Doing a disservice to many schools and their efforts is probably the worst sin of both the My School website and the various media efforts to interpret the results.

The major sin is that there is little in the available in the figures that show what value the school adds to the mix of children that attend. There is not much merit in a school that takes in mainly bright children with considerable advantages and turn them out as still bright children with considerable advantage. There is considerable merit in a school that takes in children who have not had the advantages and substantially increases their life chances. This type of input is not measured, although education bureaucracies have value adding scores for their schools.

We also do not have a cost benefit score, which looks at how much is spent on children both by parents and public funding, so extra financial resources and facilities are not included. Some estimates can be made by looking at student staff ratios and non teaching staff supports which are not highlighted in the present reporting.

And there are other problems!

The Sydney Morning Herald’s version of league tables does an even deeper disservice to parents than the My School website because of the inept way in which they have compiled their lists. They have listed schools by their average, both overall and on individual scores to produce hierarchies which are grossly uninformative.

Their main problem is their averaging of scores to create the listings. Measures of central tendencies, as means, medians and modes are referred to, are not effective ways of comparing scores. Means or averages are poor reflectors of the range of scores achieved because there is no differentiation between schools who serve a wide range of students, adding value to lower capacity students, and those who serve a relatively homogeneous student population.

A school, for instance, with a preselected high achieving group, such as NSW selective public schools, will do very well and they did. A school with a integrated children with mid disabilities, high proportions of relatively recent English speakers or other groups that need lost of support will not score as well. Yet the SMH lists did not differentiate between such schools but just ranked them.

Not too surprisingly, one local primary that every academic and pushy parent fought to get into over the past decade was well up the list, while another with a much more mixed group of children, including some with disabilities, did not score well. Even though the second one had many high scoring children, they also had low scoring ones who were not longer part of the more upmarket ‘competitor’ down the road. How many anxious and pushy parents are on the phone today trying to find a place in a higher scoring school regardless of how well they were doing where they were?

I saw the anger of a principal and deputy principal of very low ranked schools on Saturday morning at the local café. The principal had university offers for 40% of her year 12 students, about triple the level of comparable schools. Many of her students are refugees with little schooling history, whose language skills may not match others but have done extra ordinarily well overall. Nothing in My School lists reflects the value this school adds, and I know what they put in. The primary deputy was just devastated that their efforts in a difficult environment would not be recognised, and her school community would feel shamed by an averaging process, not the mix of children.

Averaging blurs the differences, advantages or disadvantages schools on the basis of size and spread of students, It encourages schools to take on students who will succeed, rather than the mix that may want to attend. Anxious parents will misread the tables and not look at all the other aspects of schooling that count. Adding some more dimensions like comparable funding may be useful but am not sure how these data could be used to improve schooling for all, rather than the already advantaged. .

There is a fallacy in the basic idea that parental pressure will improve school performances. The idea comes from market models, ie consumer demands will improve products which does not necessarily work in the areas of ordinary commerce, and does not seem to work where the services are also public goods. There are arguments that local schooling comprehensive school needs to be the base for all children, and that choice beyond this should not be based on finding better quality, rather on selecting some specialist content. The market model means basically that pushy parents and those with skills and know how will seek out the best schools, (they already do) and the less informed, confident and competent will continue to get unequal access to a basic resource.

What My School confirms is that we have gross inequalities in our education system overall, and this is a problem because it delivers unfair outcomes to our children. Those it already serves well are, unfortunately, those most likely to engage politically. Unless the governments concerned make a major effort to redistribute resources more equitably, we will continue failing far too many of our more vulnerable children.