The Gonski review of school funding promises to be a watershed in the history of Australian education. Much is at stake. There is a real chance to fundamentally change the way our divided school system works and for whom it works.
A short history of school funding
Tensions in how we fund our schools, how well they perform, and the impact they make on the lives of Australians have built up over time in successive waves.
The early post-war decades saw public schooling expand at an unprecedented rate, creating opportunities unknown before the war. The private sector contracted. It carried little of the weight of social and economic change applied to the public sector, which was poorly resourced and severely stretched.
But the funding framework constructed with much hope in 1972-73 to support public schools and restore non-government schooling was undermined from the start. Conflict resumed as increasing resources went to non-government schools to support choice and commonwealth efforts for public schools stalled and faltered. The viability of public schools was weakened, while at the same time greater and greater accountability was required to improve their performance or face market extinction.
Going nowhere
Today, as yesterday, the poorest fifth of all schools in Australia are almost all government schools.
Today, as decades ago, four-fifths of the poorest children attend government schools.
Over the same period, more and more educated and prosperous families have been subsidised to shift to private schooling. Public schools have had to defend themselves in this context on many fronts — against depletion of student numbers and student mix, against contractionary budgets of state governments, against hostility from sections of the media, and against a tenacious ideology that says resources do not matter (so spending on public schools, though not private schools is a waste).
An upside down mess
But at the same time expectations have risen.
Greater demands are being made on the largest and most exposed system, and are being enforced through annual national testing, performance agreements, and management contracts. Public schools have become a sector which is policed, while private schools have become a sector of preference.
Australian policy makers have created this division, which is uniquely Antipodean, a fact not lost on private school lobby groups who have warned Gonksi off international comparisons as incompatible with Australian “tradition”.
Our funding system is indeed upside down. For it diverts resources into choice and away from the schools that most need to work well.
The average child in a public school located in a high SES community is two years ahead of the average child in a school located in a poor area. The middle classes are thus well served by their local government school, but public policy in Australia since the mid-1960s has multiplied options for these classes when their social power and cultural capital already assured them of high standards in the public system.
The great diversion of effort from tackling disadvantage to multiplying choice has achieved nothing for the poor. It has created an over-resourced, corporatised and solipsistic private sector that sees nothing of what its unimpeded growth leaves behind.
The wrong debate
Much has been written for the Gonski review to paint a softer picture. Sermons are preached on the evil divisiveness of “us and them”, scandalous comparisons of income are denounced as “illegitimate” (not only invalid), and private schools parade their randomly-selected poor as proof of openness to all.
The theme has been the far-from-privileged nature of private schooling as a simply-better-performing version of public schooling. All schools, the argument runs, are close to the people, except for a few princely palaces whose antique exteriors obstruct the view.
How little debate there would be if this were truly the case! Alas the problem runs very much deeper. Much of the public funds spent on private schools flows not into the coffers of Kings or Haileybury, but into the mass of Catholic and less-than-notorious private establishments, opened in the past few decades or resuscitated from academic oblivion in the sixties.
These schools critically depend on public money because their fee income is too low. They need fees to filter their intakes and outperform government schools. But they could not survive in the marketplace on their own.
A drain on the system
Keeping these, the majority of non-government schools, on life-support comes at a very high price. It uses up the resources needed to eliminate under-achievement in the public system. It also uses up the cultural resources represented by educational level, know-how, values and aspirations that are needed to make the public system work consistently well, but are applied to segregation in a private system that adds little value of its own.
This is why real change cannot come from targeting the rich. But it is an even bigger mistake to imagine working-class and lower middle-class families are best served by splitting them up and dividing the scarce public dollar between them. That is not a recipe for either productivity or equity.
Public schools are community assets which only work well when financial and cultural resources are pooled in them. This is the only way to get value for money and justice into the bargain.
Will Gonski see it this way or will the review bow to tradition? The review committee must surely know that their answer will affect the future of Australia’s most disadvantaged families.
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Comments (10)
Con Zymaris
Untethered Polymath (logged in via email @cyber.com.au)
The following articles may be germane to this discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
"Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most…
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Derek McKinnon
Manager (logged in via email @atcm.com.au)
My daughter goes to a private school. The MyChild website shows it gets about the same amount of money as the state schools around it, except around 40% of it comes from the parents. However the state schools don't have to pay for land and buildings out of their money.
So my daughters school runs on less money and provides superior education and values.
The problem with the state system is that it doesn't provide what parents want. It provides what education bureaucrats want to impose on the Australian public and at a greater total cost. Since it doesn't meet the customers requirements, it is in decline.
If you want to save the state system, start providing what parents want (values based education with solid academic backing). And get rid of the bureaucracy so it can be done at a similar total cost. That's what is needed to revitalise the state education system.
James Mahon
Student (logged in via email @gmail.com)
I highly doubt the MyChild website has those figures and before I believe that the MySchool has them I'd probably want to know which schools you were referring to, or at least a postcode, to be able to check the figures.
For a different example that you can go and verify, within my postcode (2141) in 2009 the public primary school I attended received $8306 per student in government funding, the other public school received $9879, the closest non-government school received $8825 and the other…
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Michael Brown
Professional, academic, company director (logged in via email @bigpond.com)
Research by the Australian parliamentary library shows that each government school student costs taxpayers $12,639 per year and each non-government student costs taxpayers $6,607. (http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/SchoolsFunding.pdf).
Ipso facto, the more private school students there are, the more tax money there is for the disadvantaged.
James Mahon
Student (logged in via email @gmail.com)
Refer to my reply to Derek above for how this often isn't the case on local levels.
I'd also note my numbers didn't include a very small local school (20 students) with average per student funding of $75,484. It should be obvious that these types of facilities should be considered separately, but they all get lumped into the government sector average.
David Healy
Retired (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)
Three of our 4 children graduated from a government high school. One graduated from a Catholic high school. If there was much difference in the standard of education the children received, I missed it. Both schools were good, but the government school was better resourced for music.
Since the area children live in is also (for the most part) the area where they attend school, parents tend to live in suburbs where their children can attend whatever the parents perceive to be "good" schools…
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Jac Hancox
BSc. Agriculture - Biotech undergraduate (logged in via email @msn.com)
One of the problems I see in my area that makes private schooling very attractive to those that can afford it is the fact that public schools cannot refuse enrolment to children with challenging behavioural problems whereas private schools can. Those with the resources will place their children in private schools to avoid these type of kids where teachers can concentrate on getting on with their job without the added disruption of challenging children. This is the main factor cited by the parents…
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Kissindra
(logged in via Twitter)
I hear this a lot, that public schools are dumping grounds for students with disabilities and behavioural challenges that private schools don't wish to deal with. I have to say this is not how I've found things in my area and with my child. It was state schools who are notorious for under supporting and pushing out students with behaviour difficulties, and problems associated with disability - and we experienced this first hand with our own son. We had to move twice to find a state school who did accomidate him happily, and in our area this school routinely ended up with students other state schools pushed out, to the extent that the department had to intervene and tell our school it was no longer allowed to accept enrollments from sudents with special needs in an effort to make other state schools stop pushing these kids out. In stark contrast, I found a host of private schools who have quite well known success with challenging students and students with a disability.
Seamus
(logged in via Twitter)
" It also uses up the cultural resources represented by educational level, know-how, values and aspirations that are needed to make the public system work consistently well, but are applied to segregation in a private system that adds little value of its own."
Tease really nails it here. This is a much bigger issue than the simple case of a few dollars being mis-allocated.
What sickness lies in our education system does not stem from what is taught, for even in the worst of schools much learning takes places, but in the class divisions in our society the education system mirrors, and inevitably reproduces through the allocation of scarce cultural resources, such as elite university degrees.
wilma western
(logged in via email @bigpond.com)
It seems just wrong that hard on the heels of a closing-down of small rural schools in Victoria in the name of better resourcing per primary govt school student, new private schools can get funded with about 20 pupils using the same buildings recently vacated by the state primary school - and there are lots of other examples of schools starting up thanks to govt funding on minimal justification apart from "choice".
But while reducing the handouts to established rich private schools that have always…
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