Yesterday's letterbox junk included a flyer from an academic coaching college – the kind of place that specialises not so much in remedial tuition as in helping kids pass selective high school and scholarship exams.
Among its claims to fame, the college says it placed 66 students in the 2007 Year 7 intake for the best selective high school in the state. Now, given that this school offers only 120 places in Year 7 and assuming that there are other coaching and tuition colleges around the city that are also successfully preparing students for selective high school entrance tests, it does rather look as if a significant majority of the current cohort has been coached. (Whether or not these students *needed* the coaching in order to gain their places is too speculative a question.)
Flashback 25 years: some of the kids entering Year 7 at this school had been in "opportunity classes" in Year 6 – a kind of accelerated or advanced program that allowed bright kids to tackle more challenging work – but very few, if any, had had any kind of formal coaching for the entrance tests themselves. It was more a case of blithely rocking up to the examination centre on the day, doing the tests, and thinking no more of it until the results came in.
Let's say I'm bothered by the shift. There's a difference between extending an academically gifted child through more challenging or advanced study and coaching them to blitz a very particular set of tests. One stimulates intellectual development and joy of learning as well as allowing students to progress at a faster rate than they might otherwise in normal classes; the other has a narrow focus which is entirely to do with "getting in" (and then what?).
My concerns aren't allayed in the slightest when I read forum and facebook discussion comments from recent alumni and current students and see disturbing references to "Factory/Academic Centre of Excellence" and "UAI factory". It's odd, because on the face of it the school still has what looks like a thriving extra-curricular program (all the music, theatre, debating, sports, cadets, Duke of Edinburgh, and other programs of yore) – so students must be doing more than churning out the marks – but it does seem as if the attitude and values have shifted.
Perhaps it comes from the school, but given its relatively stable teacher population I'm not convinced by that argument. Perhaps it comes from the students and their perceptions of what's expected of them after high school. Or perhaps it comes from the parents. After all, it's a parent who sends a 10 or 11-year-old to a coaching college...
Footnotes:
And then there is the inevitable: a few years back another large coaching college was alleged to have stolen past papers, thereby giving their students an unfair advantage on tests that are ultimately meant to test natural ability.
Moving from parliament to the media later that month, an article that mentions that the tests be given a written component. I found that interesting because there had been a written component in the past, so clearly at some point the creative writing and similar writing questions had been removed.
These are old links, but reports and comments elsewhere suggest very little change. One kiddie last month wrote: "i ama kid and i hate selctive high schools because they put so much pressure on us to get in. parents send kids to coaching3 days a week." Sad.
UPDATE (10 April 2008): Allan Tieu, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, offers a different perspective on the broader theme.