A crude analysis of Adelaide schools

I’ve put together a spreadsheet of NAPLAN results for Adelaide schools. NB: Not all Adelaide schools! ‘Though I like data and analyis, and I enjoy books filled with things that I already know, set out fair and square with no contradictions, spending that many hours on the My School website would just be very, very sad. I’ve concentrated on the schools in to the immediate north, east and south of the city centre. Please, let me know if there are schools that I’ve missed that you would like to see added to the analysis, and I will update my lists and the graphics below. And contact me if you would like me to send my spreadsheet to you, at my hotmail address, where I use dfr141 as my handle. Yes, the school my daughters go to is in the list, as is the secondary school we think they will attend.

The analysis is crude: I am no statistician. However I do know enough to exclude very small schools, such as the Sturt St Community School, because the very small year group sizes there mean that the data from the school is much more subject to variability.

The upshot of the analysis: the schools with the highest averages are private schools, but some public schools are level pegging with them, more or less, and many public schools are doing better than many private schools. If you have the money, and your child is a girl, then the Wilderness School looks very good indeed. Pembroke is also very good, but given the expense, it’s not clear why you would choose these schools over some of the very good state schools, such as Glenunga International, and Marryatville High School, which are performing at more-or-less the same level. The principal of one not-so-well performing private school has said that of course, they offer a rounded education, and they educate the whole person [link]. In what, I ask? Most of the state schools claim to do that too, and some of the money that parents don’t spend on high fees is often spent on “whole person” stuff, such as music lessons and drama lessons and sports clubs and the like. That’s our approach, over and above our commitment to public education (our attitudes to state education are perhaps skewed by coming from New Zealand, where only 5% of children go to private schools).

If you take a look at the website of one high profile private school, you will see that they boast of having educated 3 Nobel laureates, 41 Rhodes scholars, and 8 Premiers. So, to me, it looks as though what they are selling is privilege, the sort of privilege that helps you to know the right people (a very important thing in Adelaide, I’ve found), to establish the right connections, to be the right sort of chap. Lovely.

Given that the private schools don’t really do any better than public schools, with a couple of exceptions (that would be Wilderness and Pembroke), I have to conclude that what the private schools are selling is not education, but snobbery, the ability to say, “Oh yes, darling, my children are being educated at [fill in the private school of your choice here].” I feel deeply uncomfortable about these sorts of attitudes, and I’ve been uncomfortable about them ever since we moved here. So much for egalitarianism.

Okay…. rant over. My very very crude averaging of schools’ scores on the NAPLAN test follows. All the usual caveats apply! I’ve used Year 7 results to rank primary schools, and year 9 results to rank secondary schools (primary school goes from Reception to year 7, and secondary school from year 8 to year 12, in South Australia). I’ve simply averaged the results in each curriculum area – Reading, Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, Numeracy – to get a score for the school. This means that I’ve given far more weight to literacy skills than to numeracy skills. I suppose I could have done something a little more complicated, like averaging the four literacy skills and then averaging that score with the numeracy score to get an overall result for each school… but that looks just as value-laden as a simple average. I’ve included each school’s ICSEA number; that’s a measure of socio-economic advantage. But again, caveats! Please, do contact me if you want the full spreadsheets: I’m very happy to share.

Primary schools

Secondary schools

Friday Feminist – Naomi Scheman

We need to resist the temptation to present noncanonical voices as representative, as introducing diversity by giving the Black or women’s or whatever perspective. Such voices need to be diverse and to disagree among themselves. One of the sillier arguments against taking diversity as a reason for affirmative action has it that doing so presupposes that there is a distinctive perspective a member of the group in question will bring. The reality, of course, is exactly the reverse: it is when members of marginalized groups are scarce that those who are present are put in the role of representatives of their race, gender, disability, sexual identity, or whatever. One of the goals of affirmative action is to have enough members of such groups around that the diversity among them is always apparent (meaning both that there are enough people for the diversity to be represented and that they are sufficiently at home not to need to hide their diversity behind a united front).

Naomi Scheman, Engendering the Subject, 1993

Other things Tony said

The Australian Women’s Weekly is not my usual magazine purchase. In fact, I don’t normally buy it at all, but in a spirit of self-sacrifice, I have paid my $6.80 (inc GST), so that I can read more of what Father Abbott said, following on from his revelations about virginity as a gift (given by a woman to a man, of course, not the other way around), and pre-marital sex and so on, discussed at length on Larvatus Prodeo, and here on In a Strange Land, and at SkepticLawyer, and at An Onymous Lefty, and no doubt elsewhere in the blogosphere too (feel free to add links to other pieces in comments).

Part of the article is on-line, but there’s more in the print edition, including that budgiesmugglers shot, which I could have done without at morning tea time. There are some interesting tidbits there, including this one:

On the problem of businesses paying women on average 16 per cent less than they pay men in the same jobs, Tony is unaware there is still a problem.

Well, that’s good, isn’t it. A man who wants to be prime minister is simply unaware of one of the major obstacles that women face.

And then there’s this, which is not in the on-line edition:

The issue is not whether some women don’t like him because every politician has a core group of people who hate them. The real question is how many women don’t like him. “I suspect that it is probably more than 10 per cent, but less than 70%,” says Tony.

“Look, we are all just guesstimating here because we don’t have this kind of sophisticated polling, but I suspect that [what] we are talking about here is a woman of a certain age, in a certain line of work.

“I think we are talking about younger professional women, essentially, who, for perfectly good reasons, don’t want to be told by anyone else how they should live their lives.”

Nice work on the apostrophising there, Tony. “Women of a certain age” and “in a certain line of work.” Do you get the feeling that he might just be a little scared of some women?

Another little beauty, this time with respect to morals:

Yet before he tackles the big issues… he stops the flow of questions. “Let’s start, if we may, [on] the traditional moral teaching in this area, which until a generation ago, was not regarded as the Catholic Church’s teaching. It was regarded as the accepted wisdom of Western civilisation. It was based on the understanding that, if families were a good thing, intact families were a good thing, happy marriages were a good thing.”

So you see, it’s not that the Catholic church is out of touch with modern society. It’s that modern society is out of touch with the Catholic church. And let’s get those “women of a certain age, in a certain line of work” all married off, and straight back into the family home. Then they won’t be nearly so much trouble.

Tony Abbott, working on restoring the patriarchy, as quick as he can.

As for the Australian Women’s Weekly, February 2010 edition: there’s some excellent recipes in it. I especially like the section on what to put in school lunch boxes.

Cross posted

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Previous posts in my occasional series about Father Abbott:
More stripes
Revealing his stripes

The Great Australian Internet Blackout

Joining The Great Australian Internet Blackout (sticky post)

More stripes

Tony Abbott, leader of the opposition in Australia, doesn’t like contraception. Because if people can use contraception, then oh noes, they have sex. And even worse, because women and men can use contraception, some women have been taken advantage of. Really, women should stay virgin until they get married, because virginity is a gift to their husbands.

Yes. It’s really true. He did say all this. Take a look for yourself.

I confess that I laughed out loud when I read the article. Racing straight back to the nineteenth century, he is.

Jeremy, An Onymous Lefty, does a nice job taking apart the “save yourself for marriage” idea. You should head on over there and read it. But more than no-sex-before-marriage-for-women, Father Abbott has a rather nasty idea about women’s autonomy in this. It seems he thinks that they don’t really have any, that they can just be pressured into sex.

Well, yes, of course that can happen. But really, don’t you think that lots and lots and lots of pre-marital and extra-marital sex happens because – quick, cover your ears, Tony – people like sex. And even people who are women like sex. And they might choose to have sex because they want to have sex, not just because they ‘give in’ to some man. And that the fantastic part about contraception is that at last, women could choose to have sex, without fear of becoming pregnant. A good liberal ought to be delighted that people’s autonomous choices were made easier, not chewing his fingers and angsting over whether people ought to have sex at all. Or maybe he just doesn’t like the idea that women might choose to have sex, might be sexual beings, might have preferences and desires and make choices, all of their own.

It’s all pretty antediluvian stuff. Whaddya think Abbott will come out with next? And when do you think that the Liberal party will realise that Abbott’s conservative Catholicism might not actually be a vote winner?

Update: Forgiveness is overrated by SkepticLawyer is worth reading.

Rather, I’m suggesting that shaming is the appropriate response to public figures who get off on wallowing in their sin in public, and who then purport to advise the rest of us on the basis of that wallowing. Talking the talk requires walking the walk, in other words.

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This is the second in what I predict will be a not so very occasional series about Tony Abbott.

Previous post in this series: Revealing his stripes

Plus if you haven’t already, read Pavlov’s Cat’s piece: The Abbott and the Women: some thoughts.