I should reply to Sniggid’s comment as it was directed to me. You must have missed the last section of my article because it is really important that schools are accountable and I suggest how it can be done better.

The problem is, as the article demonstrates, that only 30% of the difference between schools is explained by what schools do (as distinct from who they enrol). It’s not my opinion, the chief exec of ACARA himself regularly cites this.

So even before you start, the significance of NAPLAN as an explanation of the difference between schools and their relative worth is seriously flawed. It means that you must factor in all other differences between the schools otherwise you end up comparing apples and oranges. ACARA know this, hence the ICSEA index - which falls short of the mark for reasons I explained.

What Sniggid needs to show is evidence from anywhere that more testing and high stakes testing raises the quality of learning and the quality of schools. I wish you luck!

Candide’s suggestion (re-introduce school inspectors) is a partial answer to vanna’s plea (where do we get this information?). Independent professional assessment of schools is expensive but others do it (e.g. New Zealand) – why can’t we? And they use student test data as a valuable source, but certainly not the only source, of information.

The post from Queensland reminds me of another problem. Year 7 in Qld is at the end of primary school – the kids have been at the school for years. In NSW the Year 7 test is given after the kids are in their new high school for just over three months. And then we compare NSW and Qld Year 7 NAPLAN results! Someone needs to explain to me why this is valid.

Chris Bonner,
Maybe it is difficult to measure schools when there is not a national curriculum, and numerous teachers can’t even understand what they are supposed to be teaching.

Guess who opposes not having a national curriculum (and it is not the parents).

Measuring data and comparing one organisation to another can bring about dramatic improvements in both organisations. However I would not leave it to the schools to prepare and report data to the public. Left to their own devices, schools have not reported such data in the past, and it is now necessary for governments to report such data.

If you don’t like governments reporting such data, compare it to the situation where schools were not reporting anything to the public, who pay a considerable amount of their taxpayer funding to the schools.

I don’t know of too many teachers who DO NOT take the public completely for granted.

Dear Chris

Your recent post misses the point I was making. You want to cloud accountability by linking it to a process that is in effect "in house" within the education community. In other words a bureaucratic system that considers so many variables as to make really negative results being able to be explained away.

Rather we should consider what all schools have a basic responsibility for. That is to equipt youngsters with literacy and numeracy skills that will allow them to move forward into other areas of education and post education life. So, we test them and make the results public so that the customers, parents in the main, can make judgements about the quality of the product.

Principals should welcome this and in the government school systems push for the ability to hire and fire, and have full control of the resources provided. Fortunately moves in this direction are beginning to take place in Western Australia.

I know that educators generally have an aversion to high stakes testing. I have never been able to fatham just why this is. It probably relates back to the fact that teachers are one of the most unionised workforces in the country.

Nevertheless, principals are on a hiding to nothing by opposing the small step Julia Gillard has taken.

I thought Chris Bonnor's piece was a typical example of the gulf that exists between the elites of this nation (such as him) and the general public, who as a number of other posters have remarked validly have had enough of the lack of transparency and the difficulties they face in getting information about their children's education

It is the parents who pay the taxes which employ the teachers and they have every right to know how their school is travelling when it comes to basic skills such as reading , writing, spelling and maths

Bonnor's disdain for that right to know exemplified by his sneering reference to "Transparency" only reflects his intellectual snobbery and contempt for the "customer" so often found among leftists.

Good on Julia Gillard for standing up to the antediluvian teachers union whose gloomy if not hysterical prognostications about My School have not been borne out
In a nation where the pressures of competitive economic life means having to measure up is faced almost daily by most workers other than teachers and academics it is time the latter groups also had to face analysis of their performances
Lastly I would suggest Mr Bonnor might usefully read Shaun Carney's recent article in the Age in which he indicated how he expects the Rudd governemnt to use MY School as a tool to enable it to gradually shift resources to the least well -resourced and well -functioning schools after its pre election commitment to the Howard schools funding scheme concludes with the imminent end of that program

"The problem is, as the article demonstrates, that only 30% of the difference between schools is explained by what schools do (as distinct from who they enrol). It’s not my opinion, the chief exec of ACARA himself regularly cites this."

I think you have to be careful with those figures. I suspect they have come from some kind of multivariate linear regression. That is we have to remember that correlation does not imply causation. 30% could very well be biased upwards or downwards.

Take for example the a simple example to illustrate my point:
Suppose that parents/Socioeconomic have no *direct effect* on their child's achievement. Suppose that only the quality of teaching affects academic achievement. Suppose those parents with greater income/education are better able to secure higher quality teachers for their children.

What will you observe in this example? You will observe a correlation between income/parental education, but to infer from this that it is causation would be incorrect by our very starting assumption.

Differences between school play little part in the difference between children in standardized tests Pisa, the NBER studies on the Chicago lottery system and twin studies all point to it. Genetics, epigenetics and early child development all overwhelm the effect of schools. Even the famous marshmallow tests by Walter Mischel showed that outcomes for children are largely predicatable by 4. School readiness is a very good predictor of a child's school performance. Makes sense - as the child through their school life is taught by the average teacher. They do not get the average parent.

Why the ranking of schools is harmful is it is a distraction from the real causes of children's problems. Schools should do what they do well not have all their effort directed into things they probably have no influence. Parents, education is not a consumer good that you can shop around for.

An interesting side question for those who thing schools are so important is why Catholic/Anglican/Uniting schools are full but their churches are empty?