preparation – and only then be classified as ineligible to teach based on a test designed for entry – is problematic. It maintains the position of teacher education programs as ‘cash cows’ in that they can continue to collect tuition from students who might never see a classroom, but it places pre-service teachers and teacher education programs in a precarious situation.

The three key actors in recent Australian education policy reform efforts – AITSL, TEMAG, and the federal government – have all attempted to address the decline of student outcomes by improving teacher quality, but there have been inconsistencies in their approach. A discourse of inputs has given legitimacy to arguments for selecting only the highest-quality students into teacher education programs, but the implementation of LANTITE in practice – as we elaborate further below – seems to have little to do with selection, given the students being tested are already enrolled into the same programs.

LANTITE policy in practice: practice as cost neutral/avoidance

Focused on ensuring ‘quality in’, and the ‘problem of teacher education’ constructed as a lack of quality candidates amongst those who are doing teaching courses, the Australian Government originally introduced LANTITE in mid-2016 with two goals: first, as a gate-keeping mechanism to ensure students admitted into teacher education had relatively high standards of literacy and numeracy (the top 30% of the general population); second, as a way to attract higher quality applicants to the profession more generally from the outset. That is, by setting an entry bar to reposition teaching as a more competitive, exclusive (and consequently, desirable) professional domain (AGDET, 2015, 2016; Gore et al., 2016).

Although the highest-profile example of its type and a federally-funded national initiative, LANTITE is just one of several gate-keeping measures that have been introduced by universities in the last 2–3 years, including CASPer (Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics) and TCAT (Teacher Capability Assessment Tool) (Bowles, Hattie, Dinham, Scull, & Clinton, 2014). However, beyond its federal mandate and profile, what is distinctive about LANTITE is its exclusive focus on two core skills to define ‘what counts’ as a quality for admission into teaching: literacy and numeracy.

LANTITE defines success as having ‘personal literacy and numeracy […] broadly equivalent to those of the top 30 per cent of the population’ (AGDET, 2017, p. 6), echoing a larger, more well-established discourse about what is most valued within the Australian education system more generally: the ‘core skills’ of ‘learning, reading, writing, oral communication and numeracy’ (Australian Core Skills Framework [ACSF], 2016). ‘Personal literacy’, LANTITE elaborates, is the ability to ‘[understand, evaluate, use and shape] written texts to participate in an education community, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential as a teacher’ (AGDET, 2017, p. 10). Further, the test acknowledges a focus on reading and technical writing skills over ‘extended written communication, oral or aural modes of literacy’ (AGDET, 2017, p. 9). In other words, rather than being a direct test of authentic writing, test-takers answer multiple choice questions as a proxy for global writing ability. With a bank of 14 test templates constructed from 108 field-tests items, the literacy component comprises 60 items: 40 on reading and 20 on technical skills for writing (AGDET, 2017, p. 31). LANTITE defines ‘personal numeracy’ as ‘interpreting and communicating important non-technical mathematical information, and using such information to solve relevant real-world problems to participate in an education community, achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential as a teacher’ (AGDET, 2017, p. 21). Further, the numeracy component also assesses the extent to which prospective teachers can use every day mathematics to solve real-world problems in daily professional life. Focussed on three main content areas – number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability – the test comprises 60 numeracy items across two sections: the first 48 items allow use of an on-screen calculator; the second 12 items are done without calculators (AGDET, 2017, p. 31).

Although TEMAG’s 2014 recommendations emphasized a more rigorous and transparent process of selection at entry, LANTITE’s ‘soft introduction’ has allowed universities to determine when students sit the test, so long as they pass before graduation. A review of entry criteria across Australian universities indicates that no courses currently require students to have passed LANTITE as a condition for admission. Instead, enrolment is typically tied to a mid-course milestone, such as moving from first to second year (Monash University, 2018). In New South Wales, the teacher accreditation authority has externally mandated that students have successfully completed the test prior to their final practicum in a school-based setting (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017).

By design, LANTITE should be passable at point-of-entry into teacher education: courses themselves are not considered to value-add to the competencies LANTITE considers essential for improving teacher quality. As it explains in its supplementary materials, the test aims to determine whether aspiring teachers can already demonstrate, at entry, ‘their capacity to engage effectively with a rigorous higher education program and to carry out the intellectual demands of teaching’ (AITSL, 2011, p. 12).

In 2018, each test-taking attempt cost $185 AUD (equivalent to about $150 USD), with each component being $92.50 (Australian Council for Education Research [ACER], 2018), usually paid for by the teaching student. In some cases, course providers cover these fees (e.g. University of Queensland, 2016). LANTITE is therefore at the very least cost-neutral but, with 20,000 students graduating from teacher education annually, it has the potential to generate up to $3.7 million in revenue each year (Knott, 2016). Pitched at a Year 10 level of literacy and numeracy (Riddle, 2015), students have three attempts to pass or, with a letter of support from their teacher education course provider, can apply for additional attempts if required. With the federal Minister of Education and Training reporting that the 2016 pass rate for the LANTITE was approximately 95% (Barry, 2017), it is not surprising why it has been suggested that the test is ultimately pointless (Riddle, 2015). Field Rickards, TEMAG member and former Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, has similarly questioned LANTITE’s relevance given the trend towards graduate teacher education at master’s level: ‘There’s no point having a test costing $185 if 100 percent of students pass’ (in Knott, 2016, p. 11).

Therefore, despite aiming to be a mechanism for selection and as a way of attracting high-quality candidates to teacher education and the profession, LANTITE has been appropriated in practice in ways that have left many questioning its relevance. We take up this dissonance between the intended aims and purpose of the policy initiative in terms of its actual impact and effects in the final section of this discussion.

Impact and implementation

Given that the LANTITE was only introduced mid-2016, there is limited research on the impact of this test. However, the potential outcomes and impact of the implementation of the LANTITE can be considered by examining the impact of established standardised tests in teacher education programs in the United States and the findings from a recent study analysing sample LANTITE test questions. In addition, exploring the fiscal impact of the test interrogates the financial gains and losses of the implementation of this policy.

Predicting impact: who will this test marginalize?

Given the test has been criticised for being so ‘easy to pass’, there is value in understanding whether the few that do fail are concentrated in a particular group, and what their characteristics might be. Evidence from the United States, for example, suggests that standardised tests for teacher selection and accreditation impact diversity in the teaching workforce, with many arguing these measures are discriminatory to minorities (Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010; Graham, 2013; Memory et, al., 2003; Petchauer & Baker-Doyle, 2016).

Minorities have been found to score lower than whites on standardized tests (Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010; Madkins, 2011; Memory et al., 2003) and, correlated with the increased use of teacher testing, the ethnic and racial diversity of the teaching workforce has decreased (Graham, 2013).

With respect to LANTITE in Australia, O’Keeffe, O’Halloran, Wignell, and Tan (2017) analysed the linguistic complexity of sample numeracy skills test items – with a focus on the processes (e.g. verbs), participants (e.g. noun group structures), and circumstances in each clause (e.g. adverbial groups and prepositional phrases) – and found that the questions being asked presented a range of ‘linguistic challenges and complexities’ (p. 249). The implications of this is that while students may possess the desired numeracy skills, they are unable to demonstrate that competence due to the linguistic complexity of the exam questions. In addition to rendering the test an invalid measure of numeracy, O’Keeffe et al. suggest that having mathematical test items that were more linguistically complex than they needed to be, had the potential to discriminate negatively against students from socially disadvantaged groups which might have lower levels of literacy or limited proficiency in English.

van Gelderen (2017), for example, cautions of the impact LANTITE may have on the recruitment of indigenous educators, making it even more difficult to recruit new students to education than it was before LANTITE’s implementation.

Fiscal impact and the knowledge economy: who pays for investment into teacher education reform?

By making teacher education entry requirements more rigorous, with the hopeful outcome that it will attract high achieving students and then ensure high quality teachers, there also comes financial benefits. Although we also advocate for strong literacy and numeracy skills, a standardized test approach is ripe for profits and marketization – but for who? The term ‘knowledge economy’ suggests that knowledge and education can be treated as a business product (Ball, 2013), with investment in education being an investment in human capital (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). The use of external standardized tests, like the LANTITE, as a requirement for entry into teacher education, creates a unique education market with opportunities for commercialization of education products.

As mentioned earlier, with a fee of $185 AUD to sit both the literacy and numeracy components – as well as the potential for students to take these components for up to three (or, with permission, more) times – questions are raised regarding where the 3.7-million-dollar revenue (Knott, 2016) is going and to whom? The Australian Council for Education Research who administers the test is a non-profit organization, with the assumption that any surplus is being re-invested into further research and development. However, it still must be acknowledged that a large amount of money is going into a thriving, yet increasing powerful non-profit company while potential teachers are having to pay the price, literally. In addition, if the surplus is being re-invested into more research and development, should it not be redirected into teacher education reform? Furthermore, it is not only ACER who capitalizes on LANTITE for financial benefit, but book publishers and course providers are also offered opportunities when new high-stakes tests such as this is introduced. While more research is needed to determine whether the test improves teacher quality, it appears that the implementation of this literacy and numeracy test has a financial impact, with some actors gaining more power and agency and others less. This ‘investment’ into teacher education is going out of the pockets of student teachers and into a privatized market. While it should be noted that with every policy initiative, financial resources are required and re-appropriated (e.g. taxpayers’ money), the financial load for this initiative is primarily placed on the very people we would like to recruit into teaching, suggesting an unequal balance of power.

In addition to the financial costs outlined above, there are other associated costs to consider. This has been a significant point of contention in the implementation of the US outcomes-based performance assessment, such as the edTPA (e.g. Petchauer & Baker-Doyle, 2016; Reagan, Schram, McCurdy, Chang, & Evans, 2016). First, the move to independent auditors (e.g. ACER) to assess literacy and numeracy skills removes the autonomy, independence, and expertise from teacher education programs to design high-quality programs that develop these skills in context (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017). Second, the use of a high-stakes test to measure teacher quality suggests that standardized tests are best practice in education, reinforcing neoliberal ideals that focus overwhelmingly on narrow forms of quantifiable data and impact (Gardner, 2017; Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2017). Therefore, if the problem with teacher education is a lack of teacher quality and the solution is requiring pre-service teachers to take a standardized literacy and numeracy test, this leaves little accountability among ITEs to prepare and equip pre-service teachers with the needed literacy and numeracy skills to be effective teachers post-admission. As Perry (2011) argues, ITEs are well-equipped as educational institutions to not only teach basic skills but to ensure that these skills are authentically contextualized within a teaching context, which is very difficult for standardized tests to do.

Conclusion

Using Cochran et al.’s (2013) framework to interrogate the development, execution and impact of the LANTITE, we argue that policy makers introduced the LANTITE to address the perceived lack of teacher quality in Australia with the hope that new admission criteria might aid in selecting higher quality teacher candidates into teacher education programs. However, we conclude that this particular policy initiative has little impact on reforming teacher education as a whole. We argue that the message that this policy sends, whether intentional or unintentional, is that quality teacher education programs are secondary to the need to attract teacher candidates with a particular knowledge and/or skill set (e.g. literacy and numeracy skills) to ensure we have the highest quality teachers in Australian classrooms. Finally, we argue that a narrow approach to literacy and numeracy skills through a high-stakes exam is not the most successful approach to improve quality in Australian schools.

The introduction of the LANTITE appears to be a tokenistic gesture that provides an illusion to constituents that policies are being implemented to create meaningful change and reform in teacher education. With approximately 95% of teacher candidates passing the test (Barry, 2017), this policy gatekeeping mechanism, statistically, does not appear to be resulting in significant reform of the selection process.

If most students are passing the test, this provides limited motivation for ITE programs to either prioritize or scaffold literacy and numeracy skills in their courses. If the goal is to encourage literacy and numeracy skill development among our teacher candidates, there needs to be more responsibility, along with more accountability, among ITE programs to ensure that they are creating their own internal benchmarks to attract high-achieving students yet addressing basic literacy and numeracy skills in their programs. It is in these programs that these skills can be directly tested (e.g. students are assessed on their ability to write rather than choosing the correct writing conventions in a multiple-choice test), scaffolded, and contextualized – all characteristics that are almost impossible to achieve in a standardized test. Rather than students spending time on learning test strategies and how to manage test anxiety (all while knowing that the overwhelming majority of the students will eventually pass the test), students might be encouraged to invest their time building and demonstrating their literacy and numeracy skills in a variety of ways throughout their education course.

Accountability is needed to ensure that if students are not making any progress at demonstrating a particular standard in literacy and numeracy, even when provided with ample support, that ITE programs do not continue to graduate students who simply do not possess the skills or the potential to be an effective teacher. Furthermore, while the introduction of the LANTITE does not significantly impact the number of teacher candidates who are admitted into ITE programs, there does need to be more research on the 5% who are failing, why they are failing and whether other ‘measures’ of literacy and numeracy skills (e.g. more direct assessment of these skills) would yield the same result. While a 5% fail rate does not suggest that this policy initiative has a significant impact on teacher education as a whole, if the 5% consists of primarily minorities then the test needs to be reviewed in light of how this test is marginalizing minorities, which in turn shapes the ‘face’ of teacher education in Australia.

While the proposed ‘solution’ to the lack of quality in education was to strengthen the selection criteria to attract high-achieving students, Strong’s (2011) review of the literature on teacher quality found that there are a variety of differing perspectives on what teacher quality entails. These include qualifications (e.g. degree, exam scores, etc.), personal and psychological standards (e.g. love of children, compassion, etc.), pedagogy (e.g. creating a positive class environment), and teacher effectiveness (e.g. ability to raise student achievement scores). Attracting high-achieving students by introducing additional selection criteria – including increasing benchmark scores and introducing additional exams – may address ‘qualifications,’ but it does not always provide opportunities to assess the remaining three factors associated with teacher quality. The risk of focusing primarily on measuring specific knowledge (e.g. literacy and numeracy skills) on selection is that a message is sent that teacher candidates who have these competencies will be quality teachers, regardless of the training they receive to become teachers. Therefore, the measure of a teacher’s potential success (and the success of their students) is determined before they have entered an ITE program. If this is true, what is the value of ITE programs? Can we determine a teacher’s worth and capacity even before they are trained as teachers as if the quality of the teacher education program is not relevant? If the focus continues to be on a candidate’s aptitude to be a teacher rather than their development into a quality teacher, then ITE programs become obsolete.

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Notes on contributors

Melissa Barnes

Dr Melissa Barnes’ teaching experiences in the USA, Germany, Vietnam, Australia and Brunei have collectively shaped her understanding of language, literacy, assessment and teacher education in diverse educational contexts. Melissa has been both a primary classroom teacher and a high school English as an Additional Language teacher. Her research interests include TESOL and curriculum and assessment.

Russell Cross

Russell Cross is Associate Professor in language and literacy education. He leads teaching and research initiatives with a focus on content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and teachers’ practice in languages education more broadly. With a focus on the sociocultural and political nature of teachers’ work and knowledge, Russell’s work has appeared in Modern Language Journal, Teachers and Teaching and Language & Education, among others. With Trevor Gale from the University of Glasgow and Carmen Mills from the University of Queensland, Russell is current Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council’s national discovery project, Social justice dispositions informing teachers’ pedagogy in advantaged and disadvantaged secondary schools.