Greg Melleuish, League Tables and the way forward for drop kicks and losers

(Above: a new template for the school league rating system. Can you see your team, sorry school, on the table. Ain't it marvellous, ain't it wonderful, how educational complexity can be reduced to a single line. By the way, anyone below the top eight are losers. Treat them accordingly).

I often wonder about the sheltered world in which academics reside. I used to think that academics ended up in university as a way of avoiding the challenge of real teaching.

I've done a bit of both, but my first introduction to school teaching was the usual catalogue of challenges. You know, going out into the playground as a prac teacher while the real teachers had a staff meeting, and then with another prac teacher dealing with a riotous fight bunged on by some testosterone laden young men who knew they could get away with it.

Funnily enough, it was the school at which I'd been a student, and the boys were always in the business of giving prac teachers a merciless introduction to their craft - a fractiousness handed down over the years in which sob I'd once been a participant. Sic transit irony.

If you go to a really big school - at that time there were fifteen hundred kids in the secondary school, over a hundred in the final year - you quickly learn about the laws of the jungle, and bullying and rampant prejudice insolently on display and ways to survive, especially if you're a nerd or a girl or an ethnic or emotionally alienated (you know, liking black as a form of dress).

Nor - if you look at the public education sector - does it take long to work out which schools are better than others to attend. In country towns of course you rarely have a choice, and if you do have a choice, it's often pretty academic (though in my home town fortunately the choice between almost any other school and Farrer agricultural college still remains a viable one).

If you live or work in the western suburbs of most cities, choice is also limited, unless you have parents rich enough to be able to transport you by car, bus or train away from the school with the deadhead reputation. It's different for the well off, or the aspirational determined to spend their last schekel to deliver a good education, since private school fees open up many doors, and then the decision as to which is the best school does evoke Choice like studies of which plasma screen will deliver the best picture for your bucks.

That's why rich folk love school tables. Hey, when you've got the money to choose, why not subscribe to "Best Schools For Rich Folks", now with improved tables and ratings and individual assessments of the quirks of all teachers.

But the western suburbs schools in which I landed were tough - the girls, if they had any ambitions, thought becoming a check out chick was a major career aspiration - and while I couldn't say they were like the schools in series four in The Wire, the damning insights that program offered into conventional notions of education still resonate with me. Especially the bit about making kids jump through hoops that in the end mean nothing to their actual education or their lives.

There was one teacher who cared - she shifted the chairs out, taught the girls movement and theatre and English - and they loved her, loved to learn with her, and had their world view shifted in ways the other teachers, who drove in from far away, found threatening. She was of course terminated by the bitch of a headmistress. So it goes. There's only so many Mr. Chips and Dead Poets' Societies to be found in the world.

Americans of course are fixated on choice, and think nothing of busing students endless miles either in the quest for choice or opening up alternate paths, such is their view of the power of positive thinking. 

But if you come from an under nourished area of society, it doesn't take much insight to realize that the schools in that area are also likely to be disadvantaged, populated by students who are also disadvantaged, and staffed by idealists who think they can make a difference, or more predictably, by teachers who are just grateful for a job and go with the flow.

Which is why there's been an endless and inordinate amount of blather talked about the way the way to transform schools is to publish tables in which poorly performing schools will be labeled as the home of failures and ne'er do wells - as a way of reforming them and leading them into educational nirvana.

And who better to add to that blather than the worthy Greg Melleuish, associate professor of history at the University of Wollongong, NSW? 

Melleuish, in Publish school results, makes some bizarre remarks in his opening ploy:

Forty to 50 years ago in NSW the Education Department used to administer IQ tests to primary school students. The results of those tests were never revealed to the students. However, teachers were provided with the numbers and, in secondary school, it was not difficult to take advantage of a teacher's absence from the room to look them up.

Well I don't know where he was fifty years ago - or even forty - but he must have been in a one teacher school because in larger schools the results were locked up in a room, often in the hands of whoever was doing vocational guidance, as it was called way back when. And the results were frequently, if informally, revealed to students, at least the bright ones, as a way of reinforcing their self-perception as being bright. (No one cared too much about the dummies, it was understood that they'd be out doing the fencing later in life).

But enough of memory sparring. Melleuish is confused as to why in the old days we could see how we might have been assessed as having achieved first class honors or As or Bs or Fs, without knowing actual scores while sitting the HSC, but these days while you can learn the actual scores, you don't get to see the individual results published in the press in a long list like the finishers in the City to the Surf jogathon.

The answer of course is educational faddism, usually in response to some passing scandal - such as when the Daily Telegraph was forced to publish an apology to the 1996 HSC class at Mount Druitt after publishing a front page article headed Class we failed, along with a photo of the 28 students sitting final exams. The Supreme Court found they'd been defamed, and damages were settled out of court.

The apology, published November 13 (2000), states in part: "In that story The Daily Telegraph suggested, among other things, that the students in the class of 1996 failed their HSC.

"This is wrong and The Daily Telegraph withdraws any such suggestion. The Daily Telegraph also withdraws any suggestion that those students acted without discipline or commitment in their HSC studies.

"The students in the HSC class of 1996 successfully completed their HSC and contrary to the suggestions in the original article many of those students performed very well scoring high marks in the HSC.

"The Daily Telegraph apologises to each student in the class of 1996 at Mt Druitt. It also apologises to their parents and friends for all the hurt, harm and suffering it has caused them." (here)

Of course the Telegraph still resents the outcome, and thought they were doing great things for the students and the educational system by labelling them as a bunch of failures, because of course it was the system that had failed them, and it was the system that made sure they could be construed as a bunch of failures. Oh look, and there's a flying pig selling ethical tabloid newspapers.

But that was 1996 and thirteen years is long enough for educational faddism to veer through another 360 degrees, in much the same way as when doing my dip.ed I had to suffer through teachers preaching the virtues of an exam free educational system, only to sit through the exams they then designed to explore my knowledge of the virtues of an exam free education.

But back to Melleuish, who of course sees the current system as a power based conspiracy:

It always has struck me that state educational bureaucracies are more concerned with maintaining their power through control of knowledge than with assisting the students under their care.

Well so what? Bureaucrats are not teachers, and what does the functioning of bureaucracies have to do with teaching where the pedal hits the metal, the rubber hits the tar? In classrooms.

Well everything it seems and the way to fix all this is to make sure that the same obsessive concern for failure that infects students is transmitted to teachers and to bureaucrats. As if they don't get enough of it already.

Melleuish, in the usual way, allows himself a little tremor of anxiety about the fixation on rankings:

What has changed has been the amount of competition in the scramble for educational success. We are fixated with league tables in education. Universities, for example, gear themselves to improve their positions on the various world and national rankings. An excessive preoccupation with rankings is not very healthy, nor is any attempt to reduce a judgment regarding quality to a number. But rankings are a reality that will not go away.

Oh that's okay then, it mightn't be healthy, and numbers might not mean that much, but what the heck, let's get on with the business of labeling the losers and failures as dropkicks. Let's really help them in their self-esteem. And whatever we do, let's not pretend it's got anything to do with socio economic or cultural disadvantage. Why I'm sure there are ever so many schools in the eastern suburbs that suffer the same disadvantages as the ones in Granville and Wentie (oops, sorry, we know you're not like Mt. Druitt, we loves ya. Oops sorry we loves ya Mt Druitt).

Melluish is hot to trot on publishing rankings, and presumably he wouldn't mind the odd league table being published either, because he can't see any arguments against such a system:

Such arguments as do exist seem to revolve around the stigma that would attach for a student who had attended a poorly performing school. Apparently if it is known that an individual attended such a school, they will be scarred for life and turned into some sort of pariah.

The problem with such an argument is that it reduces an individual to being a member of a group to be judged in collectivist terms.

There are plenty of individuals who have attended poor-quality schools but have managed, through their own efforts, to make considerable achievements. In any case, a few years out of school, who cares what school an individual has attended? It is what they do after school that matters.

The problem for an individual is if they imbibe a culture of failure from the school that they attended.

Ah so it'll be the school that'll be labelled the failure, and not the dropkicks who attended it. Phew, that's a relief. Because it doesn't matter what they do in school anyhow, since once they've dropped out they can turn into a pizza eating Bill Gates. Or maybe leave school at 12 like Dick Smith, and then make us all suffer for it.

Meantime, it seems Greg Melleuish is in a fog of unknowing, and doesn't have a clue about which schools are failing, and what might be done about it, in much the same way as students can't pick a bad teacher a mile off (and tell their parents), colleagues can't pick a bad teacher a mile off, school administrators can't spot a bad teacher a mile off, and all those bureaucrats who invent fancy titled programs to deal with 'disadvantaged schools' don't have a clue as to who might get the funds (but they did know which of the 74 most socially disadvantaged public schools could be put on notice that the Priority Action Schools Program they were in would be axed - see Book may close on disadvantaged school funding).

Why in that story about the PAS, the principal of the Airds High School Chris Presland said that the number of his year 7 students scoring in the high band of the English and Literacy assessment had doubled since he'd been able to hire three more teachers with an additional $242,000 a year, and teacher turnover had dropped from 20% to zero between 1991 and 2000.

Well bugger me with a bandicoot, if you'll excuse my literary metaphor, a little cash can help what ails ya, and even get results. Not that this would impress Melleuish. Ya see educational tables will see everything fixed:

The objective must be to discover those schools that are failing their students and to do something about it.

Like find out which schools would benefit from a PAS type scheme, and then when it proves expensive, wheel in the politicians to cut it? Well surely you don't expect my taxes to pay for educating dropkick losers, or worse flinging even more money at them?

Um, okay, what's left? How about a rant instead?

The thing about secretive bureaucracies is that one of their primary strengths lies in covering up their failures. Or, put another way, the only way to expose the hidden mistakes of a bureaucratic entity is for the public to know exactly how well or poorly it is performing. So, far from exposing students to stigma and shame, the consequence of public exposure of poorly performing schools will be to shame the educational authorities into improving their performance. In this way individual students will benefit.

Secretive failed bureaucrats. Well let's name and shame them. Let's expose them to stigma and shame so the students won't have to know about their stigma and shame. Well that's logical ain't it? Somebody has to be named and shamed and blamed. It's the liberal way. Why it's better than a Catholic priest telling you how you get hairs on your palm from wanking. I know that really helped the lads in school develop a healthy attitude to sex.

Here's hoping the rant made Melleuish feel better, because really the notion that labeling schools as failures will somehow improve them educationally is so myopic as truly to be astonishing, especially coming as it does from an academic. Especially as it's being dressed up as parental right to know, and freedom of choice.

"James, prepare my carriage, I wish to take the young one from his school in Mt. Druitt to Hogwarts, which I believe offers the finest in eastern suburbs educational opportunities."

Melleuish concludes by taking a sideswipe at Barry O'Farrell for mouthing collectivist tosh about pariahs, which I suppose is a reasonable balance from someone mouthing individualist tosh and pious hopes about improving schools by publishing tables.

Hey, I know the Roosters are bottom of the table, a pack of eastern suburbs losers. Will that be helping their performance next weekend? What about a PAS scheme with some new players and a healthy injection of cash?

Ah well, fads come and go, and here's betting that in ten years time, the wheel will have turned yet again, and as the notion of publishing league tables gets a little problematic, there will have been some fresh scandal that changes the way things are done. And bugger all will have been done to help disadvantaged schools and students, because when it comes to the pointy end that involves cash and training and prioritization of funding.

And of course at that point community minded liberals start whining about the way their already too high taxes are supporting lefties in the teaching system, and anyhoo, thanks to the federal government, everybody's already too busy making sure cult schools get their full cash top up, whether teaching on scientological principles or on the basis of an exclusive brethren view of the world. 

But there's a couple of upsides. Bureaucrats will have tremendous fun working out ways of comparing like with like, and even unlike with like (subject to many modifying parameters) and a great deal of blather will be talked about the revelations produced by a one line rating of a complex organism of hundreds of people, staff and students. Why just devising all the equivocations and clarifications will need a hundred more bureaucrats working away at being fair devising a sensible, proper rating system. Which will of course require endless tinkering and adjustments.

And perhaps the influx of chaplains, courtesy of the Howard government, can help the children deal with the emotional turmoil of being labeled dropkicks and losers in schools that are epic failures.

So it goes, and so it never changes. 

By the way, if you want a better overview of the issues involved at broadsheet level, featuring the Mt Druitt class of 1996, go to Jessica Turner's The tables are turned, which has a refreshing lack of zealotry.