Why ICSEA fails our schools

She has stated on more than one occasion, and the ACARA website is based on this myth, that the ICSEA values for the first time allow the comparison of statistically similar schools.

This requires some further explanation.

Most people are aware of some of the glaring anomalies in lists of statistically similar schools compiled by ACARA and published on My School. Adelaide’s Sunday Mail revealed the odd pairing of elite Prince Alfred College with rural East Murray Area School, with accompanying pictures of the former’s feudal bluestone castle and the latter’s shabby transportable.  The Prince Alfred College principal was at a loss to explain the pairing, and at even greater loss to explain why his college was not statistically similar to its traditional rival, neighbouring St Peters College.

What the paper did not pick up was the less glaring, but equally damaging, pairing of St Peters College with southern suburbs’ Blackwood High.

Blackwood High is nestled in the southern foothills, surrounded by a community that includes the reasonably affluent alongside the somewhat socially stretched.

According to its principal, 56 per cent of students eligible to enrol at Blackwood do not do so. They come from families wealthy enough to enrol at private schools. Each CCD in the vicinity of Blackwood High is a microcosm of social diversity. The sole supporting mother lives a street away from the wealthy businessman and his professional partner. Their household incomes are averaged. The children from the former take into Blackwood High the same average of ABS data that the children of the latter take down the hill and into Scotch College. The household income of students at Blackwood tends to be overstated; likewise, the household income of students at the various private colleges who come from the Blackwood CCDs tends to be underestimated.

The schools are not compared through ICSEA on the basis of real parental income as stated by Gillard in her many media interviews. This is certainly not denied, but acknowledged by ACARA in its own technical paper which explains ICSEA on the My School website. I repeat, it is acknowledged in the word “community” in ICSEA.

The damage that is done to the Blackwoods of the public school system is that they have higher ICSEA values than they should have and are therefore grouped and compared with schools that serve students with greater educational advantage. The acne of pinks and reds that festoon the NAPLAN results for Blackwood against the so-called similar schools on its My School page are an indictment of Julia Gillard and the damage that she is doing.

Gillard has justified her misleading ICSEA by saying that when she came to office, she did not have access to data that identified the existence of socio-economically disadvantaged schools. Later she conceded that she did have it for Catholic and private schools. She could easily have obtained it for public schools from her State and Territory ministerial counterparts.

The South Australian education department established an Index of Educational Disadvantage (IoED). It was created in 2000 to replace a previous index, the Weighted School Card Index. The IoED places schools into one of seven categories, with category one being most disadvantaged and category seven being most advantaged.

The SA IoED uses only four components and they contribute approximately equally to the overall score.  Two are drawn from ABS CCDs (household income and parental education and occupation, again, averaged across the families in the CCD). Two are school-based data sets: Aboriginality and student mobility.

Constructed out of different variables, there is some overlap and mismatch between IoED and ICSEA.