In a League of Their Own

The last few weeks have seen further wrangling between politicians over the publication of league tables comparing schools. The NSW Opposition combined with the Greens and minor parties to push an amendment blocking newspapers from publishing tables comparing school performance data.

The Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and her NSW counterpart Verity Firth naturally took a swipe at the New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, calling him hypocritical and accusing him of "political vandalism" and calling the move "a ploy that did nothing to benefit schools".

While this response was quite predictable, it does rather beg the question. Does the publication of such tables really benefit schools? A scan of some recent letters to the SMH reveals some interesting ideas "out there" such as this offering from one Lydia Sharpin:

This is what the real fear is behind league tables - they will lead to the migration of the brightest talents from schools. The better schools will get the better kids and the worst schools will be forced further down the ranking tables, which could then lead to the closure of schools and loss of teachers' jobs. But are we protecting the teachers and schools at the cost of our students' futures? [Link]

Personally, I find the suggestion that blocking league tables is about protecting teachers' jobs to be rather short-sighted. While there are students, there will be a need for teachers – exactly where those students and teachers end up may well be affected by the publication of league tables, but Ms Sharpin needs to think it through a bit more. If the "better" schools do get the "better" kids, (and I'm assuming that by better, she is referring to academic results), does that necessarily lead to school closures? If it does, where do the students and teachers go? (They have to go somewhere.) If it doesn't result in school closures, what is the impact on students and staff at those schools identified as underperforming?

O'Farrell's position doesn't exactly excite me either: "What we support are parents getting information about their child, about their child's school and their child's school's performance against the state average and against like schools." [Link] This really isn't very far from the Commonwealth's plan to publish results about 'similar' schools. Similar in what way? The likely measure here is socio-economic, but the current methods used by the Commonwealth for determining the socio-economic level of schools are badly flawed. And is socio-economic really the most appropriate measure?

However, the biggest problem (in my opinion, at least) lies in how the public understands the situation. Filtered through TV sound bites and jejune summations by newspaper columnists, the public ends up with a caricature instead of a proper understanding of what the issues really are, which in turn leads to these kinds of comments:

"For the record this is absolutely no logical reason why schools - as with any other public service - should not be benchmarked against each other to determine the poor performers. Anyone who argues otherwise has a vested interest." [Link]

Presumably this person would also expect that police, fire and ambulance stations should be benchmarked against each other and the results published so he can work out which suburbs he should avoid living in or visiting.

The politicians who are for league tables keep talking about transparency. But why should transparency necessitate the publishing of league tables? If the Commonwealth required that all schools make their results from various tests publicly available, wouldn't that be transparent enough? Schools would no doubt also put up a lot of other data about their school, filling out the picture of what their school is like, and isn't that a good thing? Won't parents be better informed by this, rather than simply looking at a table of figures comparing results on tests? Verity Firth keeps trotting out the same canard:

"Providing more information about schools' performance is not about naming and shaming schools, it is about helping and supporting schools ... Full transparency will enable us to channel resources to those schools that need them most." [Link]

Except that identifying where the needs are and channelling resources doesn't require publication of anything!

This entire exercise seems to be yet another example of politicians being seen to be doing something, in this case neatly wrapped up as 'giving parents more information'.

Maybe the teachers unions should fight fire with fire and propose the publication of league tables for politicians - number of divisions voted on, attendance rates, number of days actually spent in the electorate, whether or not the member actually lives in the electorate, number of overseas trips, etc. I'm sure we'd all appreciate such full transparency come next election.

The Purpose of Education?

I've been catching up on reading the edublogs in my newsreader, which has led to an interesting juxtaposition of articles for me.

The first is Wolin, Democracy and The Math Wars by Michael Paul Goldenberg. I found the following quote Michael gives from Wolin's book resonates very strongly with me:

"The new education is severely functional, proto-professional, and priority-conscious in an economic sense. It is also notable for the conspicuous place given to achieving social discipline through education.
It is as though social planners, both public and private, had suddenly realized that education forms a system in which persons of an impressionable age are “stuff” that can be molded to the desired social form..."

While Wolin is talking about the US in particular, this is consistent with what is also an emerging trend here in Australia, where governments readily tout education as an economic mechanism, but discussion of education as a means for personal discovery and development is thin on the ground.

Craig Emerson, the Federal Minister for Small Business , has made his view very clear:
"Market democrats harness the power of the market for the public good," he said. "They dedicate themselves to remedying social disadvantage out of prosperity by giving every child the opportunity of a quality education through excellence in teaching and high-quality school facilities." [as quoted by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald]

I agree with Gittins' response: "the primary cause of inequality of opportunity isn't education, it's inheritance - of brains, social status, social skills and money." [link]

Hard on the heels of reading Goldenberg's article, I came upon this offering from Tom Hoffman.

After reading through William Deresiewicz's article and then visiting the Teach For America website, I found myself wondering if I was missing something, if perhaps I had failed to fully appreciate the full extent of the socio-economic impact of education.

But after re-reading all of the articles again, and taking some time to reflect on them, my response to all of it is as follows:

• My own view of education, while it allows for the idea that improved levels of education may lead to opportunities for students to improve their socio-economic status, is grounded in the idea that the student be given the opportunity for self-actualisation. Consequently, I object to views of education that seek to reduce education to little more than a social or economic mechanism. This sort of utilitarianism devalues education as a whole - it dismisses as unimportant subjects like Visual Arts and Music in the first instance, but ultimately devalues all subjects by narrowing the curriculum to fit the desires of business and industry.

• William Deresiewicz's "holes" are not in his education - or more specifically, not in his schooling. His attitudes, his self-professed inability to talk to people not like him and false self-worth are the products of the social environment he grew up in, not his education. (What does the fact that he now wants to point the blame at his schooling rather than his social upbringing say?)

• Programs like TFA are actually doing good things, but there is a real risk that governments, bent on driving their particular socio-economic (read myopic) views of education, may hijack their agendas.

But that's only my view things, which no doubt someone will regard as the by-product of my 1970s/80s education and Gen-X mindset. Or possibly my working-class upbringing or maybe the fact that I now teach in a non-denominational non-government school.

Whatever. I just wish there was a way to keep politicians at arm's length from education.

Big Brother Down Under?

A couple of edubloggers in my aggregator have commented on the recent announcement by the new Rudd government about its intentions to require all ISPs in Oz to filter the Internet for homes and schools, blocking pornography and "inappropriate" material. The announcement clearly states that the scheme is "opt-out" rather than "opt-in", as it was promoted in the recent election campaign. The reaction in various quarters has predictably been "censorship". I think censorship is a secondary issue here.

The Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says he makes no apology for making the scheme mandatory. (Having heard Conroy speak on previous occasions, this is hardly surprising - I wonder if he actually knows how to apologise.)

My feelings about this announcement have shifted as I've thought through the likely scenarios. My initial reaction was that it's a positive move that will protect young children - as a father, things that will help to protect my kids tend to get a thumbs up.

As an educator, my initial thoughts were much the same. Then I started thinking about the implementation and implications.

What sort of filtering will be used? As a teacher at a school with filtering systems in place, I know full well that even the most recent versions of filtering are far from perfect. Word filters catch words, but not pictures on webpages that don't have those words. Black-lists will always be playing catch-up to the websites that you want blocked. White-lists? They also are always in catch-up mode, and in the meanwhile stifle legitimate exploration of the web. It seems a reasonable assumption that while the ISPs may do their best to conform with the government's policy, they won't catch everything.

So what happens when something gets through all this filtering, and little Johnny goes home and says, "Guess what Billy saw on the computer today at school?"

Right now, if that happened, the parents would take it up with the school; the school would check that its filtering was working, and point to the line in their policy that says that they make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc., and that's probably where it would end in most cases.

But once the new policy starts being enforced, schools have a new defence: the ISP should have blocked it before it got to us; if it got past their filters... .

When the ISP takes the line "we make every effort to block inappropriate material but due to the nature of the Internet cannot guarantee..., etc.", will that be accepted? Will the ISP be fined under the new legislation? Will the parents and/or the school be able to seek damages in court?

If ISPs will be required only to do "their best" to provide clean feed (i.e. demonstrate that they have filters in place which are regularly updated), the end result is no different from what schools and parents are getting from their own filtering software now - except for one important detail - the consumers (schools and parents) will be paying for this filtering on an ongoing basis.

On the other hand, if ISPs must provide clean feed, they will be vulnerable to prosecution, which will leave the smaller ISPs more exposed than the industry big guns, in the long run resulting in the smaller ISPs bowing out or being subsumed by their larger competition. And consumers will still end up paying for filtering.

The other thing that concerns me is that some parents who have been uncertain or lax about buying filtering software will now think "okay, it's taken care of for me, so I don't need to worry about what my kid is doing on the Internet." No filtering is perfect, and there is no substitute for parental supervision. But this policy may delude some parents into thinking that the Internet just got safer.

Australians already pay too much for mediocre web access - now they will pay even more, and for filtering that in all likelihood will be no improvement over what they can buy (for less). This policy stinks of one-upmanship on the Coalition's offer of giving family free Internet filters for their home computers.

Big Brother? More like Fagin, if you ask me.