On many occasions I have seen a student's report card with exactly the same comments written in exactly the same words about the same student FROM DIFFERENT TEACHERS.

Obviously the teachers were drawing their comments from a standard list, and the report card was simply a piece of paper without any meaning.

In the stagnant, non-innovative, socialist and feminist corrupted education system, the teachers couldn’t even think of anything original to write in the report card.

Without league table, we will simply have what we presently have, a stagnant, non-innovative, socialist and feminist corrupted education system, where teachers can’t even think of anything original to write in student's report cards.

Baygon,

Having spent some time reading documentation on the subject it would appear that nearly indicate a very strong correlation between HSC results and at least the first year results. I have included one link on the TER system, and having failed to find your reference, I would appreciate a link to a document that shows no correlation between HSC results and university performance.

http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/manuals/pdf_doc/cooney.pdf

On top of that, the better schools get more students into university. Thus the better schools get better HSC results, with students better prepared for acedemic life.

The demands for school league tables persist despite the evidence. As Ken Robinson, creativity and education ‘expert’ and author of “The Element”, points out there are three aspects of school education, the curriculum, the teaching and the assessment: all the scrutiny is directed at the first and last. However, all the research on educational achievement points to dramatic results relating to teaching and virtually none to assessment of the standardised test kind. The late Kenneth Rowe, one of the keenest minds in the education research area in Australia in the last several decades, observed in 2000, “Australian politicians and senior bureaucrats currently advocating the publication of such performance information in the form of ‘league tables’ are naively, and in typical fashion, stomping around in an uninformed epistemopathological fog.” Variation within schools is too large to allow meaningful discrimination.

Most advocates of standardised tests want to oversight the performance of teachers. Excessive oversight produces evasion! The article’s author himself shows the importance of paying attention to the individual student. The appropriate testing is formative evaluation, frequent tests used to improve instruction and coursework, as demonstrated by researchers at Kings College in London some decades ago. As Professor John Hattie of Auckland University has shown, it is the interaction – or feedback - between the teacher and student which makes the difference. Where teachers cooperate and the community treats the teacher with respect, then good results are likely to be achieved. Arguments about democratic rights of parents to know are not relevant.

Studies in Chicago and in New York by education researchers at the University of Chicago (Stephen Raudenbush and many others) and the University of Pittsburgh (Lauren Resnick and others) demonstrate how teachers well qualified in teaching methods make significant differences even in classes of significantly disadvantaged students. The success of education in Finland and some other Scandinavian and European countries is most particularly related to the quality of the teaching. All of the attempted reforms in the US and in the UK have focussed on testing and punishing “poorly performing” schools and teachers but produced next to no improvement.