By Dan Satherley
The Education Review Office says it will no longer include schools' decile ratings in its reports.
The reason given is that it's often confused for a rating of the quality of education on offer, not the socio-economic area it is situated.
"The decile rating system is a mechanism used by the Ministry of Education to make funding available to schools," says the ERO's Dr Graham Stoop.
"Too often it is seen as a rating of the quality of the education which a school provides and this is simply not correct. By removing the decile rating from ERO's reports we hope to help remove this element of confusion and correct this misconception."
But teachers' union NZEI says that removing the decile information means parents won't be able to judge a school's quality fairly.
“Decile ratings are clearly crude tools, but if ERO is to remove these ratings, it should still give parents information about the socio-economic context in which a school operates,” says NZEI president Ian Leckie.
“Poverty, ill-health and poor housing have significant impacts on whether children are ready and able to learn. ERO cannot pretend these 'out of school' factors do not affect student achievement and therefore whether a school is perceived as 'effective' or not.”
He says removing the decile ratings is "ironic", because National Standards information – that will be published – is "meaningless for assessing educational quality".
“Like decile ratings, National Standards are a very crude and blunt instrument for assessing quality education," says Mr Leckie. "League tables of schools based on National Standards achievement data are likely to simply reflect decile rating. They will not give parents meaningful information about a school’s effectiveness.”
Critics of the plan to publish National Standards data say it will be used to make "league tables" that reflect a school's socio-economic status, rather than quality. NZEI had told its members not to release the data, but was overruled by Ombudsman Dame Beverley Wakem.
Prime Minister John Key has backed the creation of league tables, but says the Government won't be the ones making them.
"Measuring the progress of your child and seeing whether they are, in fact, achieving the national standard is absolutely critical information,” Mr Key said in July.
More than 100 education academics signed an open letter to the Government stating their opposition to publishing National Standards data.
"You can’t compare schools on the basis of league tables effectively, they’re too blunt an instrument,” Prof Stephen May of the University of Auckland told Firstline in July.
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