Can you get the information from other sources? Like DoE?
If you are talking about the school level report, then you have to ask the individual school.
I am reminded of a quote by Dr. Ken Boston, one-time Director General of Education in NSW:
"there is a conspiracy of silence . . . and a determination to avoid making public any information which might indicate that one school is more effective than another" Boston, K. 1996, ‘For the record’, School Education News 1 May
If I am not mistaken, Ken Boston now works for the educational authorities in the UK. This is what the public can access in the UK:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6215682.stmThough it is seems quite obvious, do expect poorly performing schools to be particularly hostile to the idea of making their performance data public accessible:
"I've been to schools that don't have the performance data on their website. Some principals in some schools don't want this information to be out there because their results aren't that great", says Jacinta Cashen, president of the Victorian Council of School Organisations. (Source:
The Age)
Make no mistake, school adminstrators care first and foremost about themselves and keeping their own jobs and they are quite willing to keep vital information secret to cover their own ass. If publicly traded companies operated like some state schools, the adminstrators would all be prosecuted and jailed.
Often to support the idea that school performance data ought to be hidden they will make the highly arrogant argument that parents are too stupid to handle it:
Brian Burgess, president of the Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals says information in the School Level Report also has the potential to confuse parents. "It's superfluous for parents to look at because it's simply raw data. You would need to have a sophisticated understanding of what that data is telling you.
"The annual report does that by extracting the data and putting it in the school context to show what the school is doing well, what it's not doing well and what sorts of improvements the school needs to make." (Source:
The Age)
However Burgess' highly arrogant argument is beside the point. It's not about whether parents can understand such information, it's about the public's
right to know. If he was so worried that people might misunderstand the data, then the propoer recourse for him to argue, persuade people, to point out the limitations of such data - not to keep such information hidden and secret using the excuse that people are too stupid.
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