Private schools can still hold up their heads

The second research paper Ferrari refers to as evidence that non-government schools are performing badly, by Chris Ryan from the University of Melbourne, tracks changes in the PISA test results over the years 2003, 2006 and 2009.

Over the period Ryan notes a significant decline in Australia’s performance and observes “falls in school performance were more apparent in private schools than in the government-run school system across Australia”.

What Ferrari fails to mention is that Ryan also notes the fall off in results “were apparent across the entire distribution of schools”.  No mention is also made of the fact that Australia’s test results for 2003 and 2006 were not disaggregated by school sector and as admitted by Ryan this “creates some difficulties for the analysis”.

To put it simply, if Australia’s 2009 PISA results are the first time school sectors can be identified, and Ryan has had to find some other means to identify sector results for 2003 and 2006, then the validity of the analysis is weakened.

One of the persistent arguments put by government schools activists for increased funding is that state schools face greater challenges and sometimes under perform because they enrol large numbers of disadvantaged low socioeconomic status (SES) students.

It’s significant that Ryan acknowledges the fact that as much of the enrolment growth in the non-government system, especially among independent schools, has been in low SES communities.

The decline in non-government school PISA results, instead of proving that such schools are performing badly – as implied by the heading to the Ferrari piece – might be because such schools are enrolling increased numbers of low SES background students.

Ferrari begins her piece by stating the “claims to academic superiority of private over public schools has been challenged” as a result of the 2 research papers.  One only needs to see the Year 12 results across Australia every year, where Catholic and independent school students predominate, to see how misleading such a statement is.