…and here’s the text of the letter.
2 February 2010
To all ALP Federal Members of Parliament
Dear Member of Parliament
Re: League Tables – My School Website
The AEU supports the Government’s objective aimed at providing more information about school effectiveness to parents. However, the policy in its current form, which also facilitates the creation and publication of league tables, will do more harm than good.
Within 24 hours of the My School website going live the worst fears of the profession were realised with the creation and publication of crude, simplistic and damaging league tables.
The Government now finds itself in the peculiar position of both facilitating and opposing the creation and publication of league tables.
Whilst our primary concern remains the creation and publication of league tables, our concerns with the My School website are not insignificant.
The website, in its current form, is incomplete, inaccurate, and based on the invalid use of data.
It is incomplete because it contains no information whatsoever on the total resources available to schools. Throughout the course of last year, Julia Gillard said repeatedly that this was vital information if anyone was to judge school effectiveness. Yet the website went live, prematurely, without this information.
It is inaccurate because of the flaws inherent in the Index of Community and School Educational Advantage (ICSEA). Groups of “like schools” against which parents are being told to compare schools include:
• Cocos Island District School, thousands of kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, is grouped with Holroyd High School in Western Sydney which has a significant NESB student enrolment including new arrival and refugee students.
• Melbourne Girls Grammar grouped with schools including Dargo Public School, a school of one student near the Victorian snowfields.
• Cameron Downs State School, located on a property in Queensland’s Central Western District with 6 students grouped with schools including Terrigal High School on the Central Coast of NSW with 1300 students.
• Alice Springs School of the Air grouped with schools including Blacktown Boys High School in Western Sydney.
• The Kings School in Parramatta grouped with schools including Gundaroo Public School in a village near Canberra and Sassafras Primary School in the Dandenongs in Victoria.
• Geelong Grammar grouped with schools including the small Arthurs Creek Primary School in Victoria which has 71 students and Thirroul Public School near Wollongong.
It is invalid because the main focus of the website is data based on the NAPLAN national literacy and numeracy tests, which were never designed for this purpose. NAPLAN are a one-point-in-time snapshot of student performance.
The invalidity of the NAPLAN tests as a basis of a school’s performance is further highlighted by the margins of error contained within such tests. The margin of error, for small schools in particular, is very large. It can be as high as plus or minus 35 points. In the words of Professor Margaret Wu, one of Australia’s leading psychometricians from the University of Melbourne, “it would be irresponsible for the Government … to tell the public that school performance can judged from information on My School Website”.
The My School website also encourages comparison of high school performance on the basis of the aggregated scores of individual year 7 students. In most cases, year 7 students have only been at high school for 3 months at the time they are tested. How can a high school’s performance or effectiveness be judged on the basis of tests sat by students who have only been in high school for 3 months?
The damaging effects of league tables on education, students and school communities are well documented. In the interest of the future well being of our students and school communities we again call on you to introduce measures to stop the further creation and publication of damaging league tables.
We remain willing and ready to work with the Government towards the achievement of sound policy on school accountability, improvement, assessment and reporting.
Yours sincerely
Angelo Gavrielatos
Federal President
Go Angelo!
Year 7 performance may be irrelevant for judging a schools performance, but it is very relevant when you’re deciding which school you want your kids to go to.
Is the culture of the school one where teachers can get on with teaching children who (via their parents) are reasonably disciplined and value education? Or is it one where the teachers spend most of their energy just keeping discipline, and the peers your child has will undermine his/her behaviour too?
I think the MySchool absolute performance figures probably provides a data point for this sort of judgement, although of course word of mouth and a parent’s own investigations are useful too.
Repeating, the only thing people need to know about My School web site is that the statistics used as its basis for comparing schools have nothing whatever to do with education and even less to do with the ‘culture’ of a school.
Education as yoghurt maybe.
If I thought that there was a Machiavellian political intention behind Gillard’s release of this nonsense then I’d applaud. But I don’t. Social technocratic spin won’t substitute for policy.
The My School website would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.
I understand that at one school 20 expected enrolments were withdrawn by parents in one week alone after tables were published.
The teachers have no chance of winning this one.
They are up against decades of myth and fallacy and ignorance relating to private/public schooling, classism, the purpose[s] of education [as opposed to training and indoctrination] and a dozen other factors.
Take the comment above where a result of a test of students having been in a school for a few months is then, somehow, arbitrarily, made relevant to the school.
A decade or so ago the conservatives [which ones?] introduced league tables based on the same faulty methodology into the schools of my state [they called it Basic Profiles] and virtually simultaneously offered packages to teachers to cut the number of teachers.
Makes sense doesn’t it?
I saw the writing on the wall and after 30 plus years trying to teach kids took the money and ran.
It isn’t relevant to answering the question “Is the school doing a good job?” but it is relevant to answering the question “What is being at the school like?” — those children will be there for the next 5 3/4 years.
What is a “school”?
A yoghurt. It’s the culture you see. Some yoghurts have better culture than others and then they are ranked in the My Yoghurt web site.
Consumers can then judge what the yoghurt is like.
Yep, pretty good answer Adrian.
The problem is that tho’ its a pretty basic concept to this whole debate nobody really explains to the public what a ’school’ is.
Is it a collection of buildings on a site?
They can be changed of course. Cost money obviously. Julia and co deserve some credit for doing such as part of the stimulus.
But if you call a school a thingy made out of bricks and wood and glass etc thats a pretty inert thing to be looking at.
Is it a collection of educational programmes, you know, syllabus and curriculum stuff?
That would be pretty uniform to all schools within each state I would have thought.
Maybe its the teachers?
Not really, my experience is that if you visit a school one year and then go back to the same place about three years later MOST of the staff would not have been there on your first visit.
Maybe things have changed since my day?
So what is a school? [if you don't want use the term yoghurt].
What is this ‘my school’ thingy actually trying to measure?
I’m with adrian and Hannahs dad. I haven’t looked up my yoghurt, but I bet there’s better yoghurt in the big cities than where I come from. Obviously now I just have to choose between inferior yoghurts and hope that they are somewhat nourishing (though they won’t be “excellent” regardless of the quality of the yoghurt makers we have here(not to mention the experience of the individual lactobacillus who inhabit them)).
In some states Year 7 is the last year of primary school and in other states Year 7 is the first year of high school.
If you test the Year 7s at the start of the year you are testing the effectiveness of their primary school.
Why doesn’t MySchool directly compare
Geelong Grammar
Melbourne Grammar
Scotch
Xavier
St Peters
Kings School
Sydney Grammar
Cranbrooke
etc
Why doesn’t Myschool directly compare
Melbourne High
MacRobertson High
Perth Modern
James Ruse
etc
Is it policy for education departments to move teachers at public schools around that often? Turnover rates that high are surely going to cause problems – that’s a big loss of organisational memory.
Chris
That is what the rate was ‘in my day’ at most schools.
I don’t know what the current rate is.
And yes its a huge organizational loss.
At my last school the senior staff started discussing an issue at a weekly meeting and one member complained saying we had been there done that last year lets not do it again.
So we did a count.
5 of the 20 plus people had been there the previous year.
3 of the people sitting around the tables for the meeting had been in the school longer than 3 years [2 for more than a decade each, so 'averages' can be misleading].
At the end of that year 13 of the senior staff moved [8 took packages]. Most senior staff moved.
Reasons for a high turnover?
Retirements, transfers in and out, promotions elsewhere, death, changed family circumstances [often code for divorce, teachers have a high divorce rate, but also often one spouse moving and the other following], roll over of casual/relieving/contract staff, resignations, and back then, packages.
Teachers are, or were in ‘my day’ a very mobile mob.
I would be curious as to what the mobility rate is today.
And the only meaningful way to measure it is to find out at your local school how many were there, say, 3 years ago.
If its anywhere near what it was ‘in my day’ then it buggers up the concept of long range planning [3 years or more] etc for improved performance [whatever that means].
Any current teachers want to chime in?
Current teacher here. I work at a small high school 80 odd kms northish of melb. OUr turnover rate is much lower. We do, however have an aging staff cohort. On the whole I don’t think turnover or transfer is as high as in the past. I did a dip ed 3 years ago and there were loads of people with science degrees who could not find work in the private sector. Basically, I believe employment possibilities have tightened up a lot in the last 10-20 years.
Yeah, I think the data on the MySchool website probably could stand with a bit of strengthening and improving, but on the other hand, I can’t see why hiding information from the public about how students in different schools are doing benefits everyone either.
I also can’t see how the government can seriously legislate to stop people from making “league tables” or otherwise performing comparisons of data that has been made freely available in the public domain. Either the data stays private, or it remains public. Legislating to stop people formatting or presenting the data in a certain way would be a silly outcome.
This is a very good letter – it clearly sets out MySchool’s shortcomings. In the short term, it’s fair to say that MySchool will do some damage. Some parents are going to make seriously misinformed decisions. It would have been better if Gillard et al had thought through all the discrepancies and quirks and appropriateness of the NAPLAN tests before going public with comparisons. But it’s difficult to get too worked up about that when the broader concept is sound and the long-term stakes so high. This should be pleasing for proponents of school choice, accountability in state spending, ‘quasi-markets’ in education, etc. – the AEU is essentially engaged in a dialogue about how to improve MySchool rather than about how to prevent system-wide, detailed and meaningful data on schools reaching parents. So as others have said elsewhere, MySchool represents a seriously flawed but encouraging first step. The thin end of the wedge, it is.
BBB
@ 17 Yes, BBB, it’s a good letter not least because it managed to set out its case in cool, considered language, without resorting to noisome rhetoric (a chronic weakness of unionists in public communication). When you’re right, all you need is strong words, softly spoken. Angelo’s done ‘imself proud with this one.
In this morning’s papers:
1. Some cool, considered language from John Collier, headmaster of St Andrews Cathedral School.
2. Some noisome rhetoric from the Shrill Shill.
“In the short term, it’s fair to say that MySchool will do some damage. Some parents are going to make seriously misinformed decisions.”
Actually, in the short term, apart from the opportunity cost (which I imagine is pretty big — more bureaucracy, more testing etc.), I don’t think it will do much damage — it seems the worst that can happen is teachers get unnecessary grief from parents and parents move their kids somewhere else. I can’t see why the latter of these will really make much difference and hopefully the first one dies down quickly.
Alternatively, in the long term, if schools start doing yet more mindless teaching to the test (which already happens a lot in Year 11 and 12, where some schools simply get kids to memorize essays to write at exam time), then it will do real damage. That negative effect might be compensated by a positive one if the tables forces the government to do something about some schools that really are performing poorly, and the something the government does is actually meaningful (which I doubt — the problems are intractable in the short term).
In the longer-longer term, if the government deliberately tries to victimize teachers/schools, then obviously that will make less people want to go into teaching (declining standards of those entering teaching is already a problem), and that no doubt will drop the overall standard of teaching.
On a purely technical note, I don’t know why they are using average (mean) scores. What if all schools magically managed to improve by the same amount, the same schools will still appear to be “failing”. Why don’t they use some targets to judge if the students are meeting an acceptable level?
What is there stated goal? To reduce the variance in the distribution? Increase the mean? What?
conrad @ 20, this was happening (to some extent) when I matriculated more than 40 years ago.
Also, aidan #21, if the Prime Minister and the Education Minister lack the numeracy to understand how statistical data of this kind should be presented and interpreted, is that the fault of their former schoolteachers, their parents or themselves?
Oops .. @21 .. “there” should be “their” of course.
FAIL!
Some parents will make decisions based on very limited information anyway – when my kids were young I met a parent who said recommended a school because, as she put it, ‘they make them tuck their shirts in’. In the sweaty subtropical climate we live in, I thought the opposite would have been better. Strict uniform policies seem to count more than an enthusiastic librarian.
I’d like to see more transparancy but don’t know that the Myschools website is the way. I’ve a sister who teaches primary school and her house is like a resource centre for school. She is so devoted to teaching (early childhood) and loves working with kids. She switched to the teaching ‘career’ as a mature aged person, and brings a great skill set but this year has no job this year – contract last year but the school lost a few kids. I don’t understand why she’s out of work when I’ve observed some fairly uninspired & tired teachers at my own kids school. Does anybody notice which teachers demonstrate real commitment to the job?
In the past I wished the parents had a bit more say on staff – our school had a great principal – a really gentle, good-humoured fellow, he’d worked in the Torres Strait as a younger teacher and it had made an impression on him – he put up the aboriginal & TI flag next to the Aus flag, and he told great stories to the kids at ‘parade’, organised a farm with chooks and a simulated ‘creek’ play area (before water restrictions!). He was replaced on retirement by the most boring straightlaced principal you can imagine. There were a lot of crestfallen parents who’d been attracted to to the school by the atmosphere created by the former principal. That had an effect on people wanting to be involved as it was all ‘quiet down the back’ and Anzac Day overkill. I also remember being really crapped off that our keen reading kids were terrified of this one librarian at school who seemed to be an absolute sociopath. How the hell did she get in there?
Sorry, I know I’ve rambled right off the topic. p.s. re NAPLAN, I don’t think it is the best indicator, my daughter is quite reasonable at maths but didn’t do very well in the NAPLAN…
David,
that might be true, but it’s certainly got worse (unfortunately, I don’t know of any real data on the issue — I’m not sure if it exists or if anyone really wants to find out). I can understand why it is done in Year 12 (even if detrimental to overall learning), but if it infiltrates lower years more and more, it will certainly be bad news. Indeed, this problem (I’ll call it a problem!) is so endemic now that it is really a pain for us in universities, since the expectation many students have is that what they do should have essentially the same structure. Thus, they often have no expectations to do anything more than memorize a list of facts that you tell them, and that the entire course should be structured around helping them memorize these. Quite depressing really.
NAPLAN does not flag schools where pupils are performing below the accepted benchmark. It simply ranks schools from best to worst.
Presumably the pupils in the worst school are still as literate and numerate as Australian school children 100 years ago.
This is a classic…
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/2010/02/03/forget-about-myschool-what-about-myhospital-com-au/
The tasty, toasted goose @ 28 that is a well written intelligent piece