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League tables and school performance

By Des Griffin - posted Wednesday, 11 March 2009


Among the points he made (sometimes quoting other researchers) in his article in the Journal of Journal of Educational Enquiry (PDF 314KB) in 2000 are the following:

Whereas the long-term goals of school education may be expressed as the enhancement of young peoples’ access to and participation in society, as well as preparation for meeting the constantly changing demands of the modern workplace, the most direct and readily accessible measures of schooling outcomes are obtained from assessments of students’ academic attainments …

… standardised achievement tests or public examinations [which] have inherent risks as instruments of evaluation for accountability since they seldom cover more than the common core or very basic curriculum units [and] may be highly deceptive because of lacking content validity. ...

In high stakes testing environments, educational practitioners are likely to distort their behaviour in order to meet the demands of the indicator, usually to the detriment of their real job. …

Where examination scores have been used as outcome measures, differences between classes and faculties within schools are typically large and substantially greater than differences among schools, although effects are not especially consistent across faculties or from year to year … there seems to be little awareness that ... the majority of such tests assess skills in terms of generalised academic abilities and enduring cognitive “traits” rather than specific learning outcomes arising from classroom instruction.

It is not possible to provide simple summaries that capture all of the important features of schools… the historical nature of school effectiveness judgements is an acute problem… Above all, even when suitable adjustments for students’ intake characteristics and prior achievement have been taken into account, the resulting value-added estimates have too much uncertainty attached to them to provide reliable rankings.

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As Rowe shows, charting the “residuals” (variations from the mean or average of all the data) of test scores together with their 95 per cent confidence intervals for a large number of schools reveals that “the 95 per cent confidence intervals surrounding the mean point-estimates for each school cover a large part of the total range of estimates, with approximately 80 per cent of the intervals overlapping the population mean (zero)”. Attempts to separate or rank schools on the basis of this data are subject to considerable uncertainty: it really is only possible to claim that the “outliers”, the 10 per cent of schools at the each end of the graph are different from each other. One cannot say anything statistically valid about the 80 per cent of schools in the middle! At this point we can see why, in the best school systems, publication of such league tables is not done!

League tables are pounced on by tabloid media and many politicians, often in a nonsensical manner, some headlines proclaiming schools were “failing half their pupils”. As Rowe said, “… it is difficult to find ways of helping [schools] in a prevailing social and political atmosphere of blame, recrimination and retribution”.

In New Zealand, the “marketisation” flowing from publication of “league tables” was found (by Hugh Lauder & David Hughes et al, Trading in Futures Why Markets in education don’t Work, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1999) to lead to no significant improvement of student performance but to simply polarise schools by social class and ethnicity. The same is true of Australia: that children from lower SES environments tend to be concentrated in public schools fallaciously suggests to some that public schooling is inherently inferior!

It is of interest that the Good Childhood Inquiry in Britain which reported February 5, 2009 recommended that “Government should:

  • replace all SATS tests with an annual assessment designed mainly to guide a child’s learning; and
  • stop publishing data on individual schools from which league tables are constructed by the media.”

The Children’s Society’s statement on schooling says, “… exam grades and qualifications must not be seen as the primary objective of children’s education, rather one of the markers of children’s growth, learning and achievements among many others”.

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In study after study, good teaching has emerged as the principal determinant of high performance. But this is not achieved simply by financially rewarding teachers whose students achieve relatively high scores in tests. It is achieved by attention to recruitment and training, by valuing teachers - not least by setting good starting salaries - and by “relational trust”, building relationships between community, school, teachers and students.

These are results from studies of schools in Finland and other European countries whose students consistently achieve the highest scores in international tests (where “league tables” are not used), and in Chicago where significant improvements have taken place as revealed by longitudinal studies. These are also conclusions from studies by the OECD of school leadership and an analysis of the results of international tests by McKinsey and company in “How the Best Performing Schools come out on Top” (PDF 9.51MB) and of schools around the world by Professor Brian Caldwell and Dr Jessica Harris published late last year as “Why not the Best Schools?”.

Test scores are useful in tracking the performance of individual students over time: studies show that formative evaluation, focusing on achievement as it occurs, achieves results while summative evaluation such as test scores does not. The best performing schools use tests in this way.

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About the Author

Des Griffin AM served as Director of the Australian Museum, Sydney from 1976 until 1998 and presently is Gerard Krefft Memorial Fellow, an honorary position at the Australian Museum, Sydney.

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