Teachers stand up to damaging league tables

Vanguard February 2010 p. 12
Nick G

Teachers around the nation are set to do battle with the federal Government over a controversial new website launched at the end of January.

The website reports on school achievements in national numeracy and literacy (NAPLAN) tests.

Behind the use of the NAPLAN data is an attack on the right of Australians to high quality public education in their own community.

Essentially the government is saying “We have put the old arguments about rich schools and poor schools behind us by doing everything possible to leave the choice of schools up to the parents”.

Driving this retreat from high quality public education for all is the public comparison of school NAPLAN results. Gillard has said that the new My School website will allow “like school” comparisons. In her words, there won’t be a comparison between “the most elite schools on Sydney’s north shore on the top and the most disadvantaged schools in outback Northern Territory on the bottom.”

What she often fails to point out is that every school will be compared with its twenty closest schools within which there will obviously be various inequalities which will encourage parents, in Kevin Rudd’s words, “to vote with their feet.”

In addition, the capitalist media, which rarely defends public education and generally pushes privatization in every arena, will use the My School website to construct its own league tables of school comparison. Gillard oscillates between denying that My School data can be used in this way, and praising the Brisbane Courier-Mail for the league tables it constructed out of last year’s NAPLAN results released by the Queensland government!

“The issue for teachers is not the tests,” says South Australian AEU President Correna Haythorpe. “We test students every day. The issue for us is the misuse of test data which was never designed for the comparison of schools. The Government must bring in measures to stop league tables.”

Teachers point to the marketing of “teach to the test” materials in schools and bookshops as confirmation of fears that there will be an English-style narrowing of the curriculum and lack of balance in learning.

Capitalism does not concern itself with what a child gets out of education beyond ensuring that skills essential for productivity growth are drilled into the young.

The government’s neo-liberal marketisation of education must be stopped.

Each community must be provided with public education of the highest standard with a balanced curriculum.

"League tables", with their potential to demoralize students, mislead parents and limit the access to high quality public education must be stopped.