A better way to compare schools

Comparing schools is complex at best – and a nightmare at worst. Every school has a different cohort of students, each with their own unique background. But just as one’s starting position in a 100m sprint influences where you finish, one’s background influences academic and school performance.

Some of the students who started college this month would have a head start – they would have already spent thousands of hours reading books, playing music and sport.Other students are already behind. They may struggle with basic reading and writing, have never had a music lesson, or played a game of soccer, rugby or netball.

Disparate cohorts make it difficult to compare schools, particularly of different deciles. High-decile schools have more students with a head start, while more students in low-decile schools need help catching up.

Comparing different schools in New Zealand is a routine but essential task for the Ministry of Education, teachers and parents. However, this complex process is holding back our education system – and failing our children.

School choice and competition is the third key issue under the proposed Tomorrow’s Schools reforms, which highlight and recommend solutions to growing segregation, or ‘‘white flight’’.

This issue is a result of parents seeking the ‘‘best’’ school for their children. However, when they lack information on school quality, they tend to resort to using decile as a proxy for school quality – further aggravating socioeconomic segregation in schools.

This is reflected in ministry data: in the decade after the year 2000, the number of European students attending low-decile schools halved, falling from 60,000 to 30,000.

To improve school choice and competition, many countries have adopted value-added models to measure both student progress and school quality. Unlike typical assessment methods such as NCEA, which measure only where the student is at the end of the year (league table results), value-added models measure progress from the beginning to the end of the year (and progress over several years).

By using a student’s previous results (ie their results at the beginning of the year), value-added models can control for the different background characteristics of each student. The benefit is a system that can fairly compare schools with different cohorts. The greater the (academic) value a school adds to its students, the higher the quality/ performance of the school.

To be clear, value-added measures are not the only factor to be used to evaluate school performance. Interviews with principals and teachers also contribute.

Value-added models are not new. Since 1992, when the first such model was implemented in Tennessee in the United States, they have grown in popularity all around the world. More than 30 US states and districts, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Australia have operationally used value-added models.

They have been used to give parents valuable information on how their local schools are performing. In Tennessee and New South Wales, parents have access to government websites where they can see how one school directly compares with another. The information is translated into useful graphs and statistics that parents can use to make an informed and fair decision. Without such information, they are left making decisions in the dark.

Successful international valueadded models can provide a road map for education policy in New Zealand. Parents in Tennessee and New South Wales don’t make decisions in the dark. They have access to specific information on how their schools are performing at the click of a mouse.

Parents in New Zealand, too, deserve quality information so they can make informed choices.

Better information would release parents from relying on deciles as a proxy for school quality. The demand for high-performing lowdecile schools would subsequently increase, while the demand for lowperforming high-decile schools would decrease.

For New Zealand to have any shot at reducing segregation in schools, better transparency in our education is the best option.

Non-biased information on school quality performance is also valuable for principals and the ministry.

Of course, principals know how well their school is doing, but additional information on how other schools are performing would help them collaborate with those schools.

By identifying the top-performing schools, the ministry could study what they are doing well and use this to determine best practices. Conversely, it could identify and give the worse-performing schools appropriate support.

New Zealand is facing an education crisis of a generation, and without better policy we are consigned to seeking solutions in the dark.

Parents in New Zealand deserve quality information so they can make informed choices.