There has been much controvercy in the news recently about the Australia Education Union's bid to boycott the NAPLAN tests in schools. The government is accusing the Union of wanting to "gut" the website, and headlines in daily papers have screamed that the Union is against MySchool and wants it offline. The government has threatened to bring in strike breakers in the form of parents. The logic of this is silly - no parent will want to break a strike and then turn up to the parent teacher night just to defend a website.
What has been lost in the media haze are the specific questions that the Education Union has raised. Instead of reading what's in the newspaper, I would encourage everyone to check out their proposal paper on their website, which is actually a good read and raises some very important points that most of the news media haven't decided to cover.
Personally I think the best points the AEU makes are about the methodology of MySchool and the reporting of school funding. Contrary to popular belief, They don't even say that the site should be taken offline. In addition, many of their proposals Julia Gillard said would "gut" MySchool are actually very sensible suggestions, especially around statistical inaccuracies.
The unfortunate thing that gets lost in the media haze is that the facts have been brushed aside. Part of the reason has been the Union's own tactics of refusing to administer the tests. the story has become one about a Union taking industrial action, rather than a union supporting policies that would lead to better schools. Perhaps the Union should have considered different tactics. Never the less, the story is about a website - about the disclosure of information to the public.
Should data have been published in the first place? I believe the answer is yes.
One of the reasons why this idea has become so popular is that it appeals to both the right and left, and can be justified by both. Supporters of open government will always support the disclosure of this information. Right wingers want the info so they can attack the education department for being somehow useless.
Left wingers can also use the data for several purposes - where a school is underperforming, communities can organise and demand a better deal for their local school, either from school administrators or the government. This model has apparently been tried in the US, especially in New York, in black schools and areas of high disadvantage.
Besides all the Unions criticisms about the methodology of the website, the thing that struck out to me most was the tragic link that still exists between academic performance and socio-economic disadvantatage.
In an odd way (and perhaps this is why Gillard supports it), the site has given life to a truth that everyone knows but not enough people acknowledge - kids from poor areas do less well on overall academic performance than people in well off areas. It may be ugly, and it may have an impact on the mentality of kids, but it's the truth and we absolutely have to fix it.
Yet the role of a school is to advance standards of learning and achievement - so the only fair comparison of how students at a school progressed over time.
But you cannot deny that poorer kids are behind the eight ball when they get started at school. If socialist and social-democratic parties around the world are truly committed the the principle of equality, they have to do something to fix this uncomfortable fact. Lifting poor kids out of poverty through education requires a high level of committment and attention by governments everywhere.
If the government was serious about improving education, it would also publish statistics on the total level of funding recieved by each school, including a breakdown of how much public and private money was used by each. It should not use microeconomic reform, or union bashing as an excuse for poor levels of funding. The Union supports this disclosure on the MySchool website, and I think most families would too.
I honestly believe that the biggest single factor influencing the performance of a school is the level of funding that goes into running the school. Administering schools is one thing - but administration can be made incredibly difficult when you don't have enough money.
Mark Latham was ostracised for his policy of creating a "hit-list" of private schools that would lose some, or all of their public funding. To this day, I continue to believe that most Labor party members would still support and defend this policy. Labor isn't necessary against private education - but when Labor's base is as the party of workers, the poor, and the frugal middle class, it's entirely legitimate to ask whether the direction of public money is being used efficiently to benefit those in most need of help.
Clearly, giving money to fund elite school infrastructure is a scandal that shouldn't exist. When I was at Sydney Boys High - a public selective school - we played in sports competitions against elite GPS schools like Kings, Shore and Newington. When we had an away game, we would play on their perfectly maintined turf cricket pitches. I quite liked it actually, I was able to get prodigious turn on my off spinners. But when we had a home game at centennial park, cricket balls would get lost down rabbit holes or get hit into the swamp.
I didn't have a problem with GPS schools having good facilities - in fact I greatly enjoyed the experience of playing there. What I did object to was that our facilities remained mediocre for years, while governments paid little attention. In 2001, Our music rooms had poor or outdated equipment, our outdoor tennis courts and cricket nets had been poorly maintained, and some of our commerce textbooks pre-dated the the 1996 workplace relations act.
After the 1999 Sydney hailstorm, at least two of our classrooms at Sydney boys sat idle for a number of semesters waiting to be repaired. Yet only a few years later, rumours abounded that Brendan Nelson (the then education minister and a Kings School old boy) had found a million dollars of your tax money to give to Kings to build a new rowing shed. I don't know if that rumour was true, but it was certainly believeable. And it is certainly the truth that the Howard government gave public money to elite schools.
You never heard anything in the pages of The Australian about how much of a rort that was. This, I believe, was a misallocation of resources - not only was millions of dollars in public money being used on elite schools, they may not have even been used for academic purposes.
This funding was partly raised by taxes paid by the parents of working class kids who would never hope to get within cooee of an elite private school. They are also raised by the tax dollars of the middle class - some of whom shell out for a private school that has more modest facilities, and probably would be a bit squeamish to see the very rich get more money.
The Education Union makes a fantastic point when it says the levels of funding should be published. I think this would be a very positive step and a great leap forward in accountability. The federal and state governments have limited resources - and it's entirely legitimate to have a look at whether these funds are being distributed equitably. Because the fair and equitable distribution of public funding is a key component of the goal of a more equal society.
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