Openbare prestatiegegevens van scholen; nuttigheid en validiteit

The immediate motive for this article is the recently started practice in the Netherlands to publicly report performance indicators on secondary schools. Three contexts of application of performance reporting are discussed: supporting school choice, school improvement and external accountability. Given the uncertainty and relatively small size of output differences between schools, incomplete knowledge about education production functions, and limited discretion of higher administrative levels over secondary schools in the Netherlands, performance reporting is seen as being of only limited relevance in each of these contexts of application. In a discussion on the meaning and measurement of 'value added', it is argued that any measure should start with a definition based on the degree of overachievement or underachievement of individual students. Parents, quite obviously, have a different kind of value added in mind than other stakeholders: they want to know what a school can mean for their child, whereas others want to have a 'clean' as possible measure for the true impact of the school (i.e. by efforts of the teachers). Next to this parents are interested in differential value added: the specific meaning a school can have for t heir own child given its cognitive and other relevant abilities. The article closes with a discussion of possible unintended consequences of publishing school performance reports. The final conclusion is, nevertheless, that the increased consciousness about output performance is likely to act as an achievement incentive to schools thus leading to increased performance of secondary schools