What are those Flemish keys?
These are tests that all primary and secondary school students will take a total of four times during their school career. Students from the fourth year and the second year of secondary school will take the tests between April 24 and May 15. The sixth grade will follow in 2026 and the sixth grade a year later.
Education Minister Ben Weyts (N-VA) calls it “a small revolution in the education world”. “This finally gives us a complete picture of the evolution of education quality,” said the minister.
The intention is mainly to improve that quality. Time and again, international studies show that we are not doing well in reading comprehension, mathematics and science. According to Weyts, such central tests can help turn the situation around, as action can be taken more quickly in the event of a bad score.
What exactly do those tests measure?
For the time being it only concerns Dutch and mathematics. According to the Support Center for Central Testing in Education, which drew up the tests, it does not assess bite-sized knowledge, but rather whether the students have the right skills. Can they extract the essence from a text, for example? Or are they able to solve a mathematical problem?
According to the Support Center, it is explicitly not the intention that teachers or parents try to prepare their children for those tests. In doing so, the authors attempt to respond to what has been the biggest criticism of such a central test in recent years: teaching to the test. In other words, teachers who, in the hope of obtaining a good score, focus too much on the material that appears in the test and neglect other material.
How exactly do those tests work?
The students receive two tests, spread over two days. A test lasts two hours, including explanation and break. In addition, students are also presented with a questionnaire about how they experienced the test and about their home situation. Because the results of the schools are corrected based on the socio-economic situation of the students. A school with many disadvantaged students is difficult to compare with, say, an elite college.
That questionnaire has received a lot of criticism in recent months. It is difficult to ask for sensitive information about the home situation through the children. Elisabeth Meuleman (Flemish MP for Green) said earlier The morning to fear that this serves a political purpose. “Once again they are looking for a stick to beat vulnerable parents with.”
What will happen to the results?
The results are intended for internal use, it is official. The students themselves and their parents receive a brief explanation and a so-called skill level, from A to E. The schools may include that result in their final assessment, but it should never be a decisive factor. The schools also receive general feedback on how they performed compared to comparable schools (read: schools with a similar student profile).
The fact that schools can be compared with each other based on the results of these tests is the main reason why Flanders did not yet have central tests. The educational field is terrified that rankings would be drawn up from ‘best’ to ‘worst’ school. That is why a ban on rankings has been included in the decree.
Is there any criticism of those tests?
It has always been there. With baking. Although most critics have since changed their minds. Especially because the major advantage – namely more data on learning performance in Flanders – outweighs the disadvantages for them.
Roger Standaert, professor emeritus of pedagogy at Ghent University, remains critical. He researched education quality systems in various countries for more than thirty years. He calls the Flemish tests “a disturbing form of measurementism”.
“You cannot measure school performance the way you measure pressure in physics,” he says. According to him, the fact that this is being attempted here fits in with an ideological trend accountability, where you can hold people accountable for the results achieved. “This will mainly increase the pressure on teachers.”
‘You cannot measure school performance the way you measure pressure in physics. This will further increase the pressure on teachers’
According to Standaert, we will soon receive rankings of schools in the media. “In other countries there were also guarantees that this was not allowed, but the results were quickly lost. They are known to parents, teachers and school administrators. It is an illusion that you can keep it hidden.”
Maybe the media doesn’t even have to be the culprits. Weyts has already announced that a school that performs below par will be visited by the education inspectorate. Schools that are doing well should be able to spend their money more freely.
These are all things that can be quite visible to the outside world. It therefore appears that these Flemish tests may not be as optional as many people think.
