Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .
Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1763 ..
MR BERRY (continuing):
There is nothing to stop individuals or organisations from collecting school results from individual parents or through Freedom of Information (FOI) applications. Information on school results will not be formally protected from FOI applications as they have been for the last few years as Confidential cabinet documents.
I am picking items out of this article, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. It goes on to state:
Another simple way to construct a league table of average scores would be to select a key strand in literacy and numeracy such as reading, writing or number for one Year level and use this as a 'proxy' measure of overall school performance.
The P&C council, of course, strenuously opposes league tables, and there are very good reasons for that.
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I suspect it will be said by the government that we are being paranoid and overprotective. We cannot be overprotective as far as our students are concerned. There is just no way that we can be overprotective. They deserve the most strident protection from anything which will impact negatively on education outcomes.
There are a myriad of examples from overseas and Australia which illustrate the problems that arise from league tables. There have been difficulties with league tables in the United Kingdom. A brief dated June 2000 from the ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Associations entitled The case against school league tables goes to issues in the UK, and it is not hard to come to the conclusion that those sorts of things will happen here in the ACT if this sort of proposal goes ahead. The brief states:
Comparisons of school results can further entrench inequities and social division in schooling. This has happened in the UK since the introduction of public league tables and in New Zealand with public reporting on the performance of individual schools.
In the race for higher rankings some students and their families come to be seen as an asset to the school and others are considered undesirable because they are seen as a liability.
That is to say, kids who are bad performers are not wanted at the school because they affect the overall outcome of the school.
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, these are the most undesirable aspects of anything that can be described as a league table. The document goes on to say that this leads to replacing undesirable students with those who generate better test results and that replacing students is both easier and more certain of success on league tables than changing what teachers actually do. The document contains headings such as "League tables are misleading advertising", "The case against school league tables" and "Cheating by schools", and I will go to that issue. The document states:
League tables are also misleading because rankings can be affected by cheating by schools. With public reputation and status at stake, schools have an incentive to obtain a high ranking on league tables by manipulating their results.
One way is to provide students with the answers to tests. For example, there has been a spate of cheating incidents in the United States recently. In December last
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .