My school 2.0 - the never-ending saga

As well as crying foul some private school advocates are crying conspiracy, claiming that the new ICSEA will be used as the basis for funding schools. It is hardly surprising that equitable funding will require accurate assessment of the relative needs of our children and schools. Even the executive director of the Independent Schools Council of Australia, Bill Daniels has acknowledged that some funding should be provided according to need. If that is a conspiracy, bring it on!

All the furious lobbying aside it appears that we’ll see My School 2.0 in January. Or maybe we won’t see it at all. After all, Minister Peter Garrett has said the website won’t go up “until I am absolutely confident that all of the material on the site is accurate in every way”. We’ll all grow old waiting - just as we’ll all grow old waiting for some word of contrition to the schools damaged by My School 1.0.

It is time to ask whether more substantial changes should be made to My School. Maybe ACARA should hang an “under construction” sign off every page. It could and should include a statement along the lines of:

Any comparisons between schools enabled by this website should be broad in nature - Information available on My School is, by its nature and source, incomplete. It does not support fine or precise comparisons of schools.

Other problems will still remain. Over-reliance on NAPLAN scores means that the main performance indicator used is far too narrow and will certainly distort curriculum and teaching. School NAPLAN scores will generally rise for a few years as we get better at the tests, then improvement will level out and probably create our next moral panic about school standards.

We need to revisit why we established My School and seriously evaluate its claimed purpose and impact. A recent OECD report, Markets in Education, concludes that parents are not particularly interested in school performance indicators. Choice of schools is overwhelmingly local and more strongly linked to the social hierarchies of schools created by their enrolment. The implication is that My School is not providing the information parents are seeking but it might be fuelling a choice process based on social rather than educational criteria.

Is this the role of government? Will it create better schools for all our children.