TOMORROW, some 60,000 students will get the results of the Leaving Certificate examination which they sat in June. These will have a major significance for their immediate future and will affect their prospects for the rest of their lives.
In assessing these results, nobody will take into account the kind of school a student went to: whether the school was educationally impoverished; whether the special facilities and special teaching arrangements available in fee-paying schools were available in the school in question; whether the students in the school came from educationally deprived homes and thus whether the ethos of the school in question was indifferent or even hostile to educational accomplishment.
None of these factors will get a moment's consideration on the crucial issue of whether the student in question is to get a place in a third-level institution and, if so, in which institution and in what course. There is an obvious unfairness about this: that the life prospects of a young person should be determined so crucially and at such an early age by factors some of which are entirely arbitrary and so entirely outside the control of any young person.
The kind of school a person goes to, the kind of teaching they get, the facilities that are available at the school, whether their home environment is educationally sympathetic or not, whether their fellow students are educationally motivated or not, all play a crucial part in educational performance. And yet we think it is fair - or at least less unfair than any other workable system - that students should be assessed in this manner.
But when it comes to an evaluation of the schools themselves, entirely different standards apply.
The Department of Education has available on its computer the data required to publish a full report on the performance of each secondary and vocational school in the State in the Leaving Cert. But the Department refuses to divulge this information. The refusal is influenced, at least, by the blanket opposition of all the interests involved in education for the Leaving Cert: the schools themselves (or at least most of them) and, crucially, the teachers unions. They are all utterly opposed to the publication of this information.
The stated basis for their opposition is that such data would fail to take into account the widely differing educational facilities available to schools and if the catchment area of schools was educationally sympathetic. It is said it would be entirely unfair to evaluate schools without taking such factors into account and, inevitably, comparisons would fail to take such account.
It is further argued that the publication of such lists would stigmatise the educationally deprived schools and would introduce a further discriminatory element into the educational system.
But how is it acceptable that students should be assessed partly on the basis of arbitrary criteria and that their life prospects should be so crucially determined, when it is not acceptable that the schools should be assessed partly on the basis of similar arbitrary criteria? Indeed, the situation is even more unfair for students because one of the factors that does prejudicially determine the educational performance of some students is poor teaching standards. That is poor teaching standards independently of any other factor, such as the educational resources available in the schools or the catchment area or whatever.
There are several good reasons why the Leaving Cert performance of all secondary and vocational schools should be made known. The first is that thereby the schools would be held accountable for their performance. As it is now there is no means of holding schools and teachers accountable for their performance or at least none that has any real relevance. Why should institutions, and teachers, that have such a crucial impact on the life chances of students and that are publicly funded not be held to account for their performance?
The second good reason for publication of the school results is that it would highlight the extent to which differing levels of educational resources affect educational performance. Almost certainly, such information would become a weapon for the promotion of equality in education generally and, specifically, for the equalisation of educational resources - the same pupil/teacher ratio, the provision of equal educational resources generally.
A third good reason is that it would highlight the scale of inequality in society generally by showing how children from deprived backgrounds suffer not just from a poverty of material resources but from an educational poverty as well, thereby deepening societal inequality. That surely would also be a weapon in the general campaign for equality.
Yes, some schools would be stigmatised as a result of the publication of such information and it would introduce a further discriminatory element. But why is this so bad in the case of schools and why is it not so bad in the case of students who are the "victims" of such schools?
Anyway, not all discrimination is bad. It is, quite right we should discriminate between good teachers and bad teachers, between good schools and bad schools (taking account of relevant differences). And, it is likely, the real basis for opposition to the publication of these results is precisely to obstruct such justifiable discrimination.
OPPOSITION to the publication of the schools results extends beyond the vested interests concerned, even to sections of the media, which, one would expect, has itself a vested interest in the availability of as much information as possibility on the performance of important institutions in society. The contention is that such information would be misused or misunderstood.
This is the paternalistic argument in favour of censorship that the populace cannot be trusted to comprehend properly certain information and therefore, in their own interests, they should not have such information. It is an intrinsically antidemocratic argument, founded on a rejection of the idea of equality.
In a democratic republic where all citizens are equal before the law, all citizens are entitled to that information which is necessary for them to partake equally in the government of society. As citizens, we are entitled to know how those institutions, that have such a crucial impact on members of society and which command such large amounts of public resources, perform. And that entitlement cannot be withheld on the basis that we cannot be trusted with how we might use and interpret such information.
If somebody suggested this in relation to the crime phenomenon that the populace and, especially the media and alarmist and opportunist opposition politicians, cannot be trusted not to abuse crime statistics - it would get short shrift. What is so special about schools and teachers?
But, more crucially, the students themselves have an important interest in schools and teachers being held accountable, given the crucial influence they have on the determination of the students' life prospects.