Lets talk about My School!

So first and foremost, what is my school? Its basically a website that allows anyone to access information about all schools in Australia. This information can be found through a search by school name, location and different forms of Education. This is run by The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) The website provides profile information on the schools.

You can see anything thing from a schools population, it mainly gives away different levels of SES, providing us info on whether a student is indigenous, their language background (other than English) and even attendance rates.

Not only that they also reveal the Capacity or Capability (which is a no no) giving us the, again, type of school, the year range, student and staff numbers, school financial information, and location. 
But Myschool doesn’t reveal everything in a school, but it expands. 

But in a more colloquial sense, the school allows themselves to write a brief description of the school (the only optional thing available), my school talking a lot about how we had disadvantage.

In most cases a link to the school’s website is provided so that more information about the school community can be gained. 
For each school, My School compares NAPLAN results for other schools across Australia similar in terms of their number of students. They even show how much funding the school has! These data include recurrent income and capital expenditure, broken down by funding source, for all government and non- government schools for 2009, 2010 and 2011.

I mean the Myschool has some advantages.

The site should allow schools that underperform to be able to lift their game and provide a better education in the future. By testing nationally, the MySchool website provides an opportunity to allow for Australian Schools to learn from each other, to help insure that every child in every classroom receives a high quality education. The goals for accountability, transparency, choice and quality ensure schools are able to set a national standard, and give a goal for students to strive for. The benefit is that it gives parents scope to compare schools beyond merely listening to other parents' opinions or reading brochures.

But I think its more bad then good.

You cannot assess a school’s performance based purely on tests that comprise of 40 questions focused on literacy and numeracy asked every two years as the NAPLAN does. Schools should provide a lot more than literacy or numeracy skills, but how well they do that cannot be reflected in MySchools. There are many other questions parents should be asking about schools they plan to send their child or children to, including how do they teach about the world? How do they generate learning plans to meet the needs of individual students? How do they engage with the arts or music? How do they engage with their community?

This is just an attempted to become a market based school isn’t it? How can we grow if we are constantly watched?

 References:

Jensen, B. (2011, March 15). MYSCHOOL 2.0 SHOWS IMPROVEMENT BUT COULD DO BETTER. The Australian, p. 12.

Mills, C. (2012). Implications of the My School Website for Disadvantaged Communities: A Bourdieuian Analysis. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 13, 1-13.

Moore, T. (2011, May 11). After MySchool comes the real revolution. The Australian, p. 4.