Benefits of fair data on schools

Parents want national standards-type information on children and their schools, argues Steve Thomas. But, he says, it needs to be more sophisticated than the basic data would indicate.

Last week, the Australian My School website crashed due to too many hits, as Australian parents tried to see how their children and their children's schools are performing in literacy and numeracy.

The vast majority of parents want good information about the quality of their children's schools and teachers.

Access to fair and quality information about pupils' performance can help improve the schooling system as a whole, by giving schools good incentives to serve their communities well.

There are also other benefits for educational quality, such as improved feedback for pupils themselves.

These benefits should not be forgotten as the challenge to implement national standards in New Zealand becomes a reality.

There are some limitations to the way My School (www.myschool.edu.au) uses assessment data, which can provide lessons for New Zealand.

The website has allowed Australian parents to easily access a comprehensive snapshot of how their child's school compares with others in a similar socio-economic area, and with national averages.

However, a big issue is that even though parents can compare like schools, the comparisons rely on raw test scores.

Raw scores exclude the many complex background factors that can affect pupils' achievement, such as family background.

If schools that have a greater or different share of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are being compared, that comparison can be misleading.

Schools with more disadvantaged pupils are likely to appear as though they are performing worse, since these pupils often start from far behind where a standard is set.

What the raw data doesn't show is that teachers and schools might be making a big difference to those pupils' progress, even if they didn't reach the standard.

Not considering these different starting points may lead to unfair comparisons being made between different schools.

This is the same concern some New Zealand principals of lower-decile schools voiced last week.

They fear that if the data collected by national standards is too simplistic, their good work will not be represented, as they will never compare favourably to the wealthiest schools.

Their concerns are fair, as the Government's standards policy only requires schools to collect and report information about pupils' achievement.

No attempt has been made to provide information that could help to fairly and easily compare the performance of different schools through something like My School.

Instead, attention has focused on whether the media might produce simplistic league tables using raw results.

This fear has even led to talk of restricting access to the information altogether - a knee-jerk response that would throw out all the benefits of the information.

Simplistic league tables can be avoided by collecting and reporting better, fairer information.

Research by the Maxim Institute has found that providing information enhances the relationship between schools and parents.

Schools would have an incentive to perform well if they knew they had to provide parents with information about their performance.

"This would foster a relationship of accountability between schools and parents . . .

"Parents would be able to use the information to make accurate decisions about which school can best meet the needs of their child."

There are other benefits, too.

For example, better assessment data can help schools and teachers to give better feedback to pupils about their educational progress.

Research published by Auckland University Professor John Hattie has shown that good quality feedback has a marked impact on improving pupils' achievement.

Rather than clamping down on the information about school performance generated by the standards, the Government should develop a reliable indicator that could allow everyone to compare schools fairly according to the difference they make to the growth in pupils' achievement, rather than just comparing raw marks.

This would mean developing a value-added indicator - a measure of the value a school or teacher adds to pupils learning between two points in time.

Dr Ben Jensen, an educational researcher at the Grattan Institute, an Australian public policy body, argues for value-added indicators.

He says they should be used to compare school performance because they can separate out the difference schools and teachers make to pupils' performance from other background factors.

Jensen also notes, "This creates a fairer system [of reporting] that is not biased against schools serving more disadvantaged communities."

For New Zealand, implementing this kind of fair reporting system would be relatively straightforward.

We already have an assessment which could measure the value teachers and schools add to their pupils' achievement: the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning test. Widely used in schools already, the test fits straight into regular day-to-day classroom teaching.

Because of pressure from the teacher unions and others, the Government has shied away from providing more, better quality information about pupils' and schools' performance, even though parents typically want it and use it when they can access it.

The focus should be on providing the best quality and fairest information because families, teachers and schools all stand to benefit from it.

- Steve Thomas is a researcher for the Maxim Institute, a public policy think tank registered as a charitable trust.