The ‘truth’ about my school
JULIE SZEGO
THE day after the launch of the federal government’s My School website, which enables parents to compare the performance of similar schools, I met up with a friend who had just visited a Caulfield hairdresser. She said the site was the topic of conversation at the salon — mothers, armed with data, were dissecting the meaning of it all amid the tinting and blow-waving.
This anecdote didn’t surprise me. Even parents who claimed to put little store in the information — which rates school performance on the results of national literacy and numeracy tests at years 3, 5, 7 and 9 — couldn’t resist checking out the website at the first opportunity.
Federal Minister for Education Julia Gillard is right: parents are hungry for this stuff. We have been denied the information for too long, repeatedly told by the education unions that we’re too small-minded to properly assess this data.
In the Jewish community, the topic was particularly hot given the front page of Melbourne’s The Age had that morning reported that Mount Scopus Memorial College was found to be underperforming against similar schools, despite being at the top of the Victorian VCE ladder. I was mildly amused at this paper’s report on the website the following week, which led with the news that Jewish schools had performed above the state average. Well, okay, I guess we should be grateful enough for this achievement.
There are a long list of caveats and criticisms relating to the website and I take them all on board. Here’s a sample: the results are a crude measure that don’t fully reflect children’s progression from one year to the next or even during the year; the information does not reflect a school’s culture, ideals or other educational offerings; the wider curriculum might suffer if teachers are pressured into teaching for the tests; the system that attempts to group schools on the supposed socioeconomic mix of their students is imperfect.
And yet, some kind of benchmarking is necessary if we’re to have a halfway informed discussion about education that’s divorced of spin and mythology.
Let’s take it as a given that most Jewish schools in this country offer an excellent education and now look at what the website revealed. Mount Scopus was not the only Jewish school in Melbourne found to be underperforming. Bialik demonstrated underperformance at each level, with lower numeracy scores every year bar year 9, and Yeshivah-Beth Rivkah’s scores were also below average when compared to similar schools at most year levels. In Sydney, schools had comparable results, with Masada College below the average of similar schools in year 9 across the board, and Moriah College underperforming in some year levels across some scores.
In some ways, the fear of “league tables” — which rank all schools against each other based only on raw scores — is a pity because these tables can prove rather illuminating on occasion. For instance, some of the Jewish schools scored lower on national tests than certain state primary schools in their vicinity. And even a high school such as Melbourne’s McKinnon Secondary College wouldn’t appear too far below the Jewish schools, when you consider its socioeconomic mix (23 per cent of families in the bottom to lower-middle group of so-called “educational advantage” compared with Mount Scopus, where 97 per cent of families belong to the most advantaged group).
I would be interested to hear from the Jewish day school principals about these results. At first, I attributed their lower test scores to the high number of students who have English as a second language. But other primary schools with the same “handicap” still did better, so I’m not sure.
The only obvious and serious question all this raises is that if Jewish schools are still underperforming at year 9, then why does the situation radically shift by VCE? Is it because intensive efforts are then focused on bringing slower students up to speed? Or do the slower students end up going elsewhere? The latter did happen in my time, I’m afraid. I would like to think the practice of “weeding” for VCE no longer goes on.
Of course, the most revealing information — school resources, being how much money they receive from the state, from fees, from donors and so on — is expected to appear on the website later this year. I suspect that once this data comes online, the nation and the community can finally have a meaningful debate about the future shape of education.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.
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