MySchool is a Terrible Idea

< Perth's leading school scholar, 1986

One of the things I am most proud of in Australia is the quality of State education. We have very few of the problems that countries like the US and Britain experience, mainly because we don't have to funnel money away from schools to pay for weapons programs. State schools are very well funded by taxpayers, and it is perfectly possible for a kid who goes to a State school to get a great education and rise right to the top. In fact, when I was a child, the two top ranked schools in Western Australia -- Swanbourne Senior High School and Hollywood SHS -- were both government schools. It cost $50 a year to go to those schools. By contrast, the school that I went to (Christ Church Grammar School), cost tens of thousands of dollars per year, but children from that school on average were less successful. Because of this experience, and also because I may want to send my kid to an Aussie State school in the future, I always keep a close eye on developments in State education in Australia.

One story that caught my eye last month related to the Federal Government's decision to rank thousands of Australian schools on a website. This idea is called "MySchool", and it is a perfect example of the shift to the political right of Australia's Labor Party. In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald by the Australian Associated Press, the head of the Australian Education Union said it was a "sad day" for education in Australia  that the website had been created as it would track the performance of individual students, not schools. As a result, a misleading impression could be created that a school was bad, when in fact groups of poor performing students could be the problem. Reading between the lines, children of recent immigrants or from socially disadvantaged areas almost always go to government schools, which is why the government schools tend to have larger groups of poorly performing students. The idea of "choice" therefore is illegitimate. Can poor or socially disadvantaged kids choose to go to expensive schools? Why does the government keep cutting funding to government schools? Why does it keep subsidizing rich schools?

I though this was quite an interesting article, although not particularly balanced. It only presented one point of view -- the one I agree with -- but then again, I think the arguments for performance based websites are very poor. If the Liberal Party (Australia's Republican Party) had come up with the idea, I could understand it, but for the Labor Party to do this?