Emptying the Haunted Air

I want to love you! But I just can't.

I guess I’m a little late with this one, but only because I still haven’t seen anything from the federal government that addresses the basic problems with the MySchool website. Tonight’s episode of Stateline NSW offered a fairly concise summary of some (but far from all) of the main arguments surrounding the issue, featuring generally nifty education-guy (but with no Wikipedia entry), Chris Bonner, and NSW Education Minister and Labor Party arse-hack, Verity Firth.

Here’s wot I think about MySchool:

1. It doesn’t assess schools based on predetermined benchmarks in the NAPLAN tests, but by comparing them firstly to ‘similar’ schools (see below), and then to every school in the country. Primary and high schools are separated, naturally. Because there is no benchmark there will always, due to the arcane workings of arithmetic, be schools that are significantly below average (‘red’ schools on MySchool: danger, Hellfire, stagnation, blood) and ones that are significantly above average (green: serene, leafy, radioactively-good, healthy, progress, civilisation, order). Unless every student in the country gets exactly the same result in every test. Therefore, the endeavour to pull Hell-schools out of the red will be an eternal pursuit, with Australian students eventually ascending to such levels of genius that they attain the status of higher beings, and are such intelligent, informed voters in the future that they won’t vote for governments with stupid, shallow ideas like MySchool. Which, actually, might be kind of a good thing.

2. Using a lottery machine to determine ‘similar’ schools is probably not very wise. At least, that’s how it seems the ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) is calculated. I can’t work out how else ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and… Ah, forget it) concluded that my school, Kirrawee High Public School, was statistically-similar to a bunch of private and selective schools. Maybe it would be a good idea to only compare selective schools to other selective schools, and elite private schools to other elite schools where parents pay tens-of-thousands of dollars for their kids to attend, with all the extra support that implies (iMac Pros, sports cars, poodles, caviar, etc.). Just a thought.

3. League tables. Good for selling newspapers and getting ratings for Today Tonight. Utterly pointless for anyone else. Except people who like saying ‘name and shame’ a lot. Also, they are technically illegal to publish in NSW, but Kristina Keneally’s (aka KKK) state Labor government are such berks that they won’t enforce it. (In fairness to the most recent regurgitation from the ‘Generate-a-NSW-Premier-a-tron’, her government opposed the bill and had nothing to do with its formulation. Also, I don’t really take the legislation seriously, but this is outweighed by my desire to insult KKK.)

4. The website doesn’t actually gauge improvements in a cohort of students from one round of testing to the next. It simply assesses a school’s performance in NAPLAN against a shifting average. You could work out how much students are improving in comparison to their previous results, but that would require some mathematical skill and a calculator. Most parents lack the former, and only use the latter to work out which of the celebrity diets on the teevee is the cheapest. The federal government has stated, and Verity Firth repeated it this evening, that one of the main purposes of MySchool is to let governments know which schools are in need of more funding, more resources. However, it is perfectly conceivable (and highly likely) that students at a red school can make substantial improvements upon their previous NAPLAN results, and still be significantly below the national and ‘similar schools’ average. The school doesn’t necessarily need more money, isn’t necessarily broken, and nothing short of far-reaching socio-economic reform will improve the school’s result. Again, it ties in with the problem of there being no benchmarks.

5. It will result, to one degree or another, in schools teaching the NAPLAN test, rather than just… Well, teaching. Haven’t you seen series 4 of The Wire? Is that not the simplest and cheapest way of improving a school’s ranking with the least possible effort?

6. Any school whose population is below the reporting threshold does not have their NAPLAN results reported on the website. Which is a shame, because ‘naming and shaming’ (I’ll never use that phrase again) the weirdos and recluses who home-school their children (who don’t live a thousand kilometers from civilisation) would be a good thing.

7. If MySchool is the first step in a broader political narrative on education reform (‘computers for schools’ was more of a 2007 campaign highlight for Labor, and its fruits shall not be borne in the short term), then Julia Gillard mucked up the sequence a little. Chris Bonner was right in the Stateline interview – MySchool shouldn’t have come first, not in it’s current form, anyway. It is a tool with enormous potential for misuse and misunderstanding, not a genuine reform. It gives the impression that Labor’s ‘Education Revolution’ will involve little more than deflecting responsibility to principals, teachers and schools. Performance pay would have been a much more substantial beginning to Gillard’s narrative, even if it would have taken longer to devise than cobbling together a website.

That’s just what I think. Unfortunately, as long as the teacher’s union at large is adamantly against any change in education, the federal government will be free to dictate the terms of reform – a little like the the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute… Maybe Julia Gillard will get ex-SAS blokes to train scab NAPLAN examiners in Dubai!