The measure of success
Socio-economic differences have troubled efforts to compare schools’ impact on their students – until now. How do we define success in education? Adele Redmond reports.
According to the available measures, Christ’s College is one of New Zealand’s top schools.
NCEA results at the decile 10 private boys’ school are consistently high – 70 per cent gained a merit or excellence endorsement last year – and its year 13 students raked in 39 scholarships in subjects ranging from physics and calculus to drama and history. The school has its own Centre for Teaching Excellence where four staff members analyse the central Christchurch school’s results to curate best practice.
Its academic director, Joe Eccleton, is proud of its record, and says success comes down to small class sizes and the ‘‘intimacy of that relationship with the students’’.
But what if success has nothing to do with the school?
New Zealand has one of the most unequal education systems in the world, according to the international children’s charity Unicef, and OECD research indicates students from lowdecile communities perform better than their higher-decile peers if they attend advantaged schools.
To counteract such biases, some Western education systems have turned to value-added (VA) models of assessment that measure students’ improvement throughout a year, rather than simply recording an end grade, like NCEA.
While VA models in New South Wales and the American state of Tennessee provide a blueprint for efforts here, critics say they promote a one-size-fitsall approach that could narrow the curriculum and institute performance-based pay for teachers.
What’s more, without complex data on students’ backgrounds, they may not highlight the effect social advantage has.
Joel Hernandez thinks he can fix that. The researcher at the New Zealand Institute, a public policy think tank, is about half way through a year-long project to build New Zealand’s first ‘‘contextualised’’ VA model.
Using integrated data from the ministries of education and social development, corrections and immigration, and weighted NCEA results from the country’s 500 secondary schools, the model aims to adjust for socioeconomic factors and determine what effect individual schools have on students’ achievement – if any.
The unreleased preliminary results, Hernandez says, are significant.
By Christmas, the model should be able to profile students’ likelihood of success based on older students with similar backgrounds; how well they do in NCEA, whether they’re likely to take on tertiary study, ‘‘whether they end up in a Corrections facility, [or] their potential to go on a benefit’’.
‘‘If you think about the top three things we want a high school to do, we want a student to get a job after high school, go on to tertiary education, or go into training. That’s where we can start.’’