The challenges and risks of measuring performance in a social learning system

This submission draws attention to the challenges of modelling and measuring teacher performance and the risks associated with the measurement of student and teacher performance. The first premise of this submission is that all such performances are strongly contextual, and that therefore valid modelling and measurement must take the effective dimensions of this context into account. The second premise of this submission is that this performance-context nexus operates as a system and that one of the properties of such systems is continuous feedback looping. The submission draws attention as well to an important entailment of this argument, which is that invalid modelling and measurement may lead to a distortion of the productive functioning of learning systems. This submission accordingly urges the Commission to commit to developing an econometric model which reckons with the contextual determinants of student and teacher performance, and the pursuit of system-wide productivity increases on the basis of the school learning system as the basic unit of analysis. The Commission is also urged to investigate the suggestion that performance measurement regimes which take the basic units of measurement as individual student and teacher performance rather than the school pose a risk to the productivity of schools as learning systems and innovation in the Australian economy as a whole in the longer term.