Why ICSEA fails our schools

Or the ratio of FTE non-teaching staff to students? At Blackwood it is a high 53.4 per student, whilst at St Peters it is a low 18 to one. Leaving aside the curation of the cricket pitch at St Peters, perhaps students at that school have an educational advantage in that their teachers are better supported in the classroom by teaching assistants, or carry less of a burden and distraction in the form of administrivia, leaving them free to concentrate on their core task of teaching.

Should student mobility be a variable? It is for SAs IoED, but is not for ACARA despite Gillard deeming it to be such a huge influence that it justifies the creation of a “discrete student identifier” (ID number) to track students across their various schools on My School.

How about really using parental income, instead of an average of 220 families’ incomes?

And let’s not forget the variable dropped by ACARA from ICSEA because it “did not correlate highly enough with student achievement”, namely, “the percentage of people who do not speak English well”! That obviously has no correlation with the four sets of NAPLAN results that are based exclusively on English literacy!

So, ICSEA does not establish a basis for comparing like schools.

It does not use school data.

It is a community index and it should not be used to compare, rank and judge schools.

The sooner Gillard takes ACARA back to the interactive whiteboard to start all over again, the better.