more monroe than onassis.

MySchool.edu.au launch leads to parent frenzy

lenier:

Parents rocked by the My School website have already begun pulling their children out of poorly performing schools.

Look, teachers are just as good as they’ve always been at every school. Take an interest in your child’s education and there won’t be a problem. There is a reason Gen X has so much animosity for Millennials. The girls have their shit together but the males are, on average, fucking idiots - and they’re only a generation removed from us. Something went wrong somewhere, man. Is there still ‘military school’? I bet it comes up as all green on the site.

Disclaimer: I’m 31. I don’t have/want kids and I think anyone under 22 is trying to steal my car. I shouldn’t really comment.

But whatever. Move them. They’re really gonna love getting shifted to a new (now overcrowded) school where their friends aren’t.

By the way, while looking up my old school on myschools.edu.au (lookin’ good, year 5!) I found that their website is STUCK IN 1998. Talk about a great reason to find your kid another school.

Fun Easter Egg: My name is somewhere on the Nimbin Central School website. Can you find it?

i rarely have an opinion that im willing to voice in something other than conversation. mainly because im so fickle and quite easily change my mind, therefore i dont like any kind of record of what i say. that said, this issue has decidedly irritated me. 
firstly, these ‘results’ that the schools are ranked on are NAPLAN tests. these take place on one day at the beginning of term two. so, essentially, schools are getting kudos/condemned because of the results of one standardised test after maybe eleven tiny weeks of schooling and just after a two week break. and, the math problems are not sums, they’re worded problems, which automatically put students from a non-english speaking background (ie. the majority of my students) at a disadvantage. 
not only are the ranks based on the one NAPLAN test, they do not show growth. sure, maybe a school like mine will be on the lower side of things, but they do not show the vast improvement that students have made between testing. and really, isn’t that what education should really value? the improvement of it’s students, rather than putting schools against schools in a competition that a kid from my school could never win.
academics aside, why does the ‘myschool’ website include racial and economic information? why is this relevant? if, really, what this information is for is to provide parents with more information about their child’s schooling, who cares what the percentage of aboriginal students is, or what the socioeconomic status of the school population is? this ‘informative’ website does nothing but create black sheep out of our already struggling communities.
teachers who work in low performing and low socioeconomic schools are aware of this. as such, we cater our programs to improve this. we implement workshops and support the learning needs of our students. we are aware of NAPLAN results and utilise them in our classrooms, as a whole and for specific students. why parents need to be aware of these results is beyond me, considering the results are supposed to be confidential.
as far as im concerned, this website is to cater for parents with nothing better to do than rally hysteria in the public school system. these ‘rankings’ do not show anything of relevance about the school.
if you are a parent and have a genuine interest in your child’s schooling, get involved and support the school community. ask your child about their school day, read to them, help them with their homework and show a genuine interest in them as people. that will support their educational and emotional development more than a ridiculous website that is only interested the arbitrary and irrelevant numbers that have nothing to do with the value of each student and the strength of the school.

Check it out!

This was posted 2 years ago. It has 3 notes.