http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/26/1090693897021.html

 

Minister calls for students' progress to be ranked

By Jason Koutsoukis, Orietta Guerrera

Canberra

July 27, 2004

 

Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson wants to force government schools to issue reports ranking students against their classmates and against national academic standards.

 

The plan for more detailed reports on students has emerged among a host of conditions that government schools will have to satisfy to qualify for their federal funding.

 

Dr Nelson says most state school reports are "full of nonsense" and tell parents nothing about the progress of their children. Campaigning in marginal seats in Victoria this week, Dr Nelson called on Labor to pass the federal funding legislation that is listed for debate in the House of Representatives next week.

 

"I have been sent hundreds of these reports which are totally meaningless," Dr Nelson told The Age.

 

"We've got reports where the teachers tick a box 'A', for achieving, or 'AA', almost achieving, but what does that mean?"

 

"The basic intention of school reports these days is to not give any offence at all to either the parent or the child, but parents have had enough and are getting quite angry about it."

 

If the legislation is passed, from 2005 schools will be required, as a condition of government funding, to report to parents of students in years 3, 5 and 7 on children's performances against national literacy and numeracy standards.

 

School reports will also have to abide by broadly stated principles that ensure parents receive timely, plain-language feedback on their child's performance, with students ranked at least according to what quarter of the class they fall into in a particular subject.

 

"If my son is in the bottom 25 per cent of the class then I want to know about it," Dr Nelson said.

 

"Someone has to be in the bottom 25 per cent, and if they are there, then they have a problem and that needs to be addressed."

 

Dr Nelson said community feedback to him on his ideas about school reports had been overwhelming.

 

"This notion that all children are the same, and progress at the same rate and are assessed in exactly the same way, and that some children do not fail to meet basic benchmarks is a complete and total nonsense to which parents have had enough," he said.

 

"Most parents are working and living in the real world on Planet Common Sense and they want information reported to them about their children's educational progress."

 

Labor says it is committed to providing parents with comprehensive report cards, but it has yet to release its schools policy.

 

Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said school reports should show whether students were improving and acknowledged that parents wanted to know how their children compared to other students.

 

"We do want to make sure that parents know just how their children are going, and parents do want to know how their children are going against the rest of the class - there's no doubt about that," Ms Macklin said.

 

"But, in addition to that, parents want to know whether their children are improving and how they are going against the standards they are expected to achieve."

 

The chief executive of the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria, Michelle Green, said deciding what a standard report card should look like or include would be difficult.

 

"One blueprint is going to be very, very hard to establish," Ms Green said. "It's not quite as simple as mandating the way school reports should be written."

 

For example, she said, many alternative schools such as Steiner and Montessori schools, and Christian schools were concerned about the "societal message" of ranking students against their class in reports.

 

"Some people deliberately choose a school... where they feel the child will be stimulated in a lot of ways; but a negative connotation of how a child is progressing might be provided by a statistical ranking," she said.

 

The Australian Education Union is also against class rankings. The union's Victorian branch vice-president, Brian Henderson, said students should be measured against academic standards and not their classmates' performances.