My School: Parents, Pupils and the Public Interest – Maralyn Parker

Maralyn Parker is a the education columnist for The Daily Telegraph and has won awards for her journalism. She has published several books on education, the most recent is My School: What Every Parent Needs to Know (Random House 2011). On Tuesday 17 May 2011, Maralyn Parker joined Dr Helen Proctor to discuss Australia’s MySchool website and the outcomes surrounding the promotion of national testing and public information on schools.

 

MY SCHOOL: PARENTS, PUPILS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST

 

MARALYN PARKER

The My School website has had a lot of bad press, including from me I confess. You might be surprised to know (not if you have read my book) that I believe it is the best resource parents, and the public in general, have ever had to help them understand what is happening in Australian schools. There is a whole range of information on the site and just about all of it is useful, from the gender mix at the school, to NAPLAN results, to school finances.

Take the gender mix for example. Some co-ed schools today are de facto boys’ schools because there is a trend for families to send their girls to all-girl schools and their boys to co-ed schools. Girls are a civilizing and calming influence on boys. As long as it is someone [else]’s daughter doing the civilising and calming it seems. You can see how the gender mix at a school might be important.

For the first time, the My School website is giving us publicly comparable information about schools that has not been filtered first by the schools themselves.

Some of the information about private schools, such as some school finance data, would never have seen the light of day if schools had not been forced to supply it for the My School website. Some information, such as the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage or ICSEA, has been created specially for the site. The ICSEA is a brilliant idea. There are still problems with it and it is a complex formula that uses information about the families of children who attend the school and includes information such the remoteness of a school. But, the good thing about it is it allows us to look at the socio-educational advantage of a whole school community and compare it to the big picture of schools in Australia. I have to say looking at the ICSEA of a school is very enlightening. I’ll try to come back to that later if I don’t run out of time.

Some of the information on My School has been available to parents through school annual reports or in those glossy school brochures. Usually only the best bits, however. Many schools in NSW carefully reported data in their annual reports in a way it that could not be easily used to compare with them other schools. Some of the information available on the site has been deliberately hidden from us until now by state and territory governments, including the immediate past Labor government.

If you are at all interested in schooling in Australia you should visit this website. I promise that you will learn something new about your school, or any school, if you are visiting for the first time. I have to say it is not just parents who are trawling the site with much interest. Educational researchers love it. They are getting free access to data they previously had to beg governments for, or put in FOIs, or even pay for.

So I give the Gillard Government a big tick for its transparency agenda and the My School website.

There has been a lot of clamour to close the site down, especially when it first went live. Many of the fears expressed by educators and teachers at the time I believe were, and some still are, absolutely valid. The first version of the site had multiple problems, including inaccuracies and poor quality data. Most of these problems were fixed for the second version.

It should be understood that the site is a work in progress. It will keep getting better and there are plans to give us more information. For example, we will probably get Year 12 results, post school outcomes and a value-added measure sometime in the future. But the big fear everyone has about the site is whether it will force on us a school system driven by standardised tests. We have seen what happened in the US and the UK, where teachers dropped everything to practise for standardised tests. No-one wants that to happen here.

However, I don’t think it is happening to any great extent in Australian and I have high hopes that it won’t.

The big difference between what is happening here and what happened in the US and the UK is that the US and UK governments constructed their own official, simplistic, league tables. The governments labelled schools as failing, sacked teachers and closed schools down. That is not happening here. No government in Australia is constructing league tables. In fact, just about every Australian politician has come out to say quite strongly they do not approve of league tables, including Julia Gillard. In NSW, we even have state legislation that can punish newspapers if they publish league tables. That is another story. I could go on for 15 minutes just about that. But suffice to say there has not been the media frenzy around making league tables from NAPLAN results in Australia as many people expected. My newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, with Garry Linnell as editor, did not publish league tables. This was hugely significant. We are the highest selling daily newspaper in this state.

As much as I like the My School website I have three major areas of concern.

The first is that it makes the NAPLAN results seem much more important than they should be. And the site can give a very misleading picture of a school, especially a small school. Just about every section of the website is complicated. It is not just a matter of getting on there and reading some red or green graphs, even though the site seems to invite you to do that. One of the most complicated parts of the site is the ICSEA. It is important to understand it and how it is used to compare schools, because the big message from the site is that it is not fair to compare schools on NAPLAN results without understanding quite a lot about the school community and the background of the school.

There needs to be a context where many other things are taken into account.

All the research agrees that the socio-educational background of a child makes the biggest difference to how successful they are at school. The socio-educational background of a whole school community makes the biggest difference to how well the school will perform in national tests. The ICSEA is used to find other schools where the school community has a similar socio-educational advantage or disadvantage so comparisons can be made about performance.

My second big worry about the site is it makes the NAPLAN test results seem much more important than they should be. They are just small tests of around 40 questions. They are a snapshot designed to measure the standards being reached in literacy and numeracy in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and to provide some diagnostic feedback to teachers. But the site takes that one result and shows it in five different ways. I don’t blame anyone who just gives up and looks at the red and green and makes a judgment about a school based only on NAPLAN results. That is a big problem. A school showing red on the My School website can be doing the most amazing things with its students. A school showing red can be making a much bigger difference to the standards of its students than a school with the highest of all NAPLAN results. Yes there are also schools showing red where there are low expectations and not much happening. But the My School website does not tell you the difference.

 

Literacy and numeracy standards are important. We should be keeping tabs. The public should be privy to the information governments collect about the standards being reached in our schools, and how they compare to state and territory standards and national standards. However, we need to keep it all in perspective. NAPLAN tests are just small tests of only around 40 questions each. They are just for years 3, 5, 7 and 9. They are just a snapshot from one day.

And that brings me to my third big concern about the MY School website. The NAPLAN results can be very misleading for small schools.

Professor Margaret Wu from Melbourne University has written several papers about the margin of error in these tests. The margin of error is the difference the test result might be if a similar test was given to the same children at about the same time.

For an individual child the margin of error is 12 per cent. So a child who gets 70 per cent in a NAPLAN test could get anywhere from 82 per cent to 58 per cent in a similar test around the same time. Professor Wu says a school needs about 40 children in the year being tested before we can take any notice of its school average. That means a primary school needs about 280 students, a high school 240 students and a combined primary and high school about 520 students, before you should take any notice of a school average. However, the site shows school averages based on as few as five children. The margin of error for a group of five children can be plus or minus over 30 per cent. The My School website does show the margin of error now. It did not in the first version. So that is a big improvement.

However, I don’t think the site explains emphatically enough the significance of the margin of error and how it can totally undermine any conclusions you might come to about a school. Parents should never use NAPLAN results alone to choose a school for their child.

A school can have the best NAPLAN results in the world and be the wrong school for your child. In my book, I go through each element of the website, explain it and say how it might be useful to parents and what, if any, controversies there might be around it. However that is just one chapter in my book.

After I had written about the website, it was obvious to me there are many things the My School website does not tell you that are important to parents. So I started writing a second chapter about all of the things the My School website does not tell you. Eight chapters later, I had a book.

One of the questions parents ask me frequently is: how do I know if my child has a good teacher? And unfortunately, almost as frequently: what can I do about a bad teacher? In the book, I explain some of the research about what makes a good teacher including John Hattie’s Visible Learning and the research around productive pedagogies in Australia. I included this explanation because I know some parents are interested. But parents don’t need to know about the research. There are many things they could notice that would tell them their child has a good teacher.

Top of the list, and it is widely recognised, is good teachers ask for feedback on their teaching. They try to find out if their teaching is effective. So a child might be asked to give themselves a grade on how well they have learned something. They might bring home a survey to fill in about how they think they are going in different subjects. A teacher might even have a system where a student can let them know during the lesson how they are coping. For example, they might put out a coloured disk on their desk, green for good, orange for you are losing me, and red for I don’t get it.

Good teachers might even stop a lesson to reteach or will do some extra teaching at the end of the lesson. Of course there is a lot of trust involved in telling a teacher you don’t get it. Good teachers build trust. Good teachers also give good feedback to students. I don’t mean general feedback such as, “You are doing well”, but very specific feedback on the work they are doing. Often this will make a child feel as though they are progressing, even if it is only in very small steps. It is vitally important for a child to believe they can learn. If they lose that belief there can be devastating effects. So what can you do about a bad teacher who might make a child feel like that?

For starters, just because a child doesn’t like a teacher doesn’t mean they are a bad teacher.

There can be a personality clash. It happens in every workplace. It could be the child and teacher simply don’t like each other, though you would expect the teacher to behave in a professional manner if that is the case. There can be other reasons a child is unhappy at school, such as being bullied or having a good friend moved away. In the book, I go through about ten things that you might recognise that tell you your child has a bad teacher.

The most obvious is your child will not be making much progress. A bad teacher may not even notice, and if you approach them about it they will probably not know why and most certainly be doing nothing about it. Worse, a bad teacher might tell you everything is fine when clearly it is not. So what can you do about a bad teacher? I would like to give you a quick solution, but aside from getting the child out of that class immediately, there is no simple remedy. In the book, I offer some suggestions about what you could do.

I do say you have to do something. Parents tend to think if my child has one bad year it won’t matter, they’ll catch up next year. But research shows us once a child falls behind they might never catch up. In fact the effect can be cumulative.

If a child gets a few bad teachers in a row the end result of their schooling could be way below what it normally would have been. Of course, the same thing happens the other way around with a run of quality teachers. You can choose a school but you can’t choose a teacher. And I have to tell you there are good teachers in every school in every sector, just as there are bad teachers. Just when it starts to get exciting I have to finish. I have only told you a little bit about the first two chapters in my book. There are seven more chapters.

Anyone who follows my column in The Daily Telegraph will know I have strong opinions about most things educational. However, my book is not a political critique of the My School website; it is fairly straight forward advice for parents. I haven’t been able to help myself though. I do voice an opinion occasionally. But mainly I have stuck to giving advice that would be useful no matter where a child is enrolled. I have also included a checklist parents could use if they are choosing a school.

There is a Facebook page for my book where you can post questions and comments.

For anyone who wants to join me in political debate or discussion about schooling please join my blog on the Telegraph’s website. I promise you there is some fun to be had there.