Opinion & Commentary
School Reporting Policy is in a League of its Own
When the federal government confirmed last year that it would be making good on its election promise to introduce transparency measure for schools, it attracted intense criticism from many quarters. These transparency measures include indicators of school-level performance in national tests, the School Certificate and Higher School Certificate, and a range of other information.
Even people in favour of the policy, myself included, wondered whether it would really happen, because it required the cooperation of state governments that have trenchantly opposed such moves in the past. Against the criticism and the skeptics, state and territory education ministers signed up to the policy and on 12 June the Ministerial Council for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) released a new set of agreed principles and protocols for school reporting.
In order to comply with this new agreement, New South Wales has to amend legislation put in place in 1997 that specifically prohibits the publication of information that allows schools to be compared on academic performance. Yesterday, a bill was introduced to the NSW parliament to do just that. The amendment will allow a new national federal agency, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, to publish the academic outcomes of individual schools.
The main cause for concern amongst the critics of school performance reporting is the potential for the publication of ‘league tables’ – lists of schools ranked from ‘best’ to ‘worst’ by a single performance indicator. Fears that this might happen were realized when a Tasmanian newspaper recently published school rankings of the newspaper’s own creation.
The prime question is whether the public good arguments for reporting on individual school performance outweigh the risk of harm from league tables. I think they do. The benefits flow to parents, as mentioned above, but the information can also allow high performing schools to be identified and share their successes. It puts pressure on governments or other education authorities to improve low performing schools which might otherwise continue giving students a poor quality education. It sheds light on whether school reputations, both good and bad, are deserved.
School performance reporting and league tables are not the same thing. School performance reporting, done properly, is a way to empower parents and make them informed participants in their child’s education. The data to do this already exists, but has been kept from the public eye. Federal education minister Julia Gillard has made her thoughts on this clear, last week saying that she finds it ‘offensive to suggest that this information should be withheld or that parents are too stupid to know what to do with it.’
League tables are the great bogeyman of school accountability and transparency. They represent the possibility that information provided for the public good can do harm if used in the wrong way. Concerns about league tables are understandable. League tables offer no useful information. Parents need good information about their school and other schools in their area, not a ranked list of thousands of schools, most of which are hundreds of kilometres away. There is no point comparing a small central school in regional NSW with James Ruse Agricultural High.
Furthermore, there is a risk of harm to schools that end up at the bottom of the list. Some schools might deserve to be there, but others won’t. League tables don’t offer any kind of context in which to view schools’ performance.
The MCEETYA protocols acknowledge this, stating that ‘governments will not publish simplistic league tables or rankings, and will put in place strategies to manage the risk that third parties may seek to produce such tables or rankings.’ Unfortunately, it is not clear what these strategies will be, or how governments or ACARA might act to prevent spurious league tables being published.
To this end, while it was being debated in parliament yesterday, the NSW Greens introduced a clause to the amendment which attempts to prevent the publication of league tables in ‘a newspaper or other document this is publicly available in this state’. The clause also prohibits the identification of schools ‘in a percentile of less than 90% in relation to school results, except with the permission of the principal of the school.’ The wording is ambiguous so time will tell whether this clause will be effective or even damaging. It was introduced in the last half hour of the debate and agreed to with insufficient consideration.
If league tables can be prevented, they should be, but not at the expense of parents’ right to know. Hopefully, in their haste to pass the amendment, the NSW parliament has not undermined this principle.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
