Hunger for Information

I was reading this news report about the "My School" online school performance website for all of Australia's schools:

Gillard stares down teachers over My School

In the story, it talks about how school principals feel that the site is unfair because it starts to "rank" schools according to performance, without much other information. They believe (quite rightly, I think), that it will lead to "league tables" of schools and actually cause more problems than it solves.

While this is a serious set of issues, what really struck me about this was the fact that the justification Julia Gillard gave for keeping the site was that people want this information.

"We believe parents around the country have voted with their fingertips in huge numbers because they were hungry for this information." -- Julia Gillard

This is a completely stupid justification. For one, a lot of the objections from principals was that the rankings didn't have any explanation or further information, "context" if you will. Secondly, although there is a lot to be said for including parents in the processes at schools, what good is going to come from this release of information? As far as I can tell, it'll mean that teachers will not want to work at "bad" schools, parents won't want their kids to go to "bad" schools, and a huge wedge is driven in the community between the parents and the already-overworked and over-stressed teachers at disadvantaged schools.

If the government wants to encourage schools to improve performance, there are ways of doing so that don't involve shaming them in public. They are probably underfunded and under-resourced to begin with, have low morale amongst staff and students, and many other issues that stress from a ranking table and associated parent pressure won't help in the slightest.

I love information, and I want it to be free as well, but I want it to be available in a way that means that people can really discern the true meaning behind it, not just arbitrary things like rankings and tables. Statistics and ranks that are decontextualised such as these are not meaningful, and the opposite of useful for schools and their communities.

And using "but the people want it" as the justification is just awful. Information has such a lot of power to change communities. Let's use it to change them in good ways.