Fears and Tears of Transparency and Disclosure: Controversies and Politics of School Profiles in Hong Kong Since 2000

Abstract

One measure of current education reform in Hong Kong is reporting school performance to the public to increase the transparency and accountability of schools, enhance parents’ right of access to information, and provide guides for choosing schools. This article examines the controversies and politics involved and shows how the sociopolitical construction of information are connected to crucial questions about how the conflicting values and expectations of different stakeholders are balanced. Advocating public school performance reporting without adequate deliberation could introduce anti-educational and unethical consequences, however unintended. Drawing on the works by Albert Meijer and findings from Hong Kong, this study provides additional empirical evidence and conceptual insights for understanding the complex dynamics of school transparency in the context of public sector accountability. The article concludes with analytical and ethical implications of the Hong Kong experience and recommendations for policy makers, particularly concerning the value judgments on the right to information, freedom of choice, transparency, accountability, freedom of the press, and professionalism.

Keywords

school profiles transparency accountability news media information Hong Kong

Background

The public reporting of school performance and effectiveness data is becoming increasingly common in many places to ensure accountability via transparency, facilitate school improvement, raise standards, and provide information with which parents can make school-related choices for their children (Cuttance & Stokes, 2000; Meijer, 2007). The most common forms of reporting are the publication of performance indicators such as attendance, success on public examinations, and the findings of official school assessment reports. The information sometimes takes the form of league tables, ostensibly to enable direct comparison between schools.

Following the tide in the West, Hong Kong’s education sector adopted a policy of information disclosure to the public from 2000 (Lam, 2001; Tsang, 1997, 2000). However, the information disclosure policy has sparked strong opposition from the school sector. Against the background of the policy’s development and the current education reform in Hong Kong, this article examines the controversies and politics surrounding school profiles in light of newspaper articles, as well as the major policy papers, documents, and reports published by the Hong Kong government and relevant consultative bodies from April 1999 to November 2013.

Fierce debates concerning the pros and cons of school transparency prevail, and there is a growing body of literature on release of information to the public in recent years (Cuttance & Stokes, 2000; Finkelstein, 2000; Meijer, 2007, 2009; Rich, 2000; van Petegem, Vanhoof, Daems, & Mahieu, 2005). However, our understanding of the construction of transparency in interactions among stakeholders over an extensive period of time is still limited; and more in-depth, diachronic case studies are needed to enhance our understanding of its complex dynamics in specific policy domains.

Theoretical Framework

Accountability is a complex idea, and scholars have developed various typologies and mechanisms to gauge it for the public sector (Garn, 2001). Reporting school performance to the public could be viewed as a combination of the performance and market models of accountability. Changes in market accountability and assessment policies have brought about the problems and politics related to information disclosure or transparency (Garn, 2001; Lindle, 2009).

Dutch scholar Albert Meijer (2007, 2009, 2013) argues that transparency is constructed and continuously reconstructed through sociopolitical processes along the lines of institutional relations, information exchanges, and domains of transparency. To elucidate the complex dynamics of transparency, he develops and illustrates a heuristic threefold model for studying the social-political construction of transparency in interactions between various stakeholders: strategic, cognitive, and institutional. The strategic aspect focuses on the power games of a variety of stakeholders, and the way in which changes in transparency influence their power such as decision- and policy-making processes. The cognitive aspect identifies the meanings that transparency contains according to the various actors. Furthermore, the impact of transparency changes to the cognitive framing of issues is analyzed. The institutional analysis focuses on the role of institutional rules such as legal frameworks. In parallel, it also analyzes the effects of changes in transparency in terms of the new rules of interaction between governments and the public, including such as what specific domain of policy activity that is rendered transparent, what is considered to be appropriate content, as well as who should have access to the information.

Meijer also depicts a chain of activities that may eventually lead to a change in the behavior of public service organizations, either due to actual sanctions or to the anticipatory reactions of other stakeholders. There are both opportunities and risks for the effectiveness and legitimacy of public service organizations.

While Meijer’s framework shows promise in guiding further studies, its political components of stakeholder interaction and debate are subject to further development and elaboration (Greiling & Spraul, 2010). And this is the gap of knowledge that this study serves to fill.

After a brief description of the theoretical framework, the next section will be about the development of the policy, then my analysis will unravel these complex controversies and distill them into three key aspects for detailed discussion: (a) the politics and interactions between various stakeholders; (b) the construction of information, with the case of value-addedness of secondary schools as an illustration; and (c) the use of information and the consequences of disclosure.

Policy Development in Hong Kong

It has not always been easy for parents in Hong Kong to obtain information on the performance and effectiveness of schools, whether through the government or the schools themselves. Even when information on student and school performance was available, it was not considered comprehensive or publicly accessible. In recent years, many parents have complained of not having enough data to guide them in selecting schools for their children. Many commercial guides and websites have been produced for this very purpose.

The Guides to Schools (later renamed School Profiles) were initiated as a vital measure allowing the public to access information. These booklets aimed at enhancing parents’ right of access to information and making schools transparent to assist parents in choosing suitable ones for their children. In 2000, the Committee on Home-School Co-Operation (CHSC; an advisory body to the former Education Department) began publishing school profiles at the secondary and primary levels after a year’s preparation and with the administrative and financial support of the department.

These profiles, published in booklet form by the CHSC, covered essential school data related to student performance, principal and teacher information, school characteristics, facilities, class structures, timetables, extracurricular activities, and fees. Individual schools were allowed to provide the basic information on a voluntary basis. Moreover, the first secondary school profiles identified 44 “positively value-added” schools out of 426. This evaluation was compulsory and carried out according to a formula designed by the Education Department. The profiles in later issues incorporated more information related to assessment methods, medium of instruction (MOI), admission criteria, and so on. Printed copies were placed in public libraries, District Offices, Regional Education Offices, and the Parents’ Center of the Committee for easy public access. The latest issues were also uploaded onto the Internet from 2004 onward. The cyber edition provides viewers with hyperlinks to access school inspection reports and school websites. A powerful search engine also allows viewers to look for more specific and up-to-date school information. Schools are able to update their own profiles on the website at any time.

Despite the official rationales stated previously, there was evidence that the Education Department usurped the use of the profiles to compel schools to comply with certain education policies, such as teachers’ language proficiency in English and Putonghua. The quality of language teachers has become a source of concern and anxiety for the public in recent years. After the 2002 implementation of a screening device called the “Language Proficiency Requirement,” which many teachers opposed and boycotted, parents and the media were keen on accessing the benchmark results of individual schools to determine their progress in attaining professional standards.

School strategies of promoting reading in tandem with a key curriculum reform known as “Reading to Learn,” the compositions of the school management committees, and information on the teachers who were receiving special education training were among the items later included. Thus, public reporting became a tool for hastening policy implementation, fueled by the pressure the public put on the schools.

Politics and Interactions Between Various Stakeholders

This section will proceed with the strategic, cognitive, and institutional analysis framework as suggested by Meijer (2013). First, concerning strategic analysis, responses to the school profiles were polarized. The government, news media, and parents gave the release of the profiles particularly enthusiastic support. For example, surveys showed that parents endorsed these measures and wanted more information than just basic figures from the schools.

However, there was strong opposition to these measures from the education sector itself over the course of development. In Hong Kong, while most primary and secondary schools are funded by public money, only a small proportion of them are directly run by the government whereas a vast majority are managed by nongovernmental organizations (so-called sponsoring bodies). The original proposal conceived by the CHSC on the first secondary school profiles involved releasing data on the banding of student intake, percentage of students admitted to university, and public examination results in every subject. In anticipating the worries of the school sector, the CHSC allowed the schools to furnish these details on a voluntary basis. However, many schools and teachers resisted disclosing the information and demanded that the publication date be deferred, even after some concessions about the coverage of sensitive information were made. Twelve groups, such as major school councils, principal associations, and the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union (HKPTU; the largest teachers’ union in Hong Kong), criticized the proposal on either methodological or ethical grounds (more details in the next section).

Despite severe criticisms from the school sector, the secondary school profiles issued finally reported students’ pass rates in the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) and listed 44 “positively value-added” schools in the academic domain. Senior officials Mr. Joseph Wong and Mrs. Fanny Law said the government would gradually disclose the list of “zero value-added” and “negatively value-added” schools at a future time. However, to soften the resistance met from schools when collecting and reporting the data, the CHSC abandoned some sensitive items that had been originally proposed. It also adjusted the format used to report students’ pass rates in the HKCEE for English, Chinese, and Mathematics over the past 3 years from exact figures to three bands, roughly classified into 50% and below, 50% to 75%, and above 75%. While all but six schools submitted the most basic information required, only 173 of 426 (40.6%) reported their public examination results in the booklets. To combat the school sector’s massive boycott of releasing public examination results, the Education Department finally resorted to commanding government schools to do so in the following years.

The 2000 primary school profiles provoked another controversy. Unlike their counterparts at the secondary level, no public examination results were made available to the primary schools. The Subsidized Primary Schools Council and the Primary Education Research Association strongly objected to the original proposal to publicize data on academic aptitude test results (a screening device for allocating primary students to secondary schools practiced for years). They also objected to publicizing applications for Primary 1 places and the allocation results of each primary school leaver due to the labeling effect on schools and the pitfall of misleading the parents. They argued that these data did not reflect the quality of a school.

Regarding the official advocacy of revealing teachers’ language test results in the 2002 school profiles, the school sector also largely opposed the proposal and believed it was too early to do so. Even worse, the sector believed that by presenting only a partial picture to the parents and public, the data released would erroneously suggest that Hong Kong teachers’ language proficiency was low, and would decrease people’s confidence in or respect for the teachers and schools. The sector also believed that publishing teachers’ results would place additional stress on the teachers, as it would be akin to compelling them to meet the targets. This call also intensified conflicts among the schools and among school teachers and their management. Only seven of more than 400 secondary schools ultimately disclosed their results voluntarily in the 2002 school profiles.

In view of the controversies and criticisms surrounding the reporting of value-added indicators in 2000, the secondary school profiles subsequently ceased doing so. The Education Department was alerted to the limitations of the original formula and commissioned two academic institutes to design new indicators. An individual school report card produced as a written report on the value-added findings was sent to individual schools but no longer directly disclosed to the public. Since 2003, the modified “School Value-added Information System” has classified the value-addedness measurement into nine ranks, with rank five or above taken as a positive value-addition. The value-added information is updated each year, and all secondary schools are asked to include value-added information in their annual reports. Schools may divulge the information to parents who are interested in how the schools are faring at teaching and learning, but the government no longer expects them to use it for publicity purposes. To further avoid the problems of unhealthy competition and the effect of labeling on schools, the Education Bureau ceased allowing schools to release their banding and territory-wide system assessment results in addition to the value-added data in the Secondary School Profiles 2007/2008. Parents’ organizations condemned the move as weakening their right to information, and some schools rephrased the presentation in response.

The MOI is an important factor affecting a parent’s choice of secondary schools. After the authority fine-tuned the language policy in 2009, schools were no longer strictly segregated into Chinese- and English-medium streams, allowing schools with greater flexibilities to offer classes taught in English in proportion to the abilities of the students. The government wanted to avoid the labeling effect and to decrease the pressure schools were facing, and did not allow schools to announce the number of Chinese and English classes they were offering. It also wanted to prevent using simple figures as recruitment propaganda that could lead to unhealthy competition. Finding only scant, unclear, and even dubious information on MOI arrangements in the Secondary School Profiles 2009/10, many parents were upset and confused by the number of classes to be taught in each language and had to ask schools directly about the MOI or obtain such information from their websites.

The availability of information resulted in a redefinition of the political game between different stakeholders. There have been strategic coalitions around transparency between school councils and the teachers union on one hand, and parents and the news media on the other. Information asymmetry has been reduced as parents and the public now have better access to more information from the schools. But as the issue has provoked political struggles over the years, the CHSC and the Education Department have been inevitably engaged in the cycles of managing the conflicting interests and concerns. Bargaining and compromises were made on several occasions in view of the opposition by different stakeholders.

Concerning the cognitive framing of issues, local press such as Ming Pao (“‘To Enhance the Quality of Both High and Low Achievers’ in Education Is Correct and Feasible,” 1999; “ED Should Disclose Overall Secondary Schools’ Results,” 2000) and Sing Tao Daily (“Are Schools Willing to Cooperate With Parents?” 2000) supported disclosing the overall secondary school results to the public on the grounds of “right to know,” “right to choose,” accountability, and parents’ interest. They also argued that this might reveal the black-box-like operations of the schools, promote healthy competition, and raise the performance of the school sector as a whole (Cheung & Tik, 2000; Wong, 2000).

According to CHSC’s Chairman, Mr. Chi-yuen Tik (2000b), many parents were inclined to select schools according to their reputation, but they might not have had enough knowledge about the schools, and sometimes well-known schools were not necessarily beneficial to all children. These profiles were thus helpful guides for parents in selecting schools, and they also served to persuade parents not to make their choices based on academic achievement alone. In June 2002, senior official Mrs. Fanny Law urged schools to detail their teachers’ test performances in their annual school profiles to satisfy the parents’ right to know the teachers’ language proficiency and to increase transparency.

In view of the response by the school sector toward these initiatives, which was at best lukewarm and usually resistant, most newspapers and parents’ representatives criticized the education sector for declining to inform parents about teachers’ performance, viewing it as the inability of government subsidy recipients to fulfill their role for accountability (“Are Schools Willing to Cooperate With Parents?” 2000; “Could not Allow Parents Choose Schools in the Black Box,” 2000; “Increased Transparency of Schools Is Better Than Wild Guess by the Public,” 2000;” How could the ED conceal the VA results,” 2002; “Put Students First Over Principals and Teachers,” 1999; “Teachers’ Quality not Disclosed, Lack of Information for Parents to Choose Schools” 2003). They endorsed the introduction of competition mechanisms and release of the “value-addedness” results on the grounds of their respect for consumer rights and the facilitation of parents’ choice in schools for their children. It was reiterated that this would improve the quality of education. Over the years, the request for more information has often been a focus of media attention.

Contrariwise, the school sector opposed the initiatives of publicizing data on academic results and other sensitive information like teachers’ language test results in the school profiles because of the negative labeling effect on schools and therefore misleading the public. The criticisms of the value-added formula as inaccurate, narrow, arbitrary, or unfair as used in the first secondary school profiles are a case in point (Education Convergence, 2000; Poon, 2000a, 2000b; Tsang, 2000).

Finally, concerning the role of institutional rules, before 2000, both formal and informal institutional rules emphasized confidentiality and therefore key information is in the hands of individual schools and the Education Department—the sole inspection and monitoring agency. And exchanging school information were interactions between the two parties and other stakeholders were excluded. Later, access rules have been formalized and the change in access affected the institutional rules as well as the relation between schools and the public. As time goes by, particularly with the aid of information and communication technology, schools could update their information onto the website of the CHSC directly, whenever necessary, and parents can obtain the latest school information. Furthermore, parents may make use of the hyperlink provided by an individual school in its profiles to access more details. The profiles and related leaflets are also sent to all parents who are about to choose a school for their children. The relation between schools and parents slowly resembled the market character in which consumers could purchase goods or services on the basis of this information as a medium of exchange. These changes in rules and practices resulted in different roles for stakeholders. Parents have changed from being passive citizens to active consumers, and schools from being social service agents to competitive service providers. But in view of Hong Kong’s specific state–civil society historical circumstances and the resistance from the school sector, the voluntary principle of information disclosure is observed and it is up to the individual schools to provide and vet the information in the profiles. It has become a loophole for evading release of unfavorable information or for selective uses of released information.

Policy instruments used by governments to bring about policy objectives cover a wide range, including financial and human resource allocation, regulatory measures, and service delivery advocacy. Chan, Kennedy, and Fok (2008) noticed a shift of education policies in Hong Kong from “hard” to “soft” ones in the post-1997 period. Hard policy instruments are those related to legislation, institutional objectives and commitments, and budgetary allocations. Soft policy refers to the forms of codes, guidelines, and conventions that, although nonlegally binding in nature, exercise power through persuasion, benchmarking, and the setting of best practice. Viewed in this perspective, school profiling is a soft policy characterized by an open form of accountability or governance, and greater flexibilities and space for schools to follow in multilevel systems. But after all, the Education Department still plays the gatekeeper role in deciding to whom and in what ways school information is disclosed. Indeed, to accommodate the responses of the school sector, some original plans of open access have been shelved, removed, or significantly modified. As a result, restricted access is applied to “high-stakes” or sensitive items of school performance such as value-added data or Basic Competency Assessment results. And in the course of policy development, the advisory body CHSC has acted as a source of advice and support to the government, playing a mediating role in explaining to the public the issue in question, as well as serving as a platform for reaching agreement concerning controversial decisions.

Construction of Information

The information content and assessment mechanisms are major points of controversy over the public reporting of school performance. These mechanisms relate to the coverage and quality of the data collected. As information about school performance is evaluative in nature and made public, ensuring the objectivity and reliability of the selected information and the generation process itself is crucial.

To reveal the progress of student performance over time, the Education Department compared students’ results in the HKCEE, taken in Secondary 5 (Grade 11), with their scores in Primary 6 (Grade 6), as measured by an academic aptitude test for secondary school placement over the 5-year period from 1994 to 1999. In addition, to evaluate the schools’ effects on student performance, comparisons were made between schools with similar intakes using the percentile method, supplemented by the ordinary least squares regression method for the bottom and top schools (for details, see Education Department, 2000). Of course, these figures are to some extent a human product and social construction, as different formulae could yield different results depending on what is (not) taken into account. Upon closer examination, the calculation of the academic value-addedness of secondary schools erred on a number of conceptual and measurement issues as follows.

First, the formula was said to be unfair, as it counted only one cohort of students (those sitting the HKCEE in 1999). Some critics also challenged the validity of the academic aptitude test for secondary school placement as a measure of indicating and comparing student ability. The methodology for analyzing students’ academic results in a school was criticized as partial and misleading, as academic achievements were overemphasized while performance in other domains such as school ethos was neglected. Furthermore, as the aggregate performance in the best six subjects in the HKCEE was taken as an overall outcome measure, whether the choice of the best six subjects should include the three core subjects (Chinese, English, and Mathematics) was disputable, as it could result in different payoffs even for the same school. There were also systematic biases allied with the present academic structure that were favorable to certain schools but unfavorable to others. These included discount problems related to asymmetrical class structure (some schools offering fewer classes at senior secondary levels vis-à-vis junior levels), dropout problems, students finishing their Secondary 4 and 5 (Grades 10 and 11) studies in other schools, and the appropriateness of the regression analysis method as applied to top and bottom band schools.

Second, understanding the difference between school performance and school effectiveness is critical to assessing schools fairly. Concerns were expressed that the publication of value-addedness information about schools would be misunderstood because ordinary people could not distinguish the difference between performance and effectiveness. While school performance refers to the average level of student achievement in the school in a particular assessed domain, school effectiveness refers to a school’s relative performance level in relation to students of different backgrounds and levels of prior achievement (Cuttance, 1998; Muriel & Smith, 2011). Using average and median test scores of student achievement to assess school performance is a highly flawed approach, as complicated problems of student mobility and nonschooling factors such as student, family, and community characteristics and prior achievement inevitably arise. The conceptually appropriate indicators of school performance and accountability are those that are value-added and use statistical models that can isolate the contribution of schools to student achievement growth from other factors. The authority was also aware of the drawbacks of merely reporting the current level of performance and supplemented these data with a value-added measure to allow like-with-like comparisons to indicate school effectiveness. However, the measure remained problematic in this form as a proper and fair basis for assessment. Even a pupil progress measure like the value-added indicator had nothing to do with a school’s effectiveness or improvement, let alone contributions. The so-called progress it revealed related to the difference between starting and exit points, but could not explain how the difference was attained. Another crucial problem in causal attribution was the multiple factors contributing to student performance. As the formula did not account for socioeconomic background and contextual factors other than student intake, it was not able to isolate the portion of student improvement made by the school. Because the factors contributing to student performance were not fully controlled and the value-addedness originated either from a school, the student’s family, or both, the change in student performance might not have been solely the influence and responsibility of the school. Likewise, because the indicator could not discern the sources of the change, it failed to inform schools on how to improve or solve problems.

Third, measuring value-addedness was a zero-sum game among the schools, as the original formula determined whether a school could attain an expected level of progress by comparison. In short, this value-added result was a relative ranking competition. The terms positively value-added, zero value-added, and negatively value-added were also ambiguous and misleading. The use of the percentile method was too rigid, as only those schools advancing one full grade among 10 were counted as “positively value-added.” Many schools that showed improvement in academic performance were not counted as value-added under the calculation. Finally, the combined use of the percentile and regression methods presented compatibility and comparability problems.

Without spelling out the limitations of the value-added formula to the public and media, the value-added information report merely blamed the schools for their ineffectiveness and failure at educating students. The problems with profile coverage and value-added calculation reveal a more fundamental issue with the setting of an assessment standard from which school performance information is generated (Silver, 1994). As they have different perspectives, definitions, and values, people have different ideas of what a good school means and what counts as satisfactory school performance. This provokes thorny conceptual, methodological, and measurement problems and disputes in designing widely acceptable, comprehensive, and valid indicators to capture the complexity and multifaceted nature of schooling processes and student performance (Fitz-Gibbon, 1996; Reynolds & Cuttance, 1992). Given the complexity and uncertainties of the school performance function, measuring student outcomes is fraught with philosophical disputes and conceptual and technical difficulties. Much effort is still being put into developing a sophisticated and valid assessment system (Linn, 2008; Muriel & Smith, 2011; Wilson & Piebalga, 2007). These studies have cautioned important problems associated with performance measures. School accountability results are best thought of as potentially valuable descriptive information rather than strong inferences about school quality. A hasty implementation and compilation of measurements without a commonly accepted understanding and professional deliberation could undermine the objectivity and fairness of the reporting and the legitimacy of the tools.

The problem of assessment tool legitimacy arises from a deficient policy-making mechanism. While some officials said the school profiles were compiled in the spirit of transparency and accountability, the mechanism used to set indicators was ironically neither transparent nor accountable. School representatives complained that the government unilaterally issued school profiles without consulting the schools ahead of time.

Use of Information and Consequences of Disclosure

While the official rhetoric justified the merits of information disclosure to the public on the grounds of parental choice, accountability, and school improvement, these justifications proved doubtful in view of the negative effect. In practice, the outcome of the policy backfired on its original intention in five ways.

First, the external pressures due to public reporting enhanced school improvement efforts in an ironic way. They introduced a new culture of competition and fashion of window-dressing among schools, and increasing resources and efforts have accordingly been channeled to publicity and promotion strategies and therefore away from the core task of teaching. There has been a trend in the school sector toward a competitive culture centered on publicity and marketing with the publication of school profiles, particularly at a time when school populations are shrinking due to drastic fertility rate decreases and large school place surpluses in many districts. To attract admissions and boost their reputations, some schools selectively disclosed more details in their profiles. Within a few years, the bandwagon was rolling, and more and more schools climbed aboard by incorporating only the positive remarks of the official inspection reports or complementary claims into their school profiles and websites. Some secondary schools displayed the number of As given on their public examinations or emphasized their high value-addedness. Some primary schools also highlighted their Basic Competency Assessment (a territory-wide test monitoring students’ standards at different levels) results in the 2005 profiles, although the information was not supposed to be released to the public.

This scramble for good publicity was driven by the competition for students. Because most data were reported voluntarily by the individual schools, there were many cases of schools making inflated claims or selectively reporting favorable information to the public while glossing over areas of weakness or poor performance (Lo, 2001). Advertising and exaggerated publicity have become accepted as conventional forms of good public relations. As a focus of news media and public concern, image building has become a must, either for the sake of publicity or crisis management in response to the negative labels applied to some schools.

Second, the school rankings communicated market signals to the public. The school profiles inevitably differentiated schools into different grades, particularly through the league tables composed by the press. And the role of the news media in reporting and responding to the school profiles deserves specific concern. In addition to official channels, the popular news media play an important intermediary role in transmitting information in education policy (Anderson, 2007; Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003; Leckie & Goldstein, 2011; Wallace, 1993; Warmington & Murphy, 2004; Wilson & Piebalga, 2007). Much of the news media in Hong Kong are fashioned from market-oriented journalism (Fung, 2006; So, 2003), and news value is often created by discovering or inventing “bad news.” For journalists, news about school performance often involves potentially exciting stories of public concern, particularly those related to examination results and scandals. School performance has attracted the interest and scrutiny of the press, and the storytelling aspect can be sensationalized when partial and/or negative information is made available (Elmore, Abelmann, & Fuhrman, 1996). The press was very keen to reanalyze such information to rank school performance. It focused more on reporting on so-called underperforming schools, giving little acknowledgment to the schools that were doing well. Furthermore, the news media’s derisive discourse was coupled with stigmatization (Ball, 1990). Newspaper treatments amplified the schools’ faults, which served to alarm the public and boost revenue for the press.

On the issue of school profiles, CHSC’s Chairman Mr. Tik (2000a) strongly opposed any official ranking of secondary schools, claiming the truth was more complicated than just a simple ranking. The Education Department also denied that the guide was intended to distinguish good schools from bad. Despite these appeals, the news media and many websites were extremely eager to compile and publicize league tables, particularly the public examination results, to highlight the data found in inspection reports and school profiles. Over the years, the popular press has mostly continued to highlight student intakes, public examination results, value-added results, and the percentages of students admitted to colleges in a highly selective way. High school fees, class sizes, and class numbers (hinting at schools at risk of closure), teacher qualifications, language benchmark results, and the names and numbers of secondary schools that have fully or partly shifted their MOI to English or Chinese (hinting at school tiers as perceived by parents) under the new language instruction policy starting in 2009 have also been of interest. This resulted in references to the top 10 and bottom 10 listed schools in headlines such as “List of the Best Schools in HKCEE,” “List of New Ten Reputational Schools,” and “List of Ten Schools With the Poorest Pass Rates of Chinese, English, and Mathematics in HKCEE” in some popular newspapers. Conceptual confusion was regrettably generated in readers’ minds when the news media reported the value-addedness results by stating that “only 10 percent of secondary schools are value-added.” This conveyed the message that 90% of local schools were not up to the standard, and led to an impression among the public that Hong Kong school performance was poor overall.

This kind of public sorting and ranking of schools as good or bad, strong or weak, was undoubtedly critical to the reputations of the schools. More importantly, the public reporting of school performance proved to be an unpleasant ordeal for the school sector and for many of the teachers and students involved. The misappropriation of the information by the news media functioned more like a public trial of the respective schools. The blame that the news media placed on certain schools harmed many teachers and students, and the damage done to the schools’ reputations directly affected their enrollments in subsequent academic years. And these league tables and negative reports hurt not only the weakest schools but also the famous schools that failed to meet popular expectations. In one headline, a newspaper sneered at reputational schools that were not on the value-addedness list. Due to a conflation of the meanings of the value-added formula stated above, there was an impression among the general public that a school not exhibiting positive value-addedness had problems and was performing poorly. The teachers and students of prestigious schools not on the list thus felt stressed and lost face.

Third, steeped in a traditional culture emphasizing academic achievement, Hong Kong schools are accustomed to being examination oriented. The predominance of conventional examinations and a heavy reliance on examination results as measures of success have skewed teaching and learning, a situation that has been made worse by the dissemination of school profiles to the public. In response to external pressures, it was reported that the management at some schools considered boosting student academic performance with more tuition after classes. Teachers were urged to concentrate on pushing student standards in public examinations to meet the value-added considerations. A school could also expel or withdraw low achievers immediately before public examinations to avoid a decline in its overall academic performance. Another method of usurping the value-addedness formula was to offer students fewer school subjects to achieve better public examination results. These methods of boosting value-addedness results are clearly subject to ethical disputation.

Fourth, school profiles in effect serve as consumer guides by providing more information to parents and raising consumer awareness. While there are no data to show that parents could make better informed decisions about their children’s education with the profiles available, these profiles have enjoyed popularity among the public. For instance, the school profiles posted online since 2003 have been well received by parents and the news media. About 3.1 million people browsed the primary school profiles from September 2003 to August 2006, and more than 20 million browsed the secondary school profiles from December 2003 to December 2005, more than 2,400 visits per day (Hong Kong SAR Information Center, 2006a, 2006b). And “secondary school profiles” also became one of the keywords of the popular Yahoo website during the summer in 2013. However, the original intent to replace the commercial guides to schools with official school profiles was in vain, as commercial publishers continued to publish the guides. Nonofficial guides remain prevalent, as various lists of league tables are circulating on the Internet. And notwithstanding the publications of school profiles, requests were made for the release of more information to satisfy the insatiable demand of parents.

Finally, the very heated political disputes also caused continuing strife between various stakeholders, at worst creating more enmity between the government, the school sector, and parents. On the partnership between the government and the school sector, the coverage and system of release created anxiety over the lack of consultation and the possible divisive effect on the schools. As for the partnership between parents and the school sector, the government pressured teachers and schools to conform to parental demands. All of this put great pressure on the teachers, and also misled the parents who were not sufficiently well informed of the complexities of the information. Taken as a whole, the public reporting of school performance manufactured an education crisis and alarmed the public. On the part of the school sector, it also induced a distrust of the mass media and government to some degree.

Discussion and Conclusion

Drawing on the insights of Meijer (2007, 2009, 2013) and findings from Hong Kong, this study provides additional evidence for the challenge of disclosing the appropriate information in the context of public sector accountability. Applying this model to Hong Kong’s case provides insights into the sociopolitical construction of school transparency and helps identify how this construction unfolds and evolves in a different policy and institutional context characterized by specific state–civil society relations and historical traditions. The salient findings of complex dynamics of school transparency in Hong Kong are presented in Table 1, with some additions or revisions. For instance, the school sector is not a single stakeholder and there is divisive effect within it.

Table 1.

School Transparency in Hong Kong (expanded and modifed after Meijer, 2013, p. 434).

	Multi-actor interactions result in transparency	Transparency influences multi-actor interactions
Strategic analysis	Resistance against “transparency” and “less transparency” develops over time Strategic coalitions formed	Closed interactions open up to external stakeholders and their positions are strengthened Mediation and compromise resulted
Cognitive analysis	Market logic (consumerism and competition) and accountability as the dominant themes Debate about school quality and performance, partiality, unhealthy competition, and labeling effect	Market logic and accountability reinforced
Institutional analysis	From rules based on secrecy to rules based on publicity Changing roles of parents and schools	Availability of information and audit culture as the norm, but withholding high-stakes items Profiles accepted as a soft policy for regulation and monitoring purposes Role of CHSC is strengthened New culture of competition around publicity and promotion in the school sector Culture of school rankings in news media

Note. CHSC = Committee on Home-School Co-Operation.

As shown above, the controversies in Hong Kong over the public reporting of school performance have pointed to value judgments on the right to information, freedom of choice, transparency, accountability, freedom of the press, and professionalism. The part of information generation also deserves further attention. Information is not neutral, but conditioned and structured by the social contexts in which it is embedded. Hence, contextual factors should be taken into account when attempting to understand the workings of relevant policy measures. This study also reveals the risks resulting from transparency measures such as strategic behavior. Rising public expectations and populist sentiment have generally tended to diminish public confidence in public schools. Some solutions to the problems surrounding the public disclosure of school performance have ironically sought to reinvent bureaucratic control and regulations or simply retreat from disclosure.

This study also points to the significance of an expansive concept of accountability, in which modes of accountability are interlocked and each stakeholder group has its own responsibility to the others (Greiling & Spraul, 2010). Accountability policies in terms of public access to information cover a wide range of normative and political concerns. It is imperative that we understand these controversies and deliberate on which forms of transparency or information disclosure we want in the public school sector. The values involved are at the heart of the debates about transparency accountability.

In hindsight, the controversies over the public reporting of school performance and student achievement pose a fundamental question about how to account for the concerns and interests of various major stakeholders, whether they are parents, schools, teachers, the news media, or the government. There is also the difficult task of meeting the various and sometimes-incompatible expectations of different stakeholders for information about school performance (Cuttance & Stokes, 2000). The tensions among different stakeholders are reflected in the embarrassing position of the CHSC on balancing the conflicting expectations of parents and schools in issuing school profiles. Stakeholders must weigh the pros (right to information, transparency, public money, and accountability) and cons (students being affected, professionalism, inducement to an examination-centered culture, and the fairness and validity of measurements) of public release.

As for the role of the government, the public release of information touches upon the conflicting claims of the neoliberal doctrine of the free flow of information versus the imperative for regulation. If we take a benevolent view of the role of information release, we can see both the need to ensure that citizens are well informed on school matters and the need to protect the interests of students and teachers. There is less agreement on the extent to which the information should be accessed or restricted. There are trade-offs on the public reporting of school performance, and the government should maintain a proper balance between the obligation to provide information and the duty to protect the affected students, teachers, or parents. The crux of the problem lies in defining the limits of the public interest and in considering the weight of necessary information protection, provision, and concealment. The pursuit of rights should not be an excuse for hurting the innocent.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Thomas Kwan Choi Tse is an associate professor at the Department of Educational Administration and Policy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He teaches and publishes in the fields of values education, educational policy and sociology of education. He also edited Making Sense of Education in Hong Kong since 1997 (Routledge, 2017).

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