Page 2834 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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for reporting on schools as part of the commonwealth’s new transparency to discuss the issue, among other things, they are no longer committed to avoiding possible harm to school communities in publication of these league tables. The previous set of protocols released last July included the following key principle:
The avoidance of harm to members of the community: this could occur whether the privacy of individuals would be compromised or where the reputation of an institution or a group of people would be damaged through the publication of misleading information or stereotyping.
The new protocol statement does not include any reference to avoiding harm or damage, but says that data will not be published in a form that compares the performance of individual schools without contextual information. They did not introduce any measures to stop the creation and publication of league tables, despite their opposition to simplistic league tables. The President of the Australian Secondary Principals Association, Andrew Blair, said the omission of the 2008 principle appeared deliberate. He said:
I fear the worst. I think what the protocols have done is to essentially put in place a process to deal with arrangements where they have failed to protect schools and have failed to protect the disadvantaged.
What does this mean, Madam Deputy Speaker? It means that the tables will provide potentially misleading and inaccurate comparisons of school performance because school results are significantly affected by the socioeconomic background of school communities. For example, the Tasmanian table shows that schools in higher income areas have better average results than schools in lower income areas. This does not necessarily reflect differences in the quality of teaching and curriculum, but more the impact of differences in the social backgrounds of students.
Following release of this information in Tasmania, Rob Banfield, President of the Tasmanian Principals Association said that while his members supported the release of data on schools, they were opposed to league tables. He said:
Simple averages or totals of things measured in schools does not tell the important, complex story of what is happening in a school.
There is a risk in only looking at the quantitative picture without the qualitative information and stories to give context.
Many other factors outside the control of schools can influence a school’s results. These include student absenteeism and mobility between schools, the extent of parent involvement in learning at home and the extent to which students are engaged in after-hours tutoring. Overseas experience shows that some schools respond to test-based accountability by manipulating their results in various ways. They may remove low-achieving students from test days by placing them in special education streams, suspending them or encouraging them to be absent on test days. This, in effect, shifts the focus from working on individual student outcomes to working the system.
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