Summary
In Australia, a large percentage of students only reach minimum standards of literacy and numeracy. These students are spread throughout Australia’s school education systems; there are few schools that do not have poor performing students who would benefit from improved education.
Despite decades of increasing expenditure, student performance has stagnated. We have a moral imperative to improve the performance of the 30% of year 9 students who have progressed to only the very basic elements of writing literacy.
Accurate measures of school performance are vital to improvement. The measures need to focus on student progress so that schools and teachers can focus on improving all students – particularly those most in need.
The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) assesses students’ literacy and numeracy skills and is an important advance in addressing poor performance. The Federal Government’s ‘My School’ website publishes school performance scores for each school as the average of their students’ NAPLAN results, comparing them to the results of ‘like’ schools (based on proxies of students’ socio- economic background).
The publication of school performance measures is a significant step forward in achieving transparency and lifting standards in the Australian education system. However, the school performance measures published on the ‘My School’ website are prone to mismeasurement and may be biased against schools serving lower socio-economic communities.
Value-added scores consistently measure school performance more accurately, because they are better able to isolate the performance of schools from other factors that affect student performance. This creates a fairer system that is not biased against schools serving more disadvantaged communities. For these reasons, teachers, school associations and education unions in other countries have advocated for the introduction of value-added measures of school performance.
School value-added scores are calculated by comparing the progress made by each student between assessments, measuring the contribution the school makes to that progress, controlling for students’ background. A school’s contribution to student progress would be measured between NAPLAN assessments of literacy and numeracy at years 3, 5, 7, and 9, and students’ grades in the final year of secondary school.
Value-added measures of school performance shift the focus to the student – they focus on how students learn and progress. Significant improvements come from building individualised instruction and lesson plans around multiple assessments that identify each student’s learning trajectory. School principals need to be able to identify for which students, in which subject areas and in which grade levels their school is effectively contributing to student progress. Effective programs and instruction can be expanded and less effective areas developed.