A chara, – Maria McAlinden of Luttrellstown Community College (December 9th) objects to your publication of school league tables. Given the inaccuracies with respect to this school, this is understandable. However there is a compelling argument for publication of such tables in general, notwithstanding their current limitations.
When William Petty started to measure the state of the economy in the 17th century, his estimates were necessarily crude but that did not put an end to the endeavour. When more systematic attempts at developing national accounts were initiated in the early 20th century, the resulting data was still far from perfect. Even now national accounts struggle to keep up with issues like non-market activity, quality changes and e-commerce. But no reasonable person would say we should not publish the data. The same issue arises with data in every other domain, whether it is climate, the environment, crime or public health. The moral is publish, improve and be aware of its limitations.
The argument that these tables don’t take account of other features of the school (such as sports and art) is easily addressed by publishing those too. For example, the United Nations Human Development Index is widely used to complement national accounts data in making international comparisons.
There is, of course, a whole science dedicated to collecting, presenting and interpreting data. It’s called statistics and we would do well to draw on it to see how best to keep students and their parents informed. Were league tables based on exam results to be published, as most parents want, then we should follow best practice by publishing measures of school value added that directly address the fact that schools’ “raw material” varies massively.
Nonetheless, I think that The Irish Times could probably do better with the raw data provided to it by the universities. For example, publishing data as a three-year moving average would reduce the effect of any iniquities in a particular year – due to errors, for example. Rather than publishing each school's ranking, grouping the schools by vintiles, ie the top 5 per cent, and so on, would reduce any stigma for those at the bottom of the distribution and also reduce the spurious precision that such tables can imply. – Is mise,
Dr KEVIN J DENNY,
School of Economics
and Geary Institute
for Public Policy,
University College Dublin,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.