Opinion & Commentary
Give parents informed choice for schooling
In his widely-reported speech to The Centre for Independent Studies this week, the Prime Minister talked about the importance of choice in education. When parents can choose a school for their child, we find that parents and students are more satisfied with their school, academic achievement increases, and schools have an incentive to attract students and meet their individual needs. Research evidence from all over the world has shown this.
However, for choice to have far-reaching effectiveness, it must be informed choice, something the Prime Minister also endorsed. Parents and students need to be able to select a school based on a broad range of sound criteria, such as academic performance, teacher characteristics, school activities, discipline and behaviour policies, sports participation, subject specialties, vocational education, and so on.
Arguably, the most important of these criteria is academic performance, and yet this is the aspect of schooling on which the public is given the least information. State departments of education have sufficient information to show not only the level of student achievement in each school, but also to determine a value-added measure for the school.
Value-added is extremely important because it shows the growth in achievement and provides a fairer basis for comparison. For example, some high achieving schools start out with high achieving students, while other schools start out with students of lower ability and lift their performance considerably.
School performance reporting has a variety of benefits. It puts the spotlight on highly effective schools, so that other schools can learn from their successes. It also identifies problem schools, which can then be supported or, in cases of chronic underperformance, dramatically changed. Without public identification of underperformance and the community pressure it generates, problem schools can languish at the bottom of the heap indefinitely, and thousands of children educationally disadvantaged as a result.
Such is the secrecy surrounding school performance, particularly in NSW, that not only parents are denied information but also researchers outside the education department. Education researchers in other countries are able to access and analyse large amounts of data about their student and school achievement, resulting in useful and objective research evidence to inform policy.
A common criticism against school performance reporting is that it will allow the creation of ‘league tables’, where schools are ranked from the ‘best’ to the ‘worst’. It is likely that some media will do just that. But a league table that lists every secondary school in NSW from 1 to 2152 will be of no interest or relevance to the majority of parents. Most parents will be looking closely at the small number of schools in their area and will compare them on a variety of measures, with academic performance being weighed up against the numerous other pros and cons.
Insiders like teachers know which schools are good, but the rest of us are left with only spurious information to make one of the most important decisions we will make for our children.
Is it any wonder that people choose a school based on the way it looks, or the way students dress, or glossy marketing, or hearsay? For wealthy families, sometimes the size of the school fees is seen as a proxy for the quality of education. In these respects, non-government schools often have an advantage, but it is entirely possible that a value-added measure would reveal excellent public schools that are doing more with less.
Non-government schools have another advantage — they have greater financial and staffing autonomy. Principals and school councils decide how to spend their money and they decide which teachers should teach in their schools. They are also held accountable for the school’s performance.
School performance reporting must go hand-in-hand with extending greater autonomy to public schools. It is well-known that quality teaching has an effect on student achievement above and beyond any other factor. A principal who has no control over the quality of teaching in their school can have little influence on the level of learning and achievement.
Both the Howard government and the federal opposition have voiced their support for school performance reporting and greater autonomy for principals. How and when they will be realised is less than certain because the traditional resistance of state governments and teachers unions must first be overcome, but at least there is reason for optimism.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies (www.cis.org.au)
