Damaging League Tables must be stopped

AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said the unidentified operators were selling crude‚ inaccurate league tables for $97.

Students in Australian schools are being named and shamed so somebody can make a profit‚ Mr Gavrielatos said.

They have taken test scores from the My School website and reproduced them in crude league tables showing the 'top' and 'bottom' schools.

The question is when is the Federal Government going to act to protect school students?

Education Minister Julia Gillard says she opposes league tables because they are misleading and make the job of teachers and principals harder and yet she has facilitated their creation.

Within 24 hours of the My School website going live we saw league tables in Sydney‚ Canberra‚ Melbourne and the Northern Territory.

The Government said it would take steps to counter inaccurate and damaging reporting and now is the time to act.

The only ones who support league tables are the ones that want to profit from them.

League tables which name and shame schools which do not score highly on standardised tests give schools bad reputations which they do not deserve and undermine the confidence of students and teachers.

League tables are also misleading because the test results they are based on were never designed to be used to publicly compare schools and are not accurate enough to do so. NAPLAN is a measure of the literacy and numeracy skills of individual students not a measure of school performance.

These online profiteers will only increase in number unless Julia Gillard takes action to stop them‚ Mr Gavrielatos said.