Teachers, parents, pollies and the general public are all up in arms over this myschool website, which ranks all schools and compares them with others.
For myself, I'm fairly neutral about it. I've always been pragmatic about the public school system – and for the most part, private is not a lot better. I know it's a rare and wonderful thing for anyone to get a great teacher, who will extend and nurture them. The rest of the time, it seems we are all taught as a collective, based on the abilities of the average performers. I think it's important for parents to understand this, and pick up the slack in their childrens' education where needed.
To those who are concerned, I would like to make a couple of observations.
Demographics play a huge role, as does racial mix. Some cultures place a lot of value on study and education, and schools with a high percentage from those cultures will obviously perform better. So, too, will the schools in higher socio/economic areas, where parents are perhaps better educated themselves, or just more available to educate if they are not both working. As well, lower socio/economic areas will have more 'problem' children, as poverty often goes hand in hand with 'problems at home', and this will have an effect on classes who have more disruptive children.
I think a school being a 'dumb' school – as some are being labeled – would have little to do with the teachers themselves. They are all teaching from the same curriculum, and I doubt any school would have great teachers across the board, the same as I doubt there wouldn't be at least 1 great teacher in every school. I think it's quite unfair to hold schools so accountable for the performance of the students, but it's not so much the myschool website that's doing this, rather the public who are not looking at the full picture.
Remember, we have, for as long as my memory goes, been able to view school HSC results in the newspaper, and compare schools' performance for those final exams. That's how my parents chose my high school – it was the top performing girls' school at the time (not that it did me much good :)). The website appears to me, to be just a more organised extension of that, which includes primary schools as well. Unlike the HSC though, which covers many subjects, myschool rankings are based on the NAPLAN testing. Literacy and numeracy tests for all year 3, 5, 7, and 9 students, and that's all. The 3 'R's are very important, of course it is difficult to get by in our modern world without a basic knowledge of them, but they are not the only thing that will get us anywhere in life, and I don't think people should be overly concerned about a school's particular rankings with them.
This is a long video, but well worth a look if you have the time. It raises the question, "Do schools kill creativity?", perhaps not, but do they nurture it enough? Do they put enough value on it? Think about that, if you are at all worried by your school's NAPLAN rankings.
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