Measuring what matters: student progress

• Ben Jensen
• Grattan Institute

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Image: aussiegall / flickr

04 February 2010With the recent release of the Federal Government’s ‘My School’ website, this report discusses how to measure school performance accurately, and the importance of incorporating these performance measures into managing each level of school education systems.

‘My School’ 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). This 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 that measure the contribution schools make to student progress (rather than a snapshot of performance at a single point in time) consistently measure school performance more accurately, because they are better able to isolate the performance of schools from other factors that affect student performance. For these reasons, teachers, school associations and education unions in other countries have advocated the introduction of value-added measures of school performance.

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. This report shows how a focus on student progress to measure school performance can lead to sustained improvements in school education.

Image: aussiegall / flickr