MySchool wowsers trying to lock out parents

Dave says:

04:32pm | 03/08/10

The diversion of resources is a non issue, My school costs very little. Beyond its effect of a specific schools, it’s been interesting to notice the performance gap between boys and girls in English and math. Boys have done consistently better in math and girls in English. We’ve also been able to see the effect of socioeconomic background. Essentially you can put side by side a socioeconomic map of Australia and a Myschool map and they will display the same patterns. I actually think the people who have the most to lose are the private schools who chargs large amount of money. Myschool website showed that they did not perform much better than similar public schools with similar student body.

In the end the Myschool website is driven by politics not education. Now that the concept of transparency is up and running and popular with the public. a labor government will be able to ask top tier private schools to reveal their funding, something they’ve been very reluctant to do. Can’t the excuses schools will come up to procrastinate.

Gregg says:

04:04pm | 03/08/10

So, you being sarcastic Dave when you say ” so why get rid of it “
Must be a cost to running all those tests and putting results into the system.
With no benefits to learning….... ” However pressure to teach to the test and cheating will increase. That is what has happened overseas. ”  and this also happening here from some accounts
Should we not just be dumping it as a Gillard gimmick.

Dave says:

01:05pm | 03/08/10

“So then what is the cost/benefit of a popular gimmick Dave? “,

Nil, because it does not add or detract from what we already know. NSW DET has had these statistics for years, now the public gets to have a look. More importantly will it affect educational outcomes, the school culture, motivation to learn? I would say no, because the idea of shaming people to perform does not work. However pressure to teach to the test and cheating will increase. That is what has happened overseas.

Gregg says:

11:31am | 03/08/10

So then what is the cost/benefit of a poular gimmick Dave?

Northern Steve says:

10:42pm | 03/08/10

Let’s talk about a ‘Year on Year’ improvement and how that can be gained.
The headline percentage on the MySchool website is the percentage of students at or above national standards.
The most effective way for a school to improve that mark, is to put all their effort into the students just below that cutoff.  You can do this by pulling out all the money and time spend on gifted and talented students, and on the bottom end of the cohort.  In fact, the high and low achievers could both end up with reduced marks, and it would have no affect on the school’s standing at all.

Simple!  But then, that’s the problem with simple statistics.

Gregg says:

11:28am | 03/08/10

Too true Jason and Labor now also claim as new stuff to give more power to principals over various school management issues, using WA I think it was as a model but if they do some real research they may well find there is a lot that Principals already do outside of WA .

And Doug, would you be able to adequately analyse the results and just how much impact there may have been from different students , different teachers year in year out?
What if there had been no discernible improvement nor decline but just random variation?

Doug Wilson says:

10:59am | 03/08/10

If a school shows year on year improvement within that “once a year snapshot” then it’d be a school I’d be giving a chance to educate children. If it shows a yearly decline then I’m going to consider sending my child somewhere else. That yearly snapshot is useful if you know how to use it.

Northern Steve says:

10:35pm | 03/08/10

Scarlet Pimpernel,
1. What are you actually measuring?  There is a difference between measuring the skill and effort of the teachers, and the student results.  There are too many other variables to reliably measure the quality of teacher work and skill from student results.  You cannot look at student results and judge whether the teachers are working effectively or not.
2. There is a difference between external, independent measurements, and public publication of such measurements.  Students will identify with public results, rightly or wrongly, and poor results at a school will result in students taking that personally, often resulting in worse results at the next test (plenty of evidence for that in UK and the US)
3. MySchool fails dramatically to compare similar schools.

Jack Thomas says:

02:53pm | 03/08/10

The improvement of education is a ‘good to have’ by product.

Labor’s number one priority is a good results in the polls.

These are always just about Labor spin. Computers for every school child (I think we are at about 1 in 20 still) is exactly the same.

Sounds great to the Labor spinmeister who is only just out of Uni, or the woman without kids, or the man whose kids already go to a private school, but what exactly does 1 to 1 computer ratio do for education?

Probably as much as Fuel Watch did for fuel prices…

The Scarlet Pimpernel says:

11:43am | 03/08/10

Regardless of whether schools are businesses or not (and I think private schools ARE businesses), a few things apply equally well to any enterprise: 

1. if it cannot be measured, it cannot be improved  
2.  those involved in the enterprise cannot do the measuring, it must be independent  
3. Comparisons to similar enterprises are a useful exercise, with caveats

Unfortunately, point 3 often leads to vested interests massaging the data until it is meaningless, much like I suspect the teachers’ union would like to do with NAPLAN.  To cover some of your points, it shouldn’t matter what socio-economic area the school is in; if they do poorly and the results are out there, THEN you investigate and if the cause is lack of student interest due to coming from three generations of labor voters and dole recipients, you can put programs (and funding, perhaps) in place to overcome the lethargy brought on by the students’ home environments. As for your comment about ‘‘programs external to traditional numeracy and literacy’‘, I’d say that’s very commendable provided they still manage to cover those core subject areas. Not so commendable if they ignore the core areas, or give them reduced emphasis with a view to pushing their own version of the curriculum. Speaking of which; as a person who went to 11 different schools in four different states, I say a national curriculum is long past due.