In Australia, we typically don’t tell parents the average test score in their neighbourhood primary school. In the US and UK, this information is considered public information, and its annual publication is routine. I had a bit to say about this last year, in one of the first Progressive Essays.
But parts of the US have gone much further with school accountability. I just stumbled upon an Illinois website that lists the salary of every teacher in the state. Want to know what Joanne Smith has been earning over the past six years?
Seriously, this is an invasion of privacy. What possible reason can there be for releasing this information publicly? It may actually make it more difficult to pay according to merit too, I’d think. Want to bet that systems that publicly divulge teacher pay information are systems that have less variance in teacher pay?