Before leaping into the perceived success or failure of the UK OFSTED system to achieve its objectives, I'd like to ask Julie a couple of questions.

In your last article published here you waxed lyrical over the benefits of home-schooling. Are you advocating that these "home-schools" are measured against the same criteria? If so, how? If not, why not - what is the special ingredient that lets them off the hook?

In the article before that, you waxed even more lyrical about the wonders of private enterprise in schooling. Of course, such businesses would need to be measured on the same scale as every other school, to ensure they were up to the mark, but how would you take into account in your measurements the disparity in funding available to the individual schools?

Would you measure against each other a school which relies totally on government resources for its existence, and one that is allowed to dip into the taxpayers' pockets to augment the fees it receives from its customers? And what would you do with the results of such comparisons?

The devil, as always, is in the detail. Broad brush strokes are fine for propaganda, but not for policy.

This brings to memory occasions in which students have been asked to leave well performing schools (usually private) not because of behaviour or failure, but because they may bring the school average down. In this scenario, the student who clearly needs more help has to change to a lower performing school, and effectively receives less help. This can and has happened.

Of course overall it’s good to know how well a school is doing. But reputation and private enterprise all too often work in inverse proportion to the needs of the student. Obviously a private school with a better reputation will be able to justify higher costs. A student then, with a lower income family, cannot afford said school. Right from the outset, the student is given a huge disadvantage. This is blatantly unjust.

The only way for every child to be given equal opportunity to realise their potential is for all education to be free. I don’t think the concept is very radical. In fact if I’m not mistaken, it used to be a given.

Dear Julie,

As a contributor to our Online Forum, would like to enquire whose side you are on?. Also as a successful aged student with honours and also engaged in International Relations was told by my tutors not to be influenced by Parties or Media but to form my own opinions. As rural West Australians, both my wife and I have been recently disgusted by the editor of our only public paper the “West Australian” publishing a glaring headline - Anti-US Line from Teachers:Costello, reminding us elders of the earlier social tactics of the Fascists and Nazis. Also as our local editor letting the article be printed makes us feel that the editor must be in collusion with our government which from a philosophical standpoint, owing to the threat of terrorism and asylum seekers, seems to have been successful in bringing not the best of democracy in our society but the worst.

Also citing one of your earlier essays - “Profit no longer a dirty word in Education” - gives too much reminder of the rash of a new and possibly misguided Christianity whose right-wing doctrines preach very much the same as indicated in your former essay - also reminding one of the warnings of Adam Smith, father of Laissez-faire, who said that though greed was necessary for economic competition, there also had to be a doctrine to look after those who could suffer from it, the workers. Later John Stuart Mill gave the same warning. What we are asking is are these same admonitionary signals from eminent historical thinkers, still being taught as well as the new social doctrines you are espousing?

Julie, Every year a different batch of students enters the school gates along with a different set of teachers. Reliable data on performance of standards will need to understand these variables and their impact on performance.

I think theres some more fundamental questions that need to be asked around that universal quetion "education for what?".

For many Australians the state school system is the only choice of school on offer. The free market and competitive culture you ask for in peformanace reports is fine for those schools who can compete on this education market, but for the majority of schools, just providing a standard education to the masses is already a hard slog.

While schools are economies of knowledge, they are also communities of people. I don't think you've factored this into your analysis.

Well said everyone Julie has forgotten some very basic economic principles in her ideological drive towards user pays education. It’s the stratification of education levels based on parents economic position that most of us don’t want. Every child should have the same opportunity whatever their parents finances or geographic location. These measures you talk about will only encourage this to happen. Give us some real world scenarios rather then the magic theory. What training will be provided to parents so they can make informed choises with the information provided from the test. After all does Julie belive that a one town school with 30 students that is 600 kms from the capital can be compare to a 1500 students one in the CBD?

Who really wants or needs all this information about schools performance? My kids have all well and truly left school now, but I was actively involved with the P&C during the 80s. For most of the time we were lucky to get a quorum for meetings and it was generally the same core group of interested parents all the time. I doubt if things have changed very much since. There will be an awful lot of time and effort put in by teachers and school administrators in generating all the information required for what I suspect will be marginal return. It would be far more beneficial if the resources and energy were actually devoted to educating kids.

Julie,
You say, 'The only ones who should feel afraid of schools performance reporting standards are those schools that are simply unwilling to improve performance for the benefit of students.'
That is a repugnant and totally unwarranted slur on teachers' professionalism.
It also ignores, through wilfull misrepresentation or sheer ignorance, the fact that most schools are unABLE to improve performance, simply because they are unable to increase their budgets. State governments, in case you didn't know, allocate funds to State schools, and schools must - and do - use their given allocation as best they can.
If all students (and their families) were equal, equal funds per student should perhaps produce equal outcomes. Children are not equal when they enter school, and anyone who has spent time working in a range of schools will agree that it takes more staff time (i.e. money) per student to compensate for a (relatively) deprived family background and/or lack of family support for learning. Sadly, the children who need it most are those least likely to attend the schools which have most money per student, so an initial imbalance is amplified by funding imbalances.
'League tables' in any form are likely to further increase existing differences as state systems are further residualised.
Your proposal only makes sense if resources are available equally to all schools on the basis of need. We are so desperately far from that now that I might as well say your proposal only makes sense in cloud-cuckoo land.
Kim,
Townsville

Educate for what? A citizen capable of functioning in society,as a member and worker? At present education seems devoted to the things which however crudely and unfairly can be scaled as a number. Meaning what, for edification of intellectually uninterested parents. Oh they want johny to do well, able to earn lots of money and be looked up to, a leader, but as pointed out the number attending Pand C associations is miserable. Rather more turn out to watch johny excel at sport, a measured learning outcom? Some to the debating society-an outcome. Frustrated and misinformed about sex, international politics, truth and honesty in public life, Measured, scaled outcomes, indicating on numbers of politicians, judges etc private schools doing better, that is producing more. An outcome correlated with the school or the parents intellectual background interacting with school, child, and parent? Is learning to be a parent a school scaled outcome? To be caring concerned and of sufficient integrity to seek out correct information in a world of spin, for that is what democracy requires not just emotive opinion at the poll. Oh yes is the ability to spin a scool scaled outcome or a personality outcome? As yet how a child learns is ill understood, what brain function produces a Hitler and all the others so far- a measured school outcome reported to parents as a predicted? Studies of the young child at www.Child Trauma.org suggests the outcome of school is more complex than current scalars can meaningfully predict, rather thay may be hard sells for muddled parents-and teachers.

How heartening to see how much better informed, compassionate and reasonable the posters are compared to the article writer.
As has already been pointed out, Australia has nothing like a level playing field when it comes to schools and their resources relative to the degree of difficulty they face with the students they are asked to educate. Worse, we now have a government who seems determined to make sure the playing field tilts even further away from the kids who have least towards the kids who already have most.
As someone said to the principal of a famous christian school recently; "Mate, you gave up the moral high ground when you accepted that public money."
Mind you, it would be good to see private schools being held as accountable for the public money they receive as public ones are. First and foremost, should schools that get more than 90% of their funds from taxpayers be able to pick and choose which of those taxpayers kids they will educate? Why one rule for them and another for public schools?

You might notice a quite remarkable consistency of views being expressed here, Julie. Somewhat at odds with your own scattergun approach to the topic of education, which seems to stem from a blind faith in Howard-style Conservative politics rather than any natural understanding of the forces involved in teaching stuff to kids.

Given that there is no "joined up" relationship between your last few articles, merely a "let them eat cake" capitalist tendency, I can only assume that you are a part-time Liberal party shill. If this isn't the case, perhaps in your next article you can start to show how your last three efforts - "Educating Kids for Profit", "State Schooling Sucks - Teach 'em at Home" and "Tie Teachers up with Administration - That'll Learn 'em" can be seen as a coherent expression of consistent policy.

Now that's an article I'd look forward to.

[Incidentally, you are somewhat bizarrely described by OLO as "Julie Novak is a Brisbane-based economist with expertise in Austrian/evolutionary economics and public choice theory", which could explain the fin-de-siecle Vienna flavour of your contributions - but I think we can assume that is a typo... yes?]

Hi Pericles,
That was not a typo - Austrian/evolutionary economics is quite correct. More information can be found here. http://ideas.repec.org/p/qld/uq2004/335.html
Regards
Susan Prior - editor

Thanks for the clarification Susan, which explains much of Ms Novak's somewhat compartmentalised approach to education. Anyone who has been wrestling with the identification of endogenous and exogenous variables in economic modelling deserves to be cut some slack.

Education has never been equal and never will be. Children are different (even those from the same socio-economic background), parents are different, teachers are different in their attitude, skill and commitment. Parents will always measure schools and make judgements about how good they are. That doesn't meant they always make good or well-informed judgements, but they make them anyway. Too many of the anti-accountability contributions to this debate wilfully ignore this. Is the criticism that people are making the judgements at all, or that they shouldn't have access to the kinds of data that Julie is suggesting?
The logical conclusion of those who are criticising Julie is that we shouldn't judge schools or make assessments of teacher performance. If that's not the conclusion, then how do these critics propose we legitimately hold schools and teachers accountable for what they do?
In a free society, parents must have the right to determine how best to educate their children and, within all the usual constraints (law, resources etc) do what they consider best. The fact that not everybody can choose the same education - or would want to - is not a bad thing. If there is a legtimate case for some measure of equalisation, then do something explicit, policy-driven and carefully measured about it. Don't assume that variations on the prohibition and random equalisation theme will secure the desired result.