Teachers to hold protest against school-based assessment

Teachers are upset over glitches in the school-based assessment system, including difficulties uploading data online. – The Malaysian Insider pic, February 5, 2014.  A teachers’ pressure group is planning to hold a protest at the Education Ministry at the end of this month to demand that Putrajaya end its ambitious three-year-old pupil assessment programme.

The protest, a rarity for the profession, reflects growing discontent among teachers with Putrajaya’s implementation of the school-based assessment (SBA) system, said a spokesman from Suara Guru-Masyarakat Malaysia (SGMM).

This is despite repeated assurances from Putrajaya that the SBA was necessary as part of reforms to the national education system and that kinks in the system would be worked out by April.

SGMM working group chief Mohd Nor Izzat Mohd Johari said the protest, dubbed #himpunan222kpmputrajaya, would be held on February 22 in front of the ministry in Putrajaya.

“We are holding it on Saturday to give more teachers the opportunity to make it there and also not to take time away during the weekdays from our responsibilities,” said Mohd Nor Izzat, who teaches at a secondary school in Pahang.

“We are targetting about 200 teachers, although we expect only about 50 to show up," he told The Malaysian Insider, adding that the act of teachers protesting was already a powerful symbol.

Being civil servants, teachers rarely take to the streets to vent their anger against the government for fear of reprisal.

Mohd Nor Izzat said the group’s other demand was that the ministry reopen files on teachers who they claimed have been unfairly reprimanded.

The SBA was implemented in 2011 starting with Form 1 students. It is part of the government’s efforts to produce more well-rounded students instead of those who purely excel in studies.

There are no annual exams under SBA. Each day, teachers grade pupils on a subject based on a six-band spectrum starting from band one “understand” (the lowest) to band six “exemplary” (the highest).

The data has to be entered each day into a centralised computer system.

Though SGMM admitted that the SBA was an ideal system that has been successfully used the world over, it was difficult to practise in Malaysia.

Problems include a high pupil-to-teacher ratio and a vague tracking system for individual pupil performance.

SGMM also claimed that weaknesses in Malaysia’s SBA had led many schools to fall back on the old annual exam to track pupil performance.

This is while teachers and school administrators agree to use SBA superficially to please officials in Putrajaya. It was reported that teachers are also frustrated with inadequate computer resources for storing SBA data, stemming from network congestion.

This led many to waking up at 3am to input data when traffic is lower.

Mohd Nor Izzat claimed that some teachers who had attended briefings by the ministry recently said that past SBA data would not be used to track the performance of Form 3 students this year.

This, he said, contradicted an earlier directive by the ministry for teachers to collect SBA data on Form 1 students starting from 2012. This data would then be used to track those same students when they reached Form 3 this year. 

“Before they said the data would be used. Now they said it won’t. So what have we been doing all these years then? What is the data for?” asked Mohd Nor Izzat.

Education Minister II Datuk Seri Mohd Idris Jusoh had previously assured teachers and school administrators that the SBA’s shortcomings would be fixed by April.

He said the ministry’s officers were going to the ground to brief teachers, parents and school administrators on the SBA and to gain feedback to rectify its weaknesses.

“At the end of the day, this is a system that Malaysian society wants. It is a departure from the old system that was just based on exams.

“We do not just want students who are only good in exams but who are well rounded,” Mohd Idris had said.