School website causes uproar concerning immigrant children

An uproar has been caused by the federal government’s new website which publicises the student grades from the country’s schools and gives the opportunity to parents and other interested parties to make comparisons. The educational community is strongly opposed to the website, saying that it is misleading and there is a danger of stigmatizing the schools which children of immigrants attend, since it is natural for those students’ grades to be lower than that of the rest of the students whose mother tongue is English.
On Thursday, the first day of operation of the website http://www.myschool.gov.edu.au, there were many access problems due to the large number of visits to it, as from 10am to 2pm the website received 4,5 million visits. The issues were later resolved.
The Minister for Education, Ms. Julia Guillard, stated that the high visitation to the site proved the great interest of the parents and the necessity of it’s existence.
However many parents consider the site misleading because the comparisons are not made to the point and there is no mention of the particular characteristics of each school, but only statics are presented. In addition, there are fears that schools with lower scores will be stigmatized causing many children to remove their children from them.
The parents views are contradictory concerning the site, some are claiming it will help them choose the school to send their children to, whereas others mentioning that the site doesn’t offer any useful information.The government however insists that the website is here to stay, and that will time it will be enriched with more information. According to the Ministry of Education, the total amount of funds of the private schools and their sources are to be publicized, and it is expected that the information will force the elit schools to justify their current high fees.
One of the most interesting facts derived from the comparison between public and private schools, is that the NAPLAN scores of public school primary students are on average higher than those from the private schools at which parents pay up to AUD$10,000 annually.
(source: neos kosmos)