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"Next month's arrival of US schools 'expert', Mr Joel Klein, to promote his flawed education model should ring alarm bells for ACT families who have already had one round of school closures that were partly based on average student outcomes from student testing," says Jane Tullis, Community Alliance candidate for Ginninderra.
The contradictions of Klein’s approach, which ranks schools on the basis of their average student results in testing, are immediately obvious from the closure of four high-poverty New York schools because of low student marks, even though teachers and principals at these schools had been rewarded for improving student performance overall. In other words: it doesn’t matter how hard the kids tried, or how much they improved, or what their backgrounds were, or how much help they needed: if the school average was low, the school was closed. There is no evidence that the system looked beyond the data to the actual student need. In addition, one of the principals is being investigated for cheating in response to these so-called accountability measures. Similarly, a high-achieving school can be failed, and closed, because it cannot improve its marks from the previous year. "I don’t know why anyone would persist with this model, other than the desire to ‘rationalise’ the number of public education facilities across the nation, just has been done here in the ACT,” says Mrs Tullis. The grading system has been labelled as 'inherently unreliable', 'dubious' and 'statistical malpractice'. It is statistically unreliable because it is largely based on year-to-year changes in school test scores, which are prone to large measurement errors. As Daniel Koretz of Harvard Uni, a leading US expert on testing, says: "It does not make sense for parents to choose schools, or for policymakers to praise or berate schools, for a rating that is so influenced by error." This means that a school's grade is based more on chance - the roll of a dice - rather than anything about its actual performance. "The fundamental advantage of studying another country’s education experiments is meant to be that we can recognise the inaccuracies and protect ourselves from making the same mistakes." said Mrs Tullis. "Although the Federal Education Minister says ‘writing the curriculum … isn' a job for politicians, it’s a job for educational experts’, she doesn’t apply the same logic in reviewing and instigating change. Surely an evidence-based approach to policy would be better." Contact: Jane Tullis |
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