The government’s new My School website went live this morning — and promptly fell down like the roof of a 20-year-old portable classroom. The site has been in and out all morning, presumably struggling under the weight of Australian parents’ collective hopes and dreams.
But that hasn’t stopped the pundits weighing in, as papers around the country gives their two cents:
The Australian
Samantha Maiden, Gillard delivers for parents on schools transparency
… parents are better off this morning as a result of one of the more substantial reforms of the Rudd government’s first term of office.
Justine Ferrari, Site rubs raw scores of discontent
The transparency is more like a one-way mirror than a window: the data can be examined only in one way, and that’s their way.
The Age
Barry McGaw, My School site brings fair comparisons
The My School website provides the public and the profession with better information than has been available before and information that can be used productively to improve Australia’s schools.
Hutch Ranck, League tables will improve the education system
… if we have a minority, even a small minority, who are not doing their job as well as they could be, then this impacts on the learning of many students.
Sydney Morning Herald
Robyn Ewing, A dangerous recipe for dumbing down our curriculum
Assuming My School will lift the performance of underachieving schools and teachers is not logical.
Anna Patty, High-stakes testing for easy gain
Now parents around the country will start to get a sense of what has been secret information.
Daily Telegraph
Editorial, My School’s bright future ahead
An important point to make, considering the alarm that this proposal has historically generated, is that parents have always compared schools.
Herald Sun
Julia Gillard, My School website will help, not hinder
We either provide parents with more information or we don’t. We either help schools that need it or we don’t.
Courier Mail
Jane Fynes-Clinton, Website a victory for education
This is not a league table. Blind Freddy can see that. Those who contend it is are fear-mongering.
ABC
Kevin Donnelly, Education revolution: ill-conceived and incomplete
Naming and shaming schools by ranking them in terms of performance is only one side of the equation, equally as vital is the need for schools to free themselves from an inflexible, centralised, one-size-fits all, bureaucratic system.
Have you been able to log on? What do you think? Have your say below.
Not yet. But I will, though I would rather this site had never come into being.
Halcyon days. Don’t you just luerve the way our modern day ALP has shaped itself? I’m buggered if I can figure out why Conservatives/conservatives still whine on about ‘Socialist values’.
What more do they want? They’ve certainly got todays ALP, and they’ve had it for over 20 years.
As I’ve said,-this is a very simple way to shift the failings of the education system from Government/s to the schools.
Ze master stroke!!
I have been able to log on. It works, as in it does what it says it does, most of the time. Main concern is whether the social and economic profiling used to compare like schools really reflects the family population of schools … I don’t think it does. The data comes from small census districts drawn from the postcodes of families at the schools as far as I can tell … it puts Fitzroy High School in a bracket with Pacific Hills Christian School in Dural, NSW, The King’s School in North Paramatta and The Scots College in Bellevue Hill. Must be kind of blunt … BTW, our Year 7 scores are lower than those schools, but our Year 9 are similar. Now that says something about what’s going on at the school, if you ask me.
As blogger James at The Age site said MySchools website is a government sanctioned act of bullying in that it publicly humiliates poorly performing schools. James was a high performing 28 year old teacher who is moving on because he is disillusioned by this travesty that we call an education system.
I thought it was good. I checked out the primary school my kids have been attending and the high school one of them starts at this morning. The information would have been useful last year when we were deciding on the HS. I used other methods to determine suitability at the time however this would have been useful additional data.
What is happening about Julia’s 9 week boot camp to train teachers? I would have thought there were enough trained teachers available to teach. [Check the numbers of registered emergency teachers in any area.]