Lazy Governments Love League Tables

Some non-government school advocates will say "we pay taxes - we have the right to have government money spent on the education of our child in a different system".

Rodney Molesworth, President of the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO) said this today:

“ Lazy governments which lack commitment to either quality schooling or rich and detailed reporting to parents are always the ones to promote narrow and crude competitive measures of “school performance”. These do more harm than good and are no substitute for the information about schools and student progress that parents have been demanding in vain for decades.

“ League tables”, and all types of competitive reporting of so-called “school performance”, are objectionable because:

• They do not measure the performance of schools, but of student cohorts.

• School factors contribute only around 20% of student performance, with the remainder coming from student background and classroom factors.

• They encourage “teaching to the test” and discourage education of the whole child for the whole life.

• They encourage schools to marginalise, and eventually lose, students that don’t fit their mode of teaching and organisation, rather than flexibly meeting the needs of all students in their care.

• Privileged parents can choose schools with high average results knowing that those schools will have high concentrations of students from advantaged backgrounds.

• They create residual schools.

• They divide communities and destroy the fundamental ethic of Public Education – that children who learn together, learn to live together.

• They allow governments to blame “failing schools” (those with high concentrations of students from disadvantaged backgrounds) for their own failure to properly resource schools to provide a first quality education meeting the needs of all children.

• They distract attention from the failure of governments to ensure frequent, rich and detailed information to parents about the individual progress of their children.

• They concentrate on narrow academic outcomes, when parents are equally concerned about all of the aims of schooling, including ethical behaviour, citizenship, personal confidence and happiness.

“ Parents have been demanding more knowledge and control in the education of their children for a very long time. They want to know how their child will be taught, whether he/she will have a teacher they get along with, will they be accepted as a partner with the teacher and school in the development of their child as a future worker and citizen, will they get a say in the formation of curriculum, student welfare policies, and extra-curricular opportunities. Most of all, they want regular, detailed reporting on the individual progress of their child towards a fulfilling, rewarding and happy future.

“ Governments find these demands irksome, intrusive and expensive. They would much rather publish some meaningless and damaging figures they already have available, and leave schools to sink or swim in the media frenzy that ensues.

“ Parents reject this approach, and call on all Governments to abandon the false god of competitive reporting of so-called “school performance” and to negotiate for the introduction of a properly resourced system of detailed reporting to parents, and to ensure that every public school is resourced to provide a first-class education to every student in the community it serves.