Even in those heady piñata-bashing weeks of November 2007, I don’t think any of us were expecting the Rudd/Gillard government to be some kind of paragon of progressivism. By then, I was already low expectations R Us. Simply not being Howard, Abbott, Nelson and Bishop were the key to gaining my vote. It turns out that even this was asking a bit too much.
Murphy's law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else's web site, there will be a great big dog's balls of a HTML error just below the byline.
At first, I was a fan of Julia Gillard, a funny, combative ranga who could reduce the baying saurians in the Liberal seats to a humiliated near-silence (assuming they’re capable of understanding and feeling humiliation, that is). She’s fun to listen to in question time, but she broke my heart with the part she played in the 2004 election. OK, so she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near environmental policy, but surely she’d come good on the social justice issues…?
OK, now my heart is thoroughly broken and trampled on. I’ve become the voter who cannot love. The infamous My School database/website has been released today (and very buggy it is, too), and what do we see as the very first headline on the dead-tree Herald Sun? OUR SCHOOLS SHAME. The banner on the online version? HOW DID YOUR SCHOOL RATE? So predictable. Don’t ask me how the Boy’s school rates (The Girl has just left the public system with an excellent VCE score and as yet no crack habit – the Boy starts year 7 on Monday. Serial only children, I haz them.) The website hasn’t worked successfully for me yet. And yes, I am aware of most internet traditions and able to work most simple interfaces, so I don’t think it’s me.
Back to Julia, who on assuming the Deputy PMship announced that she would bring on an Education Revolution. Well, since “revolution” can mean doing a complete 360 and ending up facing the same way as when you started, then OK, technically correct, Julia.
Trevor Cobbold in his article, The Free market and the Social divide in Education (PDF), points out that the My School website is a continuation of the commodification of education which features the establishment of “quasi-markets” in schools.
The publication of the results of each school is seen as a central component of quasi-markets because it is supposed to inform parent choice…
The Rudd government has maintained and extended the focus on markets and competition in education… It has not reversed any of the key measures of the Howard government.
…It is paradoxical that a government which calls itself progressive is implementing the policies of its erstwhile conservative predecessor.
Progressive? They’re starting to make the previous government look more progressive:
…(A)s far as education policy is concerned, the Rudd Government has given John Howard and David Kemp another term in office…(The PM) says that schools that fail to improve will be subject to “tough action”, including firing principals and senior staff and closing schools. This is something that Kemp could only dream of.
And a Labor government that can actually introduce policies that aren’t the previous government’s leftovers plus spin from a personable pollie – that’s something that I can only dream of.
Spot on, Helen. What is very disheartening is that we used to believe that Ms Gillard was “of the Left”. and we thought that because Rudd was a bureaucrat, he would go for evidence-based policy. Our beliefs were not well founded.
Once again I have to chuckle….. a view from a website that is so far to the left that it can’t tell the difference between the ALP and the Coalition. For the vast majority of Australians living in mainstream Australia we cringe at the views from the left fringe (the Greens) or the right (One Nation) and give thanks that neither Bob Brown nor Pauline Hanson will ever be given the keys to the lunatic asylum.
Good on you Julia. I’ve been hugely impressed by how she’s handled this issue and some kind of measurement system in education is long overdue.
The website worked perfectly when I looked at it this afternoon. Checked out my kids primary school (doing very well – achieving better than average results) and the high school that my eldest is attending – very pleased to see that its results are well above average, but that’s not a surprise, it’s why we chose it.
You have forgotten to mention Julia Gillard’s suggestion that parents should go and harass their kid’s teachers (who are obviously at fault). Perhaps teachers could take Mondays off to take abuse from parents instead of teaching. That would help a lot. I’m sure it will make lots of people want to become teachers too. They could have a competition to see if they can get the median TER for teaching down to 60 with all these great suggestions.
.
More seriously, I think Gillard is a big liability for Labor now. She’s just the next idiot on the block, and I’m sure Kruddy’s glad he found Penny Wong to be the defacto number 2 (wherever she came from).
If you believe that 28 January 2010 is the first occasion on which there has been “some kind of measurement system” in education; and also that the “above average” result for your school from fatally flawed database means anything more than nine-tenths of jack-s**t, then you’re a moron and I hope for your children’s sake that very little of your “knowledge” rubs off on them.
Harsh but fair Mecurius.
Actually Mercurius – I topped the state in my tertiary entrance score so I really hope my knowledge rubs off on my kids! The only morons are those who can’t see the use in a system of ranking and grading school performance (and yes 28 Jan 2010 is the first time we can do that). Time to stop hiding behind a cloud of mediocrity – the next step froo Gillard needs to be introducing a pay for performance structure for teachers….. I can hear the sighs and teeth gnashing angst already.
Just goes to show …
Performance measured how? With these tests? How does that measure the performance of an art teacher, or a music teacher, or.. any teacher for that matter? If the aim is to make kids parrot out times tables and spell properly then a computer can teach them that. Unfortunately those skills aren’t what kids will need to distinguish themselves in the future global employment market.
A bit hard and impatient on Julia and the website I reckon, Helen.
Methinks that plans are afoot to make some big changes and Julia is just preparing the ground. It will be very hard to deny the inequity of the present system with lots of information on the table. And she says there will tables on how much funding schools get, up there soon, too.
Funny, also, how you seem to have forgotten how much money has poured into the infrastructure of schools recently after years of neglect. Computers in schools and homes has been a good initiative.
The website crash stuff was sheer beat up. Any team that could get something like that up and running with so many hits on it’s first day deserve a medal.
Yeah, bit harsh – as per the other thread, the upside is the website has genuine potential to raise awareness of the need for a new funding model based on need, actual socio-economic composition (not imaginary, based on postcodes) and demonstrable performance potholes.
Depending on how they play it, of course. But making public policy ‘public’ could actually be one of the more progressive things Ive seen this govt do.
Sam,
Teaching is like any other profession. There are exceptional performers, average performers and duds. We need to reward excellence, adequately compensate the average and move out the duds. It’s sad seeing the reactions of parents at the end of the school year when they realise their child has just been allocated to one of the duds for the following year – and every school has them.
These scores are just one small step along a process of improving performance and then rewarding it. The first step is measurement.
Actually – it’s pretty simple. Principals whould be empowered to pay staff according to performance. A classroom scoring system should be one element of that.
It’s no different to any other job – I know those on the left don’t like to acknowledge inequality – but it’s the truth – not everyone is equal. Reward those who perform better.
If you are so bright, Andrew, what’s with this silly generalisation stuff about “the left”? It does you or your argument no favour, at all.
Season 4 of the Wire seemed to capture the dynamic of standardised testing pretty well, if I remember correctly.
There’s a post that should be written tying this properly to certain currents of neoliberalism (and, yes, this is an expression of a neoliberal model of competitiveness).
“I know those on the left don’t like to acknowledge inequality – but it’s the truth – not everyone is equal. Reward those who perform better.”
Actually Andrew, the left I know is trying to have the inequality of school funding under the current model acknowledged.
As for the rest of your proposition, I actually agree with you that not everyone can perform equally. But there’s no way of accurately testing a student’s merit or potential if they’re stuck in a low performing school, in a performance pothole. Thats why we need funding of schools that matches need. To make a real merit-based system.
The greatest lie in the whole area of public policy is that the right supports a merit-based approach. It doesn’t: it supports the right of better-off to buy their kids out of a genuine competition with the less well-off – a competition based on merit and intellect.
By contrast, the left that is seeking create equality of opportunity. then its up to individuals. Show us what you got. Show us your merit. Not just want Daddy bought you.
I am reserving opinion on the tables etc until the disclosure of school income info is published – thats the real deal. Thats when the info is going to hang together and things funding wise might start to be a bit more obvious. Whilst the current info may hiccups and problems, keep your eye on the real prize – fair funding (and fees). Imagine being a parent paying for private schoolfees and seeing where your top dollar is going, especially if it isnt getting your child whats required. Remember parents often have difficulty getting to see the financial statements of these publicly funded organisations. This is not just a student outcomes issue, its about the Australian taxpayer perpetuating priveleges for a selected few at the expense of many. Its also a long overdue and valid consumer choice and protection one.
This is a flawed first step in collecting and disseminating useful data about school performance. They’ve at least attempted to move beyond the mindless raw school rankings that take no account of student composition (and therefore of actual school/teacher performance). So I take this as a positive. Next stop – the comprehensive measurement of “value-add” (a terrible term) at classroom-level?
“…It is paradoxical that a government which calls itself progressive is implementing the policies of its erstwhile conservative predecessor.”
I find it somewhat bizzare that so-called progressives aren’t up for the very strict and public measurement of schools and performance-based hiring/firing/remuneration for teachers. Education is, as we all know, the single most important thing we do as a society. In view of that, we should we tolerate even one rubbish teacher, let alone school?
As for the establishment of quasi-markets in education – where the hell have you lot been for the last 50 years? They’re called catchment areas and house prices, FYI. All very efficient from the education bureaucrat’s perspective, of course. FFS.
We really only need to make a few (very minor) tweaks: (1) massively increase public funding to schools; (2) change the funding model so that it follows the student but at differential rates according to student need (e.g. according to parental means); and (3) privatise the actual delivery of education (whether by trust-based decentralisation or by permitting for-profit schools, or perhaps both). Now that’s an education revolution. Simple enough, I’m sure you’ll agree.
BBB
Gosh Andrew it must be awful having to shoulder the burden of being the self-proclaimed representative of the vast majority of Australians, and I feel your pain having to endure all that cringing. Maybe now you know how we felt every time we heard someone say ‘Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’ for 11 years. But I do suggest you keep up with your reading – One Nation isn’t really much of a power in the land these days and even at its zenith I don’t see how you could characterise it as being ‘the right’.
Anyway be all that as it may Andrew as the brightest kid in your whole year, I’m sure you understand the value of having evidence to support a proposition. Perhaps then you can cite some evidence that performance pay will improve the performance of teachers. Or is it just an ideological thing to stick it to the unions, a la Julie Bishop and Peter Costello?
Ass.
You can’t have too much information.
Many parents are already able to choose their children’s school. This new information will enable those who can’t afford to move to the right area to beat down the department’s door on behalf of their own poorly resourced school. It has the potential, this type of transparency, to enable equality of opportunity for children.
This isn’t about teachers and principals – it’s about the fair and equal education of all children.
BBB
Your second to last paragraph is very important. I feel like my head is going to explode sometimes when certain commentators criticise choice on the basis of it being non-progressive, when the lack of meaningful choice for parents of kids from low-socioeconomic backgrounds (and without the ability to get into selective schools or scholarships in private ones) is one of the factors inhibiting equality of opportunity.
Your three reform suggestions would be a genuine “progressive” revolution.
And don’t get me started on the issue of teacher quality. Since when did support for the protection of bad teachers become an indicator of one’s progressiveness?
Aaw wbb you can’t get parents to attend a P&C meeting, what chance of them beating down some department’s door (assuming they even know which door to beat on)?
People will make decisions the way Andrew already did – smugly convinced they already know which are the ‘best schools’ on the basis of rumour and urban myth and which one is closest.
“Perhaps then you can cite some evidence that performance pay will improve the performance of teachers.”
What is your take on this?
http://andrewleigh.com/?p=1939
“you can’t get parents to attend a P&C meeting”
Not all, Ken, I know, but there is always that noisy committed few who do try to run the joint – usually to the annoyance of the principal. That noisy group of busy-bodies certainly know the address of those who can make decisions.
I’m not saying this website is necessarily going to enable anything much – but it is the type of transparency we deserve from government. Govt already use this data – at least we should know how and why they make the decisions they do.
Teachers are already paid different amounts. I don’t want a school that can only afford to hire low paid graduates. The biggest single difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is experience. Experience costs more.
My take LO? Only that the comments thread accurately demonstrates the dearth of useful data about the effect of performance pay on performance.
We do have a case study in the financial sector of course … all those billions in bonuses that are causing such angst in Washington have been paid pursuant to performance pay arrangements. They don’t really give much support to the concept I wouldn’t have thought.
If teachers were paid more – A LOT more; and provided with proper resources and facilities; and if they were treated as highly qualified professionals by the community instead of overpaid bludgers; and if intelligent performance management procedures encouraged professional development while weeding out non-performers; well then we might have a better education system. But that would cost more money and require an extended period of hard work by ministers and senior management.
Much easier to fartarse around with league tables and magical pay systems.
I managed to get onto the website pretty easily.
I don’t have any problem with the government collecting and publishing data on schools performances. Sure the way data is analysed may not be the best but over 20 or 30 years there may well be a rich amount of data to analyse. Hopefully this is taken one step further and students can be studied longitudinally (such as with the 7 Up program).
Off topic… I seem to remember a year or two ago most posts on this blog were thoughtful and well considered and comments were generally polite? Maybe I have rose coloured glasses but it seems more and more posts are full of frustration and bile and the comments are less than gracious to those of dissenting views. One of the reasons I refuse to read comments on blogs like Bolt or Blair’s is the overwhelming amount of bogan stupidity and venom in the comments, hopefully the left wing version of that does not happen here.
Sam Bauers @8: “Unfortunately those skills aren’t what kids will need to distinguish themselves in the future global employment market.”
Yep. Trujillo could help them with those more useful skills for success in the global employment market…
Good for you. You got into uni with high marks. I got out of uni with 1st Class Honours and the Outstanding Graduate Award from the Australian College of Educators and the Faculty.
Now that we’ve had this lovely pissing contest, can I ask why your faith in performance measures and awards and credentials doesn’t extend to listening to people who have more of all of these than you do? And that’s just the people on this blog…
The last time there was a system-wide implementation of paying teachers based on students’ results was in Great Britain in the 19th Century. The system resulted in such widespread corruption and rorting of marks (since teacher’s pay packets depended on passing students) that it was scrapped within a decade as national school marks became so compromised as to be meaningless…
…now think of the massively inflated valuations applied to dodgy derivatives that propped up the Wall St. bonus schemes for the last decade… A smart boy like you who got the top tertiary entrance score in their state should be able to figure it out.
Your naive faith in performance marks is touching. All a high school mark really demonstrates is the institution’s effectiveness in reproducing middle-class knowledge and language structures.
viz. a performance-pay Tale of Two Schools:
a) School A, a public school in a leafy middle-class suburb. Parents white-collar, educated, day office workers.
b) School B, a public school in an outer suburb far from the jobs. Parents semi-educated, semi-employed, night shift workers.
Students at school A receive inordinate amounts of homework and exam help from parents who know how to navigate the educational system and have the time and energy in the evenings to help them.
Students at school B sink or swim on their own merits. Their parents, however willing, are only semi-literate themselves and unable to provide any form of at-home guidance or assistance.
The teachers at School A get performance bonuses, and those at School B do not. Middle-class advantage remains entrenched, and everybody gets a good night’s sleep (except the parents of school B who are on third shift) comfortable in the knowledge that the system is just and fair and the poor are right where they deserve to be.
@ 24 yes Chumpai, it was a gentler age. Just a year or two, and 18,000 one-note obsessive trolls ago. Maybe some bright spark can build a national website to plot the troll quotient of moronic hit-’n-run drive-by comments, and give out free passes to the blog hosts to be as rude as they like when the quotient reachers a certain threshold?
Since when did support for the protection of bad teachers become an indicator of one’s progressiveness? Strawman alert.
Students at school A receive inordinate amounts of homework and exam help from parents who know how to navigate the educational system and have the time and energy in the evenings to help them.
Students at school B sink or swim on their own merits. Their parents, however willing, are only semi-literate themselves and unable to provide any form of at-home guidance or assistance.
Another hypothetical from that one:
-Teachers at school A keep their already high achieving students high achieving at roughly the same rate
-Teachers at school B raise their students performance markedly over the years, from basic or semiliterate to literate and acceptable, while doing a lot of unavoidable quasi-social work that isn’t really their job to help them along
-Parents look at the website and see school B’s marks are below that of school As, therefore it’s underperforming; Punish the teachers!
Here’s another one:
-School A is able to have selective entry and expel students who don’t perform
-School B has a statutory requirement to take all comers and only expels for shockingly bad behaviour. THe result on the subsequent grade averages of course is considerable.
Oh wait, that last one wasn’t a hypothetical.
Teachers at School A assist middle-class children to become accountants and lawyers serving the middle-class.
Teachers at School B turn potential car thieves into car mechanics.
MySchool website says School A is all green and School B is all red.
But which teacher has created the greatest lifetime value in the economy and should therefore receive the highest performance bonus? Teacher B just made a lifetime taxpayer out of a potential lifetime jailbird.
LO,
you probably want to be a bit fairer. How about the other post he had on his blog recently, which I found rather amusing working in a university where this type of thing has been happening across the board for years. Marks up, learning down. Happy school.
http://andrewleigh.com/?p=2402
Mercurius you just said what I was trying to say but more concisely.
I’m not sure why we should take Andrew Leigh all that seriously, LO. Wasn’t he the joint author of a paper which demonstrated that women in late pregnancy were postponing the impending births to get the
plasmababy bonus?He didn’t explain the mechanism, though. I had this mental image of thousands of women grimly clenching their vaginas and cervixes, and using incredible mind-powers to suppress the contractions.
I’m inclined to agree with you, Helen. I’m finding Julia increasingly disappointing. It may be that she has fallen strongly under the influence of Kevin, and, being the solidly supportive 2IC, is running with policy that she would not normally adopt.
But now the best hope for a female Australian Prime Minister lies with Christine Milne who is demonstrating true depth and tenacity, in my opinion.
With this new policy of name and shame the American/Howard expectation is to pull funding from failures to better support successes. Gillard is saying the opposite, although a published shame list threatens that parents will pull their children to “successful” schools which will make the less successful schools appear to tbe even less so. Talking with one HS department head the expectation is that funding will be pulled from the less successful schools. A difference of opinion which will be played out in time.
I wonder how a name and shame list for parliamentarians would go down?
‘Murphy’s law states that if you post a scornful article bagging someone else’s web site, there will be a great big dog’s balls of a HTML error just below the byline.’
On a completely trivial side note: that’s Mruphy’s Law, a subset of Murphy’s
Well since we’re comparing sizes, I teach compensation management for a living and just finished writing a new postgraduate course in it.
Like many people in his profession, Andrew Leigh seems to think nothing has been properly researched or analysed until it has been done by economists. An enormous amount of research has been done into the effectiveness of performance pay – most of it, not surprisingly, by people working in the field of employment relations. The findings are complex and incapable of being stated as bald propositions of general application, in the way in which so many uninformed commentators try to do. Many pundits do not distinguish between merit and results based schemes; some even use the terms interchangeably, which is absurdly misconceived.
However it is clear that no pay system can have much effect on its own; or rather, that its effect will be unpredictable if it is implemented in isolation. A properly designed and implemented performance management process is much more important than the pay practices alone. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that school principals would be any more capable than other small/medium business managers of designing and implementing an effective performance management system.
There are far better ways of improving education results. For a true education revolution listen to Lynne Hinton on the improvements that she made to here schools outcomes and how she went about it and then think about how this follows through the rest of the education cycle
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/06/26/2609566.htm
The criticism of MySchool amounts to this:
1. What you want to measure can’t be measured properly.
2. Nobody knows with any precision the causal relationships that lead to good and bad performance.
3. Jumping on minor errors to try to discredit the whole exercise.
4. Asserting that behind it all are hidden malevolent agendas and that the people behind this exercise are acting in bad faith.
If this sounds familiar, it is because these are the tactics used by the climate change deniers.
I wonder who will emerge as this issue’s Lord Monkton; someone who will valiantly lead the charge against the evil, evil Julia Gillard and the MySchool conspiracy.
Remember the rules, guys. You can’t categorise them as “the left”. Everyone not on the left, however, can and will be categorised.
thanx helen, and merc…and soon we’ll all be measuring our school on how many kids the school chaplain managed to get into a hillsong retreat….i mean..if we are gonna measure lets measure aussie values as well eh?
Ken Lovell36,
It would be interesting to hear your opinions on compensation scales of $5 million and above, sometime.
“The findings are complex and incapable of being stated as bald propositions of general application, in the way in which so many uninformed commentators try to do”
.
Actually Ken, I’m not sure it really is so complex, at least in education. There are now one or two meta-analyses floating around (and a number papers — I know this because they wanted to implement it where I work without any research — this evidently how subcontracted accounting firms run, and so other people went out and found a lot of it, which showed the subtracted firm were really just bunch of morons in suits taking money from morons in management where I work), and what you find is that the effects of almost anything you measure are almost always tiny. Now this may be because most of the reward schemes are not very rewarding (are you going to change your behavior for an extra 2% on top of your pay after tax? No, me neither), but no-one is going to use massive rewards in teaching anyway. So I think it’s just another issue that the government dredges up from time to time to make it look like they are doing something.
Ken Lovell, @23, I agree wholeheartedly with para 3 of your comment. Too many people take the easy blame the teacher option when their kids don’t get the results they want. That isn’t to say that all teachers are enthusiastic educators.
Like any other profession, there are the brilliant, good, mediocre, bloody awful and time servers. Many people don’t take into account that there are an equal number of students who fall into the same category.
I have 2 children who had no hope of scoring well on literacy and numeracy tests. One has a severe language disorder and a low IQ, the other is mildly retarded, neither of whom took the tests at our behest. No amount of brilliance on the part of teachers was going to overcome those disabilities.
There were also a number of other children with quite profound disabilities ranging from Aspergers syndrome and autism to a child with severe physical and intellectual handicaps at our school. Once, there would have been a separate campus, with specialist teachers for these students with limited interaction with the mainstream students.
Now, they are integrated into the mainstream where staff have to manage them with just a few SSOs as well as a large classroom of mainstream students, some of whom have behavioural problems into the bargain.
I can only speak from my experience with the staff at the schools my kids attended. They were all dedicated to providing the best education they could to all the students at the school.
By all means weed out the underperformers, but how about giving those who continue to teach our kids a break-smaller class sizes would be a good start. Better equipped libraries wouldn’t hurt, either.
Perhaps utilising schools as vocational and higher learning centres, particularly in lower socioeconomic areas might help break chronic undereducation and unemployment cycles in those areas. Carrot and stick would have to be generously applied, I suspect as well as dedication, persistence and adequate funding.
I should have added that also providing adequate funding to “underperforming” schools is a no-brainer. How can kids get a decent education and teachers provide same, if they are badly underfunded? And I guess it’s human nature to take less care of a wasteland of junk than somewhere pleasant.
Yes conrad, they are complex in the sense that you can’t just single out one HRM practice like remuneration and try to isolate its effect on performance. There are certain bundles of practices that seem to have an effect, but even then there are so many variables involved that it’s very hard to build a predictive model of general application. Well I would say impossible, but others might disagree.
I’ve yet to see any persuasive evidence that the performance of a significant number of teachers is inadequate, on any objective criteria. Of course some are better than others but that’s no reason in itself for pay differentials. Some bus drivers are better than others too but we don’t tie ourselves in knots trying to devise a performance pay system for them, because the better drivers will still be better and the others will probably just get pissed off and take it out on the passengers. Talk of solutions and revolutions is just silly if nobody has identified a significant problem.
There is no solid evidence that I have seen to suggest Gillard is intending to introduce nationalised performance pay for teachers, although the Liberal Opposition, The Australian, Kevin Donnelly and other rightwing troglodytes have been trumpeting this as the only answer to deliberate and cynical underfunding of government schools for years now, and have to date succeeded in shifting the public debate on education resources in this futile head-banging direction. This also seems to be the assumption behind much of the negative commentary here.
What the Government has promised, as I understand it, is to eventually include on the MySchool website, funding source data for every school, public and private, on threat of withdrawal of public funding (which I suspect will be politically explosive, can’t wait), and over time the website will also show longitudinal data with some predictive value. Add all this up, and waddaya get? Rational public debate on how to send public resources to the most needy schools, and students. Politically and educationally, a winner.
Until recent decades, this country found no real difficulty in funding all public schools generously and more or less equally, and teachers were paid reasonably well, so parents did not have to make uncomfortable and time-wasting choices about “bad” and “good” schools. Howardism changed all that, but we might now be slowly getting back on track, firstly with a national database that is accessible to all. We are being offered a treasure trove of information, which can only improve over time, with good will and hard work. Most parents want this, and our kids will be the beneficiaries.
If some teachers and state governments find they come under some uncomfortable scrutiny then so be it. Let’s argue that through, without hijacking the debate into the ideological deadend of performance pay. Personally, I reckon that higher salaries overall would improve teaching quality (not an original idea, but guaranteed to send the Opposition into foaming insanity), and perhaps there might be more explicit competition between states and territories in the salaries offered (since apparently nothing works without competition), at nationally standardised levels, no performance pay necessary.
Can we afford to boost teachers’ salaries? Of course we can. We managed for years, before the resources boom made this one of the richest nations on earth.
Ken,
I’m in agreement with you on that.
However, I can identify one large problem that has nothing to do with teachers but is to do with schools and the government. Strangely, it is generally entirely ignored but has some aspects that should be fixable without too much expense (just brainpower and a bit of effort). In particular, if you compare the differences between the performance of kids in different states, there are massive differences (we love to do this across countries, so I’m surprised it doesn’t happen across states where it really is meaningful). Now that wouldn’t bother me so much if the difference was between, say, NT and NSW, since the reason then would be obvious, but there are quite decent differences between, for example, NSW (which does the best job), and WA (which doesn’t have the type of excuses WA does). Now, if I lived in WA, I’d be completely pissed off about that, since it means either (a) the curriculum they use is shitty; (b) the teacher training and recruitment system is shitty despite being funded to a similar level as everywhere else; or/and (c ) the stifling bureaucracy teachers are under is causing them to perform more poorly. All of these problem are entirely the government’s fault and I don’t see why they can’t be fixed. I don’t incidentally see introducing a national curriculum as the solution to this (NSW does exceptionally well, so you wouldn’t the federal government to wreck what they are doing), but surely the poorly performing states could at least look at NSW and see what they are doing differently.
Well for a start I think it’s terribly unfair that the measurements show private schools as underperforming with all that extra money slushing around.
Can we please switch the site over to some metrics where the private schools will definitely get higher scores than the public?
Like, for example:
- Number of staff convicted of sexual or common assault on pupils.
- Incidents of bullying, cyber-bullying and ostracism for perceived social faults.
- Alcohol and drug use, purchased from older siblings who deal, or daddy’s desk stash.
- Helicopter parents disrupting the orderly conduct of lessons.
- P&Cs with enough cheque-writing power to distort the curriculum and staffing decisions.
- Persecution and discrimination against people who are the “wrong” religion or sexual orientation, all permitted by exemption from Anti-Discimination laws.
My jury’s out on the MySchools thing. I suspect it will be at once too complex and too simple to give people and/or admins the information they want or need.
I *do* find it interesting that much of the ‘education debate’ gets swallowed up by what teachers and classrooms and schools do, and less on what happens at home. Study after study has demonstrated the enormous effect the home environment can have on children, and I would be really interested to see some thinking about what we can do or provide for parents to become active participants in their children’s education – in a pedagogical sense, not a consumerist one.
I don’t know, it just interests me that there is an unspoken assumption that the state should be (and is) the exclusive provider/administrator in education when the reality is a bit more nuanced, and the citizen and the state can work together quite well when it comes to educational outcomes. Instead we have a discourse along the lines of “what can the school do for my kid?”, as opposed to “what can I do for my kid? (with or without school)” – which I like to – naively perhaps – think is a bit more representative of a parent’s mindset.
Great comment Mercurius! You’ve made my day.
To which I can only add: number of parents who own ‘prestige’ 4-wheel drives and behave as though they owned the road, not to mention the footpath.
I was talking to my mum, who is a teacher and who administers these tests on a regular basis. She politely through gritted teeth informed me that the tests are multiple choice, and like all uni students know, one can learn how to do well in multiple choice – cancel out the 2 silliest or least likely answers, decide which of the 2 remaining answers is most likely to be correct (if you arent 100 percent sure). She tells me her kids arent that hot at it in grade 3, but by grades 5 and 7 most have the hang of it. it all depends on how much time your school devotes to practising these skills. Of how to pass multiple choice tests. She is not the only teacher to share this with me…
So one multiple choice test in each of the nominated Key Learning Area’s every 2 years is supposed to be an indicative measure of a school, or a teacher or a student’s ability??? hmmm…
My wife and I have just been through this awful process of selecting a new school for our children (girl in Year 7 and boy in Year 5) and can understand the government’s desire to increase transparency around this task – as it mostly depends on word of mouth and anecdotal evidence. But really, choosing schools is much more complex than finding the one with the highest marks.
We have been life-long advocates of public education, but after our experience with our local public primary school, we started looking at private options. It wasn’t the teachers so much (they were mostly a dedicated bunch). It was the appalling state of the physical facilities (no air conditioning, holes in the wall, 19th century classrooms, third world toilets) and a focus on just-the-basics-and-nothing-more, because there wasn’t room for anything more.
Complicating the decision, our son has Asperger’s syndrome (on the mild end of the autism spectrum) and was struggling in a small, noisy classroom of 38 children. The private school we chose has classes of nearly half the size. We also wanted a co-ed school that both our children could attend together. There wasn’t a public option. And we wanted something that made more than token efforts in the arts, drama and music. Most of all, we wanted to get away from a system that appeared to be held together with sticky tape and which threatened to fall apart at any moment.
The point of all this is that academic excellence isn’t everything. What matters to parents like us are things like facilities (no, not rifle ranges, but basic stuff like air conditioning and assembly halls), small class sizes, a focus on the child’s wider development than just his or her facility for passing exams and an understanding (and propensity for dealing with) the needs of each individual.
I’m not saying public school teachers are not as committed to this things as those in the private system. But our experience is they are so busy trying to ensure the basic boxes are ticked that they struggle to fulfill what they would like to achieve. They have no time to think about anything else is my experience.
I think we need to have a wider debate at a national level on what we are looking for from our education system. We have blindly accepted the conservative proposition that is really just about manufacturing swots who are good at rote memorising proforma answers to exam questions. I have seen the consequence of this approach in my profession, where hugely well credentialled young graduates crash and burn because they don’t know how to think creatively.
Of course, many parents DO seem to want (or at least think they want) their children to go to schools with HSC scores in the stratosphere and can’t get beyond that metric. That’s why we are seeing this political response in the commodification of education. But if you believe in market-based solutions, you have to recognise that parents are looking for different things for their children’s education.
So while I agree with the drive for greater transparency, I also think we need to be wary of the risk that simplistic quantitative comparisons result in a one size fits all policy response.
Imagine if instead of starting this website, the Labor government scrapped the Federal funding of private schools and used the statistical data to direct the funds saved to the neediest public schools instead. That wouldn’t fix all the problems, but it would certainly go some way to fixing the inequities in the Federal funding system, at least. And it might shame the State governments into making some improvements, if it were publicised.
As I said, you can only dream…
The last sectarian Labor leader was Mark Latham. And look where sectarianism got him.
Conrad – if those are state averages, why do you think W.A. should be compared to N.S.W.? W.A. has many more remote communities, mining towns etc with all their associated problems.
Russell,
I’d prefer medians, which wern’t available when I looked, which would get around this problem, but if remember the data correctly, there was a huge difference between NSW and WA. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since NSW would score close to the top in the world if it was a country — so the comparison is really great to average, not average to bad. Now there are some demographic differences between NSW and WA (and all other states for that matter), but it’s hard to imagine how they could account for such a huge difference. Indeed, NSW was ahead of Victoria, although it was much closer, and if anything, Victoria has fewer demographic problems than NSW. So it shows that many things to do with schools but not teachers per se really do make big differences. (Strangely, the media only ever tends to focus on country vs. country, where these differences really are much less meaningful). My bet is that this is because NSW had a few really excellent educational psychologists for many years, which helped them avoid some of the loopy fads that other states got (early literacy programs come to mind, and I think WA had a really weird mathematics program, although I’ve only looked at the first of these myself).
Incidentally, I don’t see why mining or remote communities should necessarily be worse off — mining communities are often extremely rich.
I agree wholeheartedly with you Helen. Can anyone tell me why the percentage of indigenous students is mentioned? Smacks of racism to me. Why single out this minority group? Why not go the whole hog and tell us how many catholics,jews,chinese etc.
This website is yet another waste of resources, and that does seem to be the one thing that this mob are really good at.
Robbo – my suspicion is that a decent percentage of indigenous students (in a school performing well) is meant to be a good thing. But a lot of folks are going to read it otherwise, of course.
VB @ 51 – one technique used to discourage guessing in multiple choice tests is to penalize people for incorrect answers. Eg You get 1 point for a correct answer, but lose anywhere from a quarter to half a point for an incorrect answer depending on how easy it might be to guess.
Helen @ 53
Seriously? Or it might just encourage the state governments into doing even less as they know the federal government will pick up the shortfall.
Chris – true!
Removing federal funding (or any funding) of private schools would be a complete disaster, because enrolments at private schools would fall signifcantly.
This is what always bewilders me about those saviours of the advertising industry, the Victorian Government, spending so much money on promoting government schools. Not only does the advertising cost money at no benefit to the community, every child in a public school costs more to educate that a child in a private school. It’s just crazy.
We should be looking at innovative ways of encouraging more people to send their children to independent schools, and therefore spend more contributing to their own children’s education, thus freeing up money for more genuinely needy children who do not have this option under almost any circumstances.
I think the problem with performance measures is they can never measure what you want. In this case, there is no way to measure teaching quality (and no debate to see what we mean when we say ‘teacher quality’, obviously a political decision). So instead we measure a proxy, like results on the NAPLAN. The obvious problem with this is that teachers will trying to improve their perceived performance, i.e. the kid’s performance on multiple choice exams which as a previous commenter pointed out, can be improved through coaching – which means less time for actually teaching stuff.
Examples from other professions abound. Measure programmer productivity in lines of code? They start pumping out screens full of unnecessary boiler-plate that wastes time and harms maintenance. Or measure it in bugs fixed, people start checking in buggy code, so there are lots of trivial “bugs” to fix. Measure call centre reps performance in terms of number of calls taken and they start pretending there is a problem on the line and hang up. Pay a CEO based on shareprice? They’ll near bankrupt the company to inflate the price, and then quit before it falls apart.
The point is that performance based pay is a really stupid idea, unless you can actually measure the thing you are trying to reward, rather than a distortable proxy. And as the myschools website demonstrates, we don’t even seem to be doing a good job of measuring the proxy at this point.
On the issue of measurement, why are we so “allergic” to measuring results?
Really, the bringing up of a child should be done by the parents. Increasingly easier said than done, I concede, but that is the parents’ job primarily.
What we really want our (primary and secondary) education system to produce is achievers. Kids who get taught something, remember it, and excel at this. They’re good at mathematics, know how to construct a sentence, can analyse what happens in a book and the main themes, know the key events in the history of the world, realise why you cannot just make water by combining hydrogen atoms with oxygen atoms, and so on and so forth.
Let’s ensure that those who don’t do so well get the help they need, and the areas that need help get it too, but why should we be so averse to telling it like it is? Let’s measure performance.
Conrad – W.A. is a huge state with a higher percentage of Indigenous population than N.S.W. – staffing small remote schools is one problem, having the kids attend them regularly another. Mining towns have well-documented social problems. (I also wonder if parents making good money in the mining industry, without much of a formal education themselves, are as likely to value education).
Novice teachers have to be forced, temporarily, out into remote schools with the bribe that after a couple of years they will be offered a permanent position in a metropolitan school. The tyranny of distance and all that …… So, I’m not convinced that comparing NSW and WA is comparing like with like.
Great idea Howard. How do you propose we do it?
Conrad – I just read this in The West Australian: “The average ICSEA value is 1000. Most schools have an ICSEA score between 900 and 1100. Some of the lowest ratings, about 530, were assigned to Aboriginal schools in remote parts of WA. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority chairman Barry McGaw said the higher a school’s ICSEA ranking, the bigger head start its students had in the classroom”
Russell,
have a look here
I just can’t believe that small differences in populations are causing such large differences in overall mean scores. The other reason I believe this is that it’s also worth looking at the percentage of kids that reach the advanced benchmarks — This basically deletes all of the groups we are talking about and leaves mainly medium and high SES students (sad but true I know). I can’t see why the demographics of any state should really affect this score. However, as you can see, there are huge differences between states there also. At least to me, this is strong evidence that some states are doing poorly compared to others, for reasons that have nothing to do with demographics.
Conrad – the survey selected a random selection of schools and the results showed the poorer performing states are WA, NT and QLD. – the redneck states, the states with remote communities, mining communities, larger proportion of indigenous population. I wouldn’t disregard what those states have in common and just say ‘must be poor teaching’ or whatever.
Is it not the case that the top students are helped to become top students by having a similar group of intelligent, motivated, well-resourced students around them, to compete with. If you have a population spread out over vast areas and a larger proportion of disadvantaged kids then I guess it will affect the result. Though I agree that the administration of schools could also affect those scores – W.A. has only just established a selective public school for academically gifted kids – if we had 10 of those schools our brighter kids in those schools might be achieving higher scores. (I think NSW has a well established system of selective public schools?)
“Removing federal funding (or any funding) of private schools would be a complete disaster, because enrolments at private schools would fall signifcantly.”
Says who? Private schools, by any chance?
Well, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Four words from 2004: Mark Latham’s hit list.
Howard Cunningham@61
every child in a public school costs more to educate that a child in a private school.
I thought it was the other way round – total taxpayer funding for private students is greater than for public ones? Either way, taxpayers exacerbating differential access to education strikes me as a bad idea. I’d like to see taxpayer top-ups funding only, based on the individual schools reported income. Sure, private schools can still have much more money than public ones… but they’ll be getting zero taxpayer funding at that point.
As far as measuring performance and gaming the results… that’s exactly the point of the system. Devise a metric, ask people to improve their score, admire them when they succeed. If the result is great drops in things not measured that is the fault of the people doing the measuring, not the people working within the measured system. I’ve worked in IT long enough to see some beautiful metrics (that all fail to measure goodness), and agree with Ken Lovell – building a system to reward the merely good and punish the merely mediocre is very hard to do. Rewarding the brilliant and punishing the terrible is easy and tells you little of value about the system.
There’s also the bass-ackwards nature of performance pay – surely we want to encourage the mediocre as well as rewarding the good? So extra funding flows both to the better than average (rewards!) and the worse than average (retraining, compensating their victims/students). Not really a recipe for reforming funding at all.
No, that belief is just the education union propaganda working
They correctly advertise that federal government funding (in small print) for private school students is greater than for public students, but conveniently forget to mention that state government funding is much higher for public school students. Add the two sources together and public school students get more total government funding. For the “elite” schools the difference is quite significant.
So if there was a big sudden shift from private to public there would be a cost increase, not to mention most likely quite a high capital requirement as well. But I don’t know that it would happen all that fast even if significant funding was withdrawn as I think many parents would go to extremes (draw down on mortgage etc) to keep their children in the current school if things were going well for them. May well affect votes though.
Of course if there was an organised mass enrollment in public schools just for show the big spike would probably give the government school administrators a bit of a heart attack
“if we had 10 of those schools our brighter kids in those schools might be achieving higher scores. (I think NSW has a well established system of selective public schools?)”
Yes — NSW has them (as does Victoria), but a small number of select public schools is not going to change the means much (the difference between 2% and 14% for example, is really quite a few students), which means the difference must come from elsewhere, and there are only so many sources that you can identify.
No, that belief is just the education union propaganda working
They correctly advertise that federal government funding (in small print) for private school students is greater than for public students, but conveniently forget to mention that state government funding is much higher for public school students. Add the two sources together and public school students get more total government funding. For the “elite” schools the difference is quite significant.
Chris, that in itself is egregious spin. For one, if you’re talking about Federal government funding as opposed to State, then it’s perfectly appropriate to compare apples with apples (something the MySchool website doesn’t appear to do). For another, the proponents of what you just said – and I see it regularly as a standard talking point in the Letters to the Editor pages – themselves fail to own up to the fact that the private schools charge fees.
Therefore, your private school parent is not miraculously better off just because more of their taxes aren’t going to the States to properly fund a better and more comprehensive public system. Instead, they’re being screwed by businesses – that’s what they are – who charge as much as the market can bear. But hey, they’re paying a bit less tax! I suppose some people are happier paying thousands of dollars annually to a business than a lesser amount to the government – but the ideological glow won’t buy baby new shoes!
So if there was a big sudden shift from private to public there would be a cost increase, not to mention most likely quite a high capital requirement as well. But I don’t know that it would happen all that fast even if significant funding was withdrawn as I think many parents would go to extremes (draw down on mortgage etc) to keep their children in the current school if things were going well for them. May well affect votes though.
I suspect that may be happening already, although I have no proof, but private debt is through the roof as we know, and people are drawing down on mortgages for things like holidays already. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the parents who have been scared out of the public system by the scaremongering of the previous government have used their Home ATM to pay for school fees.
Disclaimer: I am on the fundraising committee for a public high school, but have no affiliation with the AEU.
“I suspect that may be happening already, although I have no proof, but private debt is through the roof as we know, and people are drawing down on mortgages for things like holidays already. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the parents who have been scared out of the public system by the scaremongering of the previous government have used their Home ATM to pay for school fees. ”
This paragraph and the article linked to it pretty much summarizes why Australians will never have a great education system in my books. How about I re-summarize it: “I want a big house, a big car, nice holidays, and things like that. Once I have all of that, I might think about paying some money towards my kids education, but only after all the other things”
Most of the time the conversations are about government funding, not distinguishing between federal and state – eg if people sending their children to private schools often saves the taxpayer money. The education union advertising seems to be deliberately trying to encourage the misinformation that private school students get more government funding – its a very common belief.
Just how many people around that aren’t well aware the private schools charge fees?
And even then including fees its still not an apple to apple comparison. There’s the issue of capital works grants and donations. A friend of mine is a big believer in public school education. His children go to pretty well resourced school in a reasonably affluent areas. But he still donates several thousand dollars a year to the school as he believes it has a direct benefit to his children. Its cheaper than many private school fees and the government doesn’t penalize him by withdrawing public funding. And yes there are many private school parents who donate money to schools in addition to fees.
I think most private school parents are well aware that they are not personally financially better off by paying private school fees. They know the money saved instead goes to the remaining students in the public system or diverted to other government spending, only very rarely returning as tax cuts that they would directly benefit from.
I’ve heard Chris’ arguments a hundred times before from supporters of private schools and taxpayer subsidised privilege. They have no more veracity just because they are repeated ad nauseum. The fact is that no public money should be given to ‘private’ schools, there is simply no rational reason for it.
You may well think this, but that doesn’t make it true or even comprehensible. Memo to Chris: For spin to be effective it needs to make some sort of sense.
Chris’ screed is straight out of point #6 in my patented 10-point guide to being an Education ExpertTM in today’s media:
I wrote that years ago, and the private supporters never fail to fail into line with this “ethos”
Well that may be your ideology but I don’t think you can assert it as a fact. I do believe that private schools should be eligible for public funding though we should be concentrating funding on students who need it rather than schools who need it. But then I’m someone who ended up at a private school because the public ones were too inflexible to accept me at the time (albeit quite a few years ago).
So you genuinely believe there is no financial difference to the government between a student who attends a public school and a private one?
Mercurius,
rather than frame the question in terms of why private school parents pay, you might like to frame it in terms of why some public school parents don’t. I just don’t see it as fair that people in my neighborhood, with an average house price approaching $1 million, get to send their kids to a really good zoned public school for free, yet some person living in a some shitty neighborhood doesn’t get this privledge.
Mercurius – I said nothing about public school parents loving their children less than private school parents. Why is it that you believe parents cannot send their children to a private school without it being also a judgement on other parents? Can’t it just be a matter of them choosing what they think is the better choice for their child with no comment about what is best for others?
What about parents who send one child to a private a school and one to a public school because thats what works best for their children – do you think that means they love one child more than the other?
And I don’t know where you get the bit about noble sacrifice from? They might not benefit directly themselves but believe their children do and thats hardly a rare thing for a parent to do.
In the end, the decision doesn’t come down to ideology. It’s about what you think the best outcome will be for your kids. There are great private schools, there are great public schools. Parents make choices for all sorts of reasons. It’s dangerous to draw conclusions, but for the most part it isn’t a political choice.
Personally, I think the best option would be for public schools to be so well resourced and so well funded that there seems little point in going private, unless it’s because of one’s religious beliefs (which is how these schools started up in the first place, wasn’t it?)
Failing that, the next best option is for public funding and private delivery, with individual school boards of community trustees making decisions about the best allocation of resources.
@80 Err, Conrad, the education system did not create those conditions of inequality and unfairness to which you refer. The conditions of inequality and unfairness are what largely created our education system, which it now faithfully reproduces. Chicken, meet Egg.
You need to broaden the scope of your enquiry to a little thing called capitalism and, dare I say it, class analysis?
And then you need to consider whether documents like these League Tables help to reinforce or to break down existing class barriers. And, despite the efforts of the newspaper to portray the League Tables as a reified, politically-neutral, “it all depends how it’s used” document, it is anything but. It is loaded with class-based presumption, designed right into the metrics and the founding assumptions of those metrics, along with the presumption that rankings are important (ranking is very important to people who feel sure it will place them ‘high up’ in the list – I wonder why?)
I don’t owe you an education, but your post @80 indicates you are thinking about and are bothered by the right question: why is there such inequality and unfairness between and among different schools? Now go read…
@81 It was a joke, Joyce. A caricature of the unspoken prejudice with which many approach private education. Not that they would admit it, of course. They would probably just come up with a lengthy, dissembling, po-faced response like you did.
Mercurius,
to think I thought some sort of means testing would have sorted that out (say, earnings of 100K+ per year) versus an entire change of social system which isn’t going to happen. Given this, I’m also not sure how this relates to inequality, except in reverse where the poor give the rich money.
For something of a functionalst Marxist reading of the role of private school education the following article is an excellent account with the added value of a gender analysis of dominant masculinity:
“This article was originally published as: Poynting, S & Donaldson, Snakes and Leaders: Hegemonic Masculinity in Ruling-Class Boys’ Boarding Schools, Men and Masculinities, 2005, 7(4), 325-346. Copyright 2005 Sage Publications.
Abstract
Recent events in a ruling-class boys’ boarding school college in Sydney prompted public discussion about “bullying.” Debate ranged between those seeing an endemic problem to be cured and those who saw minor, unfortunate, and atypical incidents in a system where bullying is under control. It is argued here that such a practice is inherent in ruling-class boys’ education. It is an important part of making ruling-class men. Using life-history methods with available biographical material, the article shows that ruling-class schooling of boys in boarding schools involves “sending away” and initial loneliness, bonding in groups demanding allegiance, attachment to tradition, subjection to hierarchy and progress upward through it, group ridiculing and punishment of sensitiveness and close relationships, severe sanctions against difference, brutal bodily discipline, and inculcating competitive individualism. Brutalization and “hardening” are essential to all these processes and are characteristic of ruling-class masculinity.”
Short: private schools play a key role in producing further generations of brutalised ruling class men who just know that they are right and they are entitled. BTW: Kerry Packer was sent to a boarding school that was only a few miles from where his parents resided. Ring any bells?
From there, anthony nolan@85, it would be interesting to have a detailed table of individuals, presently in a state and federal ministry, also including shadow ministry positions, showing whether they attended private schools or government schools and which ones. It could even easily be added, prominantly, to the Myschool site.
A kind of league table of pollies from which schools. (And just information that we would love to know as citizens that would, of course, in no way influence where we placed our vote.)
I’m still chuckling about a scene on ABC2′s Friday night episode of Torchwood. Aliens have invaded demanding 10% of Britain’s children. The poobahs are locked in dicussions; the aliens are too powerful to fight. Which children do they sacrifice? “Well”, says a conscientious bureaucrat, “what good are the school leagues tables if we can’t use them in situations like this”? Pissed myself laughing.
Mind you I would’ve been first up in the flying saucer as I have yet to find a school that performed worse than my alma mater. The challenge – did anyone at LP get a worse result for their school than Norlane High? Bright red everywhere. How did me and my mates manage to get to uni at all I wonder? That an ALP Govt supports this superficial stigmatising of working class kids is just vile. My only hope is that this a set up to provide a politically palatable justification to move funding from rich private schools to poor govt schools, but I doubt it.
My only hope is that this a set up to provide a politically palatable justification to move funding from rich private schools to poor govt schools, but I doubt it.
Some commenters say so, and I hope they’re right and I’m wrong.
Excellent idea joe2. Excellent. Mybe the Greens might like to undertake that one.
Angela I am glad for you that you did not try a lame joke about that show as you may have breached some copyright.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/01/28/myschool-demography-fail/#comment-854091
And Helen, I will be particularly shitty if Myschool is not used to shake up the system. I was not impressed when I first heard about it either until someone filled me in before this whole thing broke on L.P.
You need to remember that the forces against any change are banked up and a very powerful lobby. But Julia is a pretty clever operator, I reckon.
Joe2 @86 – Also, where they send their own children.
@90 – I do hope so.
But at the moment I do so identify with all those disappointed American progressives.
I wonder whether publishing school funding will provide transparent easy to use information.
Elite schools get funds from
- tuition fees paid by parents about $28,000 per annum per student
- federal government funding
- bequests from satisfied old boys
Will Myschools list all sources of funding, or is that commercial in confidence
Will Myschools identify the schools religious affiliation. Are religious orders still exempt from tax? this will effect available funding.
I don’t find the Myschools website easy to use but you can get an idea of how rich the school is by calculating the staffing ratios and checking the numbers of non-teaching staff.
I think Myschools uses the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) as the major predictor of school performance. There is no school in Australia with an ICSEA above 1195, almost no school in Victoria with an ICSEA below 930 although the lowest is 886. I have to check manually area by area so I could be wrong. Other states have a lot wider range of ICSEA ranks.
Highlighting the portion of indigenous children sounds racist to me too. The presence of large numbers of indigenous children in the school population lowers the ICSEA. Schools are ranked with others in the same social equity index. Schools with large numbers of indigenous pupils used to get additional funding for resources like libraries.
“A kind of league table of pollies from which schools.”
The Prime Minister and Treasurer went to Nambour State High. The Deputy PM went to Unley High. There’s a start.
Where did they send their kids to school, Sam?
As Helen points out, that is also very important for the proposed Theirschool table.
Joe2, Julia Gillard is, famously, childless, so the question of where she sent her kids to school is moot.
I think Rudd’s youngest son attends Canberra Grammar. I don’t know about his other kids who have finished their schooling. As for Swan, I have no idea. Of course where pollies send their kids to school depends on what their partners’ want for their kids as much as what they want, so may not be an ideal representation of their preferences.
The PM’s son goes to Canberra Grammar – and there was a bit of controversy at the time because he allegedly jumped the waiting list. The choice of Canberra Grammar is a bit weird because Canberra probably has one the best resourced public school systems in Australia and the quality is generally very high (lots of kids come across the border from NSW). Though for people as rich as the Rudds the school fees probably aren’t really relevant and so if they think there is even just a tiny benefit to be gained then its worth it.
It would be interesting to find out the stats on where teachers send their children. Is the breakdown any different to the general population?
Billie @ 92 – I agree all sources of funding (donations included) should be publicly available and even statistics like the number of volunteer hours and parental participation as these all help to get a picture of the health of the school community. But money isn’t the only thing which is going to affect the results – I’d bet that the education level of the parents is also a measurable factor.
A very strong argument why it is necessary that parents receive a good education when they are still children.
Chris @96: “…because Canberra probably has one the best resourced public school systems in Australia…”
Evidence?
Billie#92
The regulations relating to income reporting for schools fall under ‘new arrangements’ for 2010. See Schools Assistance Regulations 2009 – where a school information statement will be required and which will include:
Sources of income (it does not exclude)• Government • Fees • Other (donations, income, building foundations etc)
Note: The regulation does not allow for individual donations to be identified.(I imagine if they are large enough the school would do this anyway)
I cannot see from the regs that the tax status of a religious order/body is required to be identified.
The school is however required under the regs. to publish a School Statement on My School at the beginning of the individual school listing which would logically indicate the schools religious affiliation. The school’s name would often confirm this. The statement also provides a link option to the school website.
The issue of how tax exempt status affects income of schools is a taxation issue and highly contentious as it relates to religious and charitable organisations.
It would be a brave, indeed courageous Government, that would take on that particular challenge.
I frankly believe that the Government should begin the dialogue in a continuation of a bid for public transparency in all matters fiscal.
Special treatment for religious bodies should cease (this has been always an area of divide and rule especially for school funding and election lobbying) and the tax treatment of charities should be a completely separate dialogue.
Fascinated – thanks for addressing my concerns
Billi@92, several of the schools within the catchment of the community service where I work have ICSEA rankings in the low 700s. One of them (Cabbage Tree Island PS) is only half an hour’s drive from the wealthy enclaves along the Byron Coast. It has 100% Indigenous enrolment so given the Indigenous weighting, I guess that explains the ranking. We have been lobbying State & Federal Govt for extra funding for years to get additonal resources to address the appalling disadvantage experienced on every socio-economic indicator for so many of our rural villages. I guess I’ll be adding ICSEA rankings along with every other demographic stat I have been throwing at them for the last decade. To no avail I might add.
And also perhaps looking at some free adult education courses for parents which are specifically designed to help parents and their children learn together. Though this could be hard to implement as it would be interpreted by some as victim blaming.
grace @ 98 – I can’t find any numbers, though anecdotally I’ve found its the one thing that parents moving to Canberra consistently comment when looking for a school for their children. The performance results reported for the ACT in the past have also been consistently higher than the other states (I don’t know what the website says). Demographics also have an impact of course and Canberra residents are rather affluent. But this itself is relevant – a lower proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds means the same amount of money goes further.
Angela, thanks for the up to date info re [no] extra resources for indigenous schools.
The PM has said today he wants to expand the MySchool site to include other information, so I reckon he thinks it is a success. That is, the polling reaction has been very favourable (real polling, not people voting on news sites.)
The politics of this are outstanding for the Government. They’ve wedged the Opposition completely. Even the Greens are reduced to merely saying that MySchool is “inadequate”.
And it is uber-outstanding for Gillard. Remember how it was asked at the beginning of the term how Gillard could handle two full time portfolios, work place rekations and education?
Repeal Work Choices and install Labor’s policy and institutions? Check.
Institute a system for measuring and comparing school performance that has been resisted by a core Labor constituency, the teachers, for decades, with a net positive political outcome? Check.
Compare and contrast with what Penny Wong has (not) achieved.
Chris@102: I have seen no evidence to suggest that Canberra public schools are any better resourced than any other city of comparable size. In fact, they may well be at some disadvantage given the relatively small size of the territory taxbase, compared to the larger states. Canberra public school kids score well because their parents are relatively highly educated, not because their schools are better resourced.
Decades ago, back in the Menzies/Whitlam eras, when Canberra was funded directly by the feds, schools were originally well resourced to service new suburbs and a growing population of public service families, but those times have long gone since self-government in the late 1980s. More recent federal governments (right and left) have treated the national capital with barely disguised contempt, so there is nothing special about canberra public schools these days. You will find the same smelly old toilets, crumbling schoolrooms and cracking concrete playgrounds as anywhere else in Australia.
But hey, to quote that american dude, in Canberra, the men are good looking, the women are strong, and the children are above average…
Mr Denmore @ 82: ‘Personally, I think the best option would be for public schools to be so well resourced and so well funded that there seems little point in going private, unless it’s because of one’s religious beliefs (which is how these schools started up in the first place, wasn’t it?)’
Not completely. Yes many private schools are run by churches or promote a particular set of religious beliefs, but others lust to replicate the British class system a la Eton, Harrow, Rugby and so on. Buying your kid a place in one of these schools in the UK is buying admission to the ruling class networks, regardless of learning outcomes. The Australian private schools with their absurd rowing races and faux military uniforms and the like are just knock offs of the British system and are unashamedly elitist.
Grace @ 105 – no argument that the public system has deteriorated since self government, and there are challenges with the small tax base though the residents are generally pretty well off (too bad they can’t implement a territory income tax). But relative to other state/territories they’re still in a good position – for example parents are more capable than average of donating directly to the school their children attend. And how many education departments around the country can afford to run a reception to year 10 fully bilingual curriculum (half the day in English, half the day in French) at one of their schools?
Ken @ 106 – Rowing is such an elite private school sport that Gillard’s old public high school Unley has rowing teams competing against private and other public schools and has done so for at least a couple of decades. Does that make Unley an elite public school?
Chris@107: “And how many education departments around the country can afford to run a reception to year 10 fully bilingual curriculum (half the day in English, half the day in French) at one of their schools?”
As I understand it, this is subsidised by the French themselves, particularly in the provision of French national teachers…
Chris @ 107 I know nothing about Unley but there’s a huge difference between offering rowing to students as one of a diverse range of sports and the orgy of tribal elitism that is exemplified by the GPS Head of the River in Sydney.
Why would people expect any different from Gillard than what they are getting?
She definitely is the loveable ranga.
She is doing what other ALP heroes such as Whitlam and Hawke and Keating and Kelty have done – destroying the union base. Which is what the job requires. ALP leaders who didn’t do it, such as Calwell, suffered for it.
The reason the unions have gone to seed is because they have no useful role any more. Some are offering services to members no better than your typical workplace social club; all are just breeding ground for future pollies – like Gillard. And they, like Combet or Shorten, have to do the same thing. Break the back of union militancy and pull the teeth.
Do you remember how Keating’s face lit up during that 2007 interview when Red Kerry asked him about pulling the teeth of the unions? He couldn’t have been happier. Former union official himself, Keating took the unions on a journey where they first lost their macro-economic power over the wage level, then their micro-economic power over individual enterprises.
When the ALP first sat under that Barcaldine tree they set two horses running – the industrial wing and the political wing. Both aimed to capture the commanding heights,one through disputation in the workplace, the other through parliament. The first horse has run its race, and needs to be shot.
Disputation in the workplace no longer achieves anything, now Gillard has complete control – over wages through the Industrial portfolio – through skills through the education portfolio, and over the leftovers for those who can’t function in society, through the social inclusion portfolio. All three levers of a social democracy under one hand. Elegant.
Just as long as you don’t allow any professional organisations either, Ricardo. Accountants, doctors, employers… What’s that you say? Freedom of association? But that’s only for the rich, I suppose.
Whilst walking through Adelaide’s rundle mall last week, i stoppped to watch a man writing his snack menu onto a window of a cafe. He looked at me and asked if he could help me. I told him I was watching his spelling. The government is planning to release a Restaurant guide to good eating. One of the contributing elements of the scoring would be the spelling on the menu. He laughed and said, you are referring to that stupid schools website.
Why is it that one public school can buy a new car, raffle it for $100 a tkt and make $10000, whilst another public school will have each child spend 2 weeks making stuff to sell on stalls at their annual fete and make a $2000 profit? Simply because they are in different post codes.
Why do parents have to choose which school their kids go to? Why can’t they just go to their nearest, neighbourhood school and get the same advantages of an educationn as anyone else?
Helen @111 – I agree entirely. The job of destroying the remaining unions is unfinished – the AMA, the Pharmacy Guild, the police unions, the RSL.
The employer reps are ineffectual, hence the enthusiasm to put Heather Ridout on every Rudd committee going. The others are just Lib fronts.
Your straw men are showing. I’ve never said people couldn’t join unions. Only that a union should be no better than a social club. I’m not currently a member of a professional association but have been in the past. If we’d sat down and agreed to collectively set wages – our employers would have first laughed out loud, then taken us to court. And rightly so. They were only social clubs.
When social clubs get involved in running the economy or setting policy, they cease to be social clubs and become parasites, bleeding money from others for their own benefit.
With rent seekers to left and right, it is tough being a political leader of a social-democratic persuasion.
Long live the lovely ranga!
So Julia is using My School as the basis for an extra $2b in funding to disadvantaged schools: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/07/2812384.htm
She must be serious about it if she has buried the announcement on a Sunday morning, we can’t have her seen to be engaging in “the politics of envy”. It sounds hopeful, or will I be crushed to discover that it’s just a rehash of previous budget allocations?
Apologies for the lazarus job on a long gone thread, but Paul Bamford’s article about one US critic of testing based education policies is worth a look: http://inside.org.au/teaching-to-the-test/