Performance Reporting and Public Accountability

PM59 Information for CIP Buckingham, Jennifer CIS Policy Monograph 59 Sydney: The Centre for Independent Studies About the Author Jennifer Buckingham is a policy analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies. About the Paper There is very little information available to parents or the general public about the performance of government and non-government schools in Australia. In this monograph Jennifer Buckingham calls for a consistent, fair and meaningful system of reporting and publishing this material which will enable parents to make informed choices about which school is best for their child. It will also serve to keep schools not only accountable to the government (which is currently the case), but also to the public whose taxes sustain the public education system. Critics of school reporting argue that it would create unhealthy competition between schools and disadvantage lower performing schools. However, a school that is identified as performing badly should be recognised and given assistance accordingly, for the benefit of teachers, and ultimately the students in improving their level of education. Buckingham outlines the current schools performance testing measures in all states in Australia from primary to secondary school. She explores the principles of school reporting and factors which need to be considered: the appropriate academic (numeracy and literacy) indicators to be used; a school’s ‘value-added’ analysis (how much a school improves on students performance); socioeconomic differences between schools; including ‘uncertainty intervals’ (calculating a range of scores within which a school can fall); and measuring the overall performance of a school, not only academic, but also physical and social provisions. J. Buckingham – CIS - Draft Copy for Review 1 School reporting information is made available to the public in other countries under different systems in England, the United States and New Zealand, as Buckingham outlines. The government has collected a mass of information on students and schools for over a decade. There would be no added expense of requiring more testing, and Buckingham proposes a way to present and organise this information to be published for general use. It will help lay the groundwork for reforms for fully funded school choice and provide the impetus to improve schools that are operating at substandard levels. Approx. 20,000 words. J. Buckingham – CIS - Draft Copy for Review 2 Introduction It is highly unusual for any person or organisation to conceal information that reflects on them favourably. This is no less true of governments. What then, are we to make of the fact that almost no information is available to parents or the public about what goes on in schools in Australia? The reasonable assumption to make is that there is something to hide. New South Wales is particularly secretive, but all states and territories are guilty to some extent. On the basis of information currently available in NSW, for example, one might reasonably conclude that the only good schools are selective state schools, a number of independent schools in Sydney, and a handful of comprehensive state schools scattered across the state. The annual jostling of a couple of dozen metropolitan schools for a position in the top Higher School Certificate rankings means nothing to the parents and students in the other 2,000 or so schools in the state. For parents, it is not a question of whether North Sydney Girls High achieves more HSC distinctions than Abbotsleigh College. They want to know that the schools in their area are meeting appropriate standards, and which school is best suited to their child’s abilities, interests and aspirations. Information that would answer these questions is denied them. This is not because the information does not exist, but because it is kept secret. Purportedly, this confidentiality is to protect schools from unfair comparisons, because different schools have different capacities to achieve. In reality, it allows low performing schools to provide substandard education without scrutiny and fosters a culture of low expectations. A consistent, fair and meaningful system of reporting on school performance in all Australian states and territories is long overdue. Schools, school systems and the people responsible for them must no longer be protected at the expense of the students in them. This is the third paper published by The Centre for Independent Studies arguing for greater public accountability for publicly funded education. Ken Gannicott in Taking Education Seriously (1998), and Alison Rich in Beyond the Classroom (2000), described the way in which public reporting on school performance has been successfully opposed by interest groups, explained the inadequacies of current reporting arrangements, and provided the rationale for greater accountability and transparency.1 This paper will, in addition to updating and further developing the arguments made by Gannicott and Rich, propose a way for performance reporting to proceed. In writing this paper I take the risk of alienating purists on both sides of the debate. On one side is the belief that schools should be tightly controlled and regulated by governments, but that the outcomes of schooling are immeasurable and relative and should not be evaluated. On the other side is the belief that schools should be given absolute freedom to educate and that parents should be given absolute freedom to choose between them. The latter side views the setting of standards and the assessment of proficiency as unwarranted and unhelpful impositions of the state. My concern is less for ideological purity than for seeking reforms that are most likely to advantage students and families in particular, but also good teachers, with the fewest J. Buckingham – CIS - Draft Copy for Review 3 possible exceptions. In doing this, I attempt to establish the middle ground by arguing that testing is important, not just for individual diagnostic purposes, but so that effective teaching strategies can be recognised. These tests should be common to all schools so that underperforming schools can be identified, and so that parents can make informed choices about the best school for their child. For the latter, results must be published. I also contend, however, that the accountability component should be primarily in the hands of parents and the communities that schools serve. These are the people whose prospects and quality of life are most at stake. Ultimately, for performance reporting to have its greatest impact, people must be able to exercise choice in schooling—a fundamental parental responsibility currently unavailable to many families, but which could and should be. Chapter 1: The case for performance reporting Few, if any, of the arguments made here for accountability of schools through the publication of performance indicators are new, but bear repeating as an introduction to the proposals and recommendations made later.2 Each of the arguments is strong and each is sufficient to justify public accountability for school performance. Together they make an incontrovertible case. 1. Public funding behoves public accountability School education is subsidised through taxation because it is considered a public good. That is, educating children benefits a whole society. Public funding, however, does not come without conditions. Parents and the public are entitled to know whether the education they are providing through their taxes meets their expectations of quality. Governments have taken over this role by proxy. State and non-government schools are required to report to state and Commonwealth governments on various aspects of schooling, including progress on literacy and numeracy benchmarks. In addition, all state schools are required to provide a minimal amount of educational performance data in their annual reports, which are distributed to parents and available to members of the public on request. Some, but not all, non-government schools also do this. Most reporting, however, is based on self-evaluation rather than external assessment, and is not provided in a form that allows direct comparisons between schools. For example, the recent Review into Non-Government Schools in NSW (the ‘Grimshaw Review’) found that ‘there is no comprehensive process in New South Wales for reporting on educational performance that is applied consistently across the government and non- government school sectors’.3 While it is therefore not true to say that schools are altogether unaccountable, the balance of accountability is certainly weighted in the wrong direction. Schools are primarily accountable to the government rather than to the people who pay for them and whose children they have been entrusted to educate. J. Buckingham – CIS - Draft Copy for Review 4 Governments, in turn, have made little or no effort to pass this information about schools on to parents. Indeed in NSW, the state government passed legislation that expressly prohibits it. This ban on the publication of school level results has been attributed to the influence of teachers’ unions,4 but the fact remains that governments have been complicit and they are ultimately responsible. Successive state and territory governments have either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the position, arguably to avoid scrutiny of their own performance.5 Melbourne University Professor Peter Cuttance believes that ‘this lack of accountability at the system level is one of the main reasons why some students fail to achieve basic

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