Gambling on your child's education

Insights Newsletter
1 July, 2016

Imagine if you were buying your first home and the only information you had was what you could see from the outside and through the windows.

It may seem odd, but this is largely what happens in our public schools.

Our newest education report, Signal Loss: What we know about school performance, argues that the information used to identify good and bad school performance are problematic as they fail to acknowledge the backgrounds of students.

Parents lucky enough to have a choice of schools are left to rely on nationally set yardsticks to judge academic performance.

Schools are expected to have 85% of their students meeting year-level achievement targets. However, what this goal does not consider is that teachers and schools teach very different students. A school serving more disadvantaged students that gets 60% of them meeting proficiency targets may have done a stellar job and seen their students grow, even if not meeting the 85% goal. By contrast, a school whose students were proficient before even stepping through the door could have failed its students if only 90% met the target.

Developments in the types of individual assessment and administrative data available to the Ministry of Education offer opportunities for better ways to grade schools.

At the moment it is difficult for parents to know how their children would do academically in one school when compared to another school. Teachers and schools also face similar challenges as it is harder to tell if they are doing the best for their students when compared to similar students elsewhere.

Consequently, parents judging schools have to revert back to available, albeit poor, indicators: either decile ratings, or performance against yardsticks that may not suit their school's circumstances.

As it stands, because school quality is harder to pinpoint, best practice is equally harder to share. By the same token, underperformance is more difficult to detect and to manage.

Signal Loss finds that though the system serves the majority of students well, thousands still leave school without attaining basic educational qualifications. Even more worryingly, some students may spend their entire schooling career in a poorly performing school.

Many of us would not want to gamble when making a significant investment decision such as buying a new home. Should choosing a school be any different?

Martine talks more about Signal Loss in this video.

Stay in the loop: Subscribe to updates