Abstract:
The involvement of communities in low socio-economic areas to bring about school improvement has gained international acceptance since the 1980's. The New Zealand Ministry of Education has tried to foster a partnership between communities and schools in its initiatives to strengthen education in two districts in South Auckland. As evaluators of this intervention, we have judged the quality of the partnership by examining the extent to which schools and parents learn from one another about how to strengthen their mutual capacity to improve student literacy in the context of reporting to parents on student achievement. The baseline conditions we propose for a mutually educative partnership through school reports are that both partners have access to accurate information about the child's current achievement level and a shared understanding of the standard used to judge that achievement. A sample of school reports on high achieving, average achieving and low achieving students from 12 schools were examined. The analysis showed that schools either described student's achievement in ways that were difficult for parents to interpret or used rating scales to indicate achievement. The standards used to judge a particular rating were rarely explicit and differed between schools. Some ratings referred to national averages, others to children in a particular class, with others referring to teachers' perceptions of an individual student's estimated potential. Most parents, on the other hand, believed the standards to be nationally based. Reasons for reporting in this way and the implications for a partnership based on unequal information are discussed further in the paper.