Finally, parents have access to the information to which they have a right - an easy-to-understand snapshot of their school.Many teachers and principals do not like this. Indeed, their unions are dead against it. As too are the Greens, who with the NSW Opposition, successfully legislated that newspapers, specifically, cannot publish any comparison of school results without the approval of principals.We appreciate Premier Kristina Keneally's condemnation yesterday of this law and her call for it to be repealed.We believe it is one of the worst laws this state has enacted; a bizarre overreaction that undermines a cornerstone of our democracy - a free press. The Sydney Morning Herald is daringly testing this obscenity of a law. And yesterday we agonised over what we should and should not publish.For a start, it would be impossible for us to compare every school - primary and secondary; public, private and Catholic - across the many areas that parents can see on myschool.edu.au.And we accept it would be unfair to schools, their interests and the public interest to selectively use information without putting it in context. Most parents, however, for various reasons, do want to know how their schools perform and how they perform against other schools. They can effectively now do this, but we cannot.One area we believed was fair to compare today was the rating of schools according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage.This measure is controversial and we could be accused of stigmatising those schools at the lower end.The index is not an indication of a school's performance, but rather signifies the "socio-educational" background of its student population. It is the basis for each school's assessment against so-called similar schools on the website.To us, the value in publishing this index for Illawarra schools is to identify "at risk" schools and ones which may need greater support in terms of resources. Readers familiar with the various demographic pockets in the region will not be surprised by this index. Overall, as Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard asserts, the fact the website just about melted down shows Australian parents are thirsting for information - just what an education system should provide.