Opinion & Commentary
Teacher union still waging a war against transparency
The Australian Education Union is waging a war against the publication of school league tables.
Its latest salvo is a proposal to reinstate school inspections. The AEU wants the federal government to scrap its plans to publish literacy and numeracy data and instead introduce a system of external reviews by teams of education experts. The union's assurance that it does not oppose accountability for schools is welcome and the school inspection proposal sounds good in theory.
As usual, however, there is much to be gleaned by reading between the lines.
The AEU's charter of school accountability, improvement, assessment and reporting is an exercise in obfuscation. It contains statements such as "Parents, students and the public have the right to know that school leaders and teachers are professionally competent and students are engaged in high quality learning." It says nothing about the right to know when they are not.
The charter likewise says nothing about whether the proposed external reviews would be available to the public. These are crucial points.
Schools in Britain have been subject to external reviews by the Office for Standards in Education since 1992 and before that by Her Majesty's Inspectorate. The reports of these inspections are published by the Office of Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, or Ofsted, on the internet, along with the schools' performance data.
A recent report by Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, a London-based think tank, provides insights into the inspection process. It sets out a strong case that external reviews or inspections are valuable as an additional source of information about schools, rather than a replacement for assessment data.
It also counsels that there are necessary conditions for inspections to be useful: they must focus on what is happening in schools, not just rely on test results; they must be conducted frequently and thoroughly; the inspection team must have good subject knowledge and experience working in schools; and the reviews must be honest, whether the assessment is good, bad or in-between.
An inspection regime, if done properly, is expensive. For a team of experts to visit every school on average every three years for, say, a week would require a full-time inspectorate of several hundred people. This means a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, at a minimum. Given the size of the outlay of taxpayers' money and the importance of the information provided by inspections, it is untenable to argue that the reports from inspections should not be made available to the public.
From this perspective the AEU would do well to be careful what it wishes for. Instead of inspections being an alternative accountability mechanism, they would more likely become an additional one.
People are keenly interested in information about schools, despite the AEU's assertions that publication of schools' literacy and numeracy results is unanimously opposed by parents, teachers and principals.
Last month the AEU produced an open letter to federal Education Minster Julia Gillard that purported to represent the views of everyone that mattered. In truth, the letter was signed by the executive of six influential organisations that were against public access to any comparative data about schools.
It is not at all clear that the views expressed even accurately represent the opinions of all of their members, let alone every other parent, teacher and principal in Australia. For example, the Australian Council of State School Organisations is a national umbrella organisation for the various state-level federations of parents and citizen's associations and school councils.
In other words, ACSSO is two levels removed from the P&Cs and school councils and even they represent a small minority of each school's mums and dads. How can it possibly be claimed that ACSSO speaks for all parents?
It is commendable that the union has so far decided to fight this battle in the arena of public debate rather than by encouraging industrial action, thereby limiting the collateral damage of lost learning time for students. And the idea of school inspections does have merit, but the strategy of providing an alternative accountability mechanism to replace the publication of school performance data is doomed to fail, as have other attempts to derail the federal government's transparency agenda.
Making literacy and numeracy data available to the public will potentially, and perhaps inevitably, lead to the creation of league tables of some kind.
The misguided attempt to legislate against league tables in NSW shows they cannot be avoided once the information is available. Newspapers are already defying the ban, willing to risk litigation and a large fine.
Although Gillard has repeatedly acknowledged that she would prefer that league tables not be published, she has realised the only way to stop the publication of league tables of school performance is to stop the flow of information. She has also clearly concluded that this is a price too high to pay.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
