It’s more about positive culture and dedicated staff

THERE is something tantalising about reading a league table. You can’t help wanting to know how your team has performed especially compared to everybody else’s team.

It could be your sporting team. It could be your weekly trivia team at the local.

And then the league table creeps into other parts of our life. What’s the best café in town? What’s the best restaurant? What’s the highest rating motel in a seaside location?

We use these tables to help us purchase things.

It’s crept into health. How do the various hospitals rank against each other? Which one is the best for me?

And then we have education. Data is collected for a range of purposes, but made available to the public in the name of accountability. And before we know it we have league tables.

Previously we have had comparisons of which primary school has the best NAPLAN results and over the weekend and in yesterday’s paper we can compare how secondary schools across the state of Queensland rank, especially in our home town.

The basis of this comparison is the percentage of students gaining an Overall Position (OP) Ranking of 1 – 5. The purpose of the OP score I presume is as a mechanism by which secondary students across Queensland can gain entrance to a place in a tertiary institution.

The scores were never meant as a way of comparing one school with another.

And I suspect most of these rankings could be determined by the “Volvo Effect”. The “Volvo Effect” was coined a number of years ago in the United States.

Some analysis of standardised testing found that the best predictor of a student’s results was the make of car in their parent’s driveway. Now I know the OP is not a standardised test, but I think one would be on safe ground predicting that the higher the number of Volvo (or equivalent luxury cars) in a parent population the higher the percentage of OPs 1 -5.

This would be regardless of whether a school is public or private. In 2010 I demonstrated this in Toowoomba by mapping NAPLAN results against median weekly incomes for various suburbs.

The “leafier” the suburb the better the NAPLAN score.

I also suspect that there would be a Great Dividing Range effect, that is, the schools west of the range would rank lower than those hugging the coastline.

Those schools topping the league table will be quick to tell us that they, “cater for all students and focus on those gaining apprenticeships and other pathways”, but the reality is that we will never have a league table of schools equipping their students for the trades.

The problem with the league table approach is that it puts way too much store into one narrow aspect of a student’s education.

What type of values do the students leave the school with. Are they exposed to the arts, to a range of sports. Do they understand what it takes to be a contributing member of the community? The league table approach also fails to recognise the herculean efforts achieved by teachers and school principals in schools in poorer neighbourhoods.

Winners are grinners but for some students, parents and teachers the ranking approach can be crushing in terms of morale.

I am not running an anti-elitist line. When all of our schools received government funding there needs to be accountability.

We have some excellent schools in this town. I know first-hand of some of the extraordinary community outreach undertaken by a number of schools in the “top 10”.

I also know of some schools who don’t rate a mention in the league table whose positive culture and dedicated staff have literally saved young lives.

Students who have flourished and been the first in their family to enter a university. Students who have broken the poverty cycle by being the first for a generation to gain full time meaningful employment.

And it’s hard to put a number on that.