This opinion article by ACER chief executive, Professor Geoff Masters, was published in The Australian newspaper on 22 January 2010.

Threats by the Australian Education Union to boycott this year’s literacy and numeracy tests must have many scratching their heads. Why would teachers be opposed to better public information about what is being achieved in our schools?

At the heart of the teacher union threat appears to be a concern that test results will be interpreted as direct indicators of how well individual schools are performing.  According to the AEU, there are two problems with such an interpretation.  First, literacy and numeracy tests measure only part of what students learn in school and so only partially capture the contributions that schools are making.  Second, schools work in very different socioeconomic contexts with significantly different resources, meaning that it is harder to achieve high test scores in some schools than in others.  For these reasons, the union argues, measures of student performance are not good measures of a school’s performance.

In England, an attempt has been made to address this concern by introducing ‘league tables’ that purport to show not measures of student performance, but measures of school performance.  This is done by first predicting the test performances of students in each school based on their socioeconomic and other backgrounds.  The difference between the predicted and actual scores in a school is then taken as a measure of that school’s performance.  The better students do than predicted, the higher the school’s measured performance.

There are several well-recognised problems with this approach.  First, it obscures actual student results.  Second, it sets lower expectations of some students than others.  A school in a low socioeconomic area can be judged to be performing as well as expected, even if students’ levels of literacy and numeracy are unacceptable by anybody’s standard.  Third, this approach assumes that the difference between predicted and actual student results is due only to the influence of the school.  As British statistician Harvey Goldstein puts it, parents relying on league tables of this kind to select schools for their children are using a tool not fit for purpose.

In Australia, education systems have chosen not to go down the path of trying to construct a measure of each school’s performance so that every school in the country can be compared with every other school in a single ‘league table’.  Instead, the decision has been made to report actual student test results for each school, including on the My School website.

This is real transparency.  It does not obscure actual student performances, and it does not suppress information on the assumption that the public might misinterpret it.  The Australian approach is to put test data into the public domain with increasingly rich information about other student outcomes and schools’ circumstances and resources so that users can make their own interpretations and judgements.  To assist users to interpret student performances in a school, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) also provides student results for other schools with similar student intakes.  In future years, information could be added about the literacy and numeracy progress that students in each school make across the years of school.

None of this will prevent newspapers from publishing simple lists of student results by school.  But lists of this kind are likely to be of much less interest when parents are able to access extensive information about individual schools and their resources and to make more sophisticated comparisons of schools in similar circumstances.

Professor Geoff Masters is CEO of ACER and author of Reporting and Comparing School Performances (MCEETYA, April 2009).

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