EDITORIAL

28-01-10: Empowering Parents with My School

In an interview today with ABC Radio Perth broadcaster Steve Cannane, the Hon Julia Gillard said:

… before My School, parents would do everything they could to find out as much information as possible about the schools in their suburb – maybe they’ve moved suburb, moved cities, moved states, want to know which is the school that their child should go to and that’s been a hard battle for them to get the information. Now, as one source of information they will be able to get on My School and see more comprehensive information than they’ve ever had access to before.

The significance of making nationally aggregated information available to parents should not be underestimated – nor the significance of a federal government taking such a step, but that kind of choice by parents is (hopefully) not made very often and by itself does not justify the scope, detail or My School. Even in such a circumstance, the practical limitations of catchment areas and family income often limit or eliminate real choice.

But when people have chosen a school, I think what they will do is they will look at My School and if there’s an area that they think their school needs to lift in then they will be there talking to the teachers, talking to the principal, working in partnerships with school to lift those standards.

This is the main point of the My School website: its layout and functionality revolves around encouraging parents to use the comparisons available to see where their school might need support and then draw on funding to address that need.

… we are dedicating more than $2 billion to lifting standards and helping schools that are falling behind. More than $2 billion for disadvantaged schools on literacy and numeracy and to improve teacher quality, so yes, we will be there in partnership helping those schools that need to have their standards lifted.

There is an issue here around the relationship between Federal and State funding. If a public school draws on Federal funding to address an identified area of need, will the State government then reduce the school’s funding accordingly?

That the basis of the comparisons should be the NAPLAN tests is also of concern. Should a snapshot of test results form the basis of parents’ choice of school, their ongoing relationship with the school and future funding opportunities for that school? Won’t schools find themselves being pressured by parents to teach to the NAPLAN tests? Won’t teachers feel compelled to pay less attention to other learning areas? Will it all become about the numbers?

The government seeks to emphasise that the value of My School lies in the comparisons between schools and within schools over time to inform parent decisions about both the choice of school and their ongoing relationship with the school. It’s the patterns that will tell parents, teachers, principals, administrators, boards, departments and governments what they need to know.

Ms Gillard knows that the numbers by themselves, taken out of context, are of little real value to parents or educators. And yet she must also know that they will be taken out of context, from the parent who takes a principal to task over a failure to meet the average in a single test, to the media outlet that concocts a single national ranking of all schools from the aggregated data.

Little concern seems to have been afforded to the reasons for statistical anomalies (a school has a sudden influx of non-English speaking migrants), yet it is the statistical anomalies, the greatest variations from the average that will end up driving change. Low ranking? More funding. High ranking? More enrolments.

Extended data from more NAPLAN tests over time, from some balancing way of assessing student and/or school achievement in non-NAPLAN learning areas, and from other meaningful benchmarks will give more meaning to My School.

My School should be given time to develop. In the meantime, parents welcome the government’s effort to inform and empower them.

ACSSO, 28 January 2010