Andrew Norton wonders whether Julia Gillard is going to “upset the public school lobby” with her suggestions on schools funding:
DEPUTY Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to extend the model of funding private schools on a socio-economic basis to public schools in a move to confront disadvantage across both sectors.
As Norton notes, the details of Gillard’s proposals are unclear. But I’m not sure that the implication that he draws from it is the way this twist to the policy debate is likely to play out:
To the extent that currently ‘over-funded’ government schools in affluent areas lost out, it would speed the shift to the private system. I don’t think the public school lobby is going to like the implications of what Gillard is suggesting. But it will be tricky for them to handle. ‘Equity’ is one of their cloaks of respectability, and it will be hard for them to argue against more money for poor schools.
That presumes that there will still be a distinct public school lobby when and if this becomes a reality as opposed to musing. What Gillard is suggesting, as I read the excerpts from the interview she gave, is fleshing out Kevin Rudd’s desire to reframe the debate so that it transcends arguments about the ownership of schools. It also, I think, entails a somewhat different funding system for private schools after 2012, because that would almost be a sine qua non of an integrated system which applies federal funding to every school on the basis of “social inclusion” objectives. This really is genuine “third way” thinking – in that it seeks to undercut the ideological grounds of current disputes. But it’s worth noting that it has its own ideological twist. Perhaps I haven’t quite caught the Blairite groove, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that “social inclusion” isn’t the first thing that a lot of the supporters of private education have uppermost in their minds.
Cross-posted at PollieGraph.
I think the existing SES funding model for non-government schools is flawed; indeed Federal Labor made many quite valid criticisms of the model during their time in Opposition.
It seems that the Rudd Government has painted itself into a corner with this model by promising to support the current funding arrangements until 2012. Schools do need certainty with respect to funding, but Labor should be offering both a level of certainty and a path for driving the funding debate in this country forward to a better place. This latest move foreshadowed by Gillard is moving things forward by consolidating funding arrangements, but it consolidates things under a dodgy funding umbrella. I’m not sure, all in all, that’s a positive outcome.
Mark and All:
Let’s hope that this really is all about inclusiveness, encouraging talent and giving everyone a fair go.
If I am sceptical but hopeful it is because I can still remember the Hawke years when there were so many wonderful things promised – from the benefits[wtf!!] of privatization to poverty alleviation to consensus in decision making to regaining national sovereignty – and yet so little was delivered [except to the filthy-rich white-shoe brigade, of course].
I do wish Julia Gillard all the best it promoting a better, fairer and less expensive system of schools funding.
In the meantme, like the rest of us yobbos, morlocks and untermenschen, I’ll just sit on the verandah [not porch], doing the crossword [not chawing tobacco], cricket-bat [not baseball-bat] at hand, watching to see if this great new idea gets stuffed [not screwed] up and ready to wallop [not wop] whoever does so. Watching. Waiting ….
Mark – Maybe there are public school ‘lobbies’, but they all think though perhaps for varying reasons that parents should be financially penalised for sending their kids to non-government schools.
I support applying the SES concept (avoiding current issues about rates and whether or not funding should be adjusted down as well as up) to all schools. I also support giving government schools the same management freedoms as private schools, probably by putting them on a similar legal basis to public universities now.
In the news segment I heard it seemed that the purpose was to give all poorer schools more and richer schools less comparatively over time. A teachers’ union rep supported the notion and said that by their calculations the state school sector would get $700 million more under the proposal.
So to comment on Andrews points, yes there would be more money for poorer schools and the whole thing would cost more as Rudd doesn’t want to reduce funding anywhere to specific schools. It seems the initiative may be supported by state school lobbies, but I can’t see why it would speed the move to private schools.
Andrew, the problem with giving public schools the same management freedoms as private schools is
a) What happens to the disabled kids?
b) What happens to the kids who get expelled?
The idea that the public system would be better – if only they could act like private schools is a short-sighted and somewhat elitist one I think.
Public schools can never – and should never – be like private schools in this regard, and frankly, they deserve more bucks because the buck stops with them, unlike private schools who are happy to push their “problem” students back into the public system unless – and sometimes not even if – the parents can scrape up enough dosh.
Patrick – There is no reason why private schools wouldn’t be interested in disabled kids. The upside of the religious ethos that public school advocates complain about is that charitable works are often part of it. The main reason that they don’t have more disabled kids now is that parents of those kids sacrifice financial entitlements if they go private. I’m sure someone can be paid to take the kids that get expelled. Can you name a single service the private sector will not provide at the right price? It’s already running the jails where too many of the expelled kids will end up.
Not all private schools have a religious ethos, Andrew.
Btw – I wasn’t including you in the ranks of supporters of the private system who don’t care much about social inclusion. But I think we’ve seen some interesting evidence recently – and in older surveys – as to why parents do choose private schools for their kids.
And I think Brian is right – an attempt to translate these principles into policy practice would probably see the relative (if not absolute) levels of funding for many private schools – as well as for some government schools – decline after 2012. A lot would surely also depend on what the states do – since they provide a very large chunk of the funding for their public systems.
But I also agree with Guy (kind of) – I’m yet to be convinced this is necessarily the desirable direction to go in. That’s not to say it may not be.
“But we’ll start to turn the corner. It’s very difficult to turn the Queen Mary around when you’ve had a government so long disinvesting in education, as the Howard Government has done.”
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2098784.htm
Anybody seen a big ship turn a corner?
Must say, though, that we are happy with OUR government funded high school and education provider. On the bad side, facilities are generally crap. Yet the teachers are great. My suspicion is that the really dedicated, interesting, staff are in for the long haul and the money grabbers have abandoned ship to bore the children of the rich and overly religious.
Andrew Norton wrote:
I’ve never been quite sure what this actually means. I think what’s being suggested is that the same amount of money (presumably, what it costs per state school student) should be directed with the student if that student moves into the private system. But this no more penalises parents than I’m penalised by not being given the $3.40 that a tram costs me if I choose to drive my car instead (this is hypothetical; I don’t actually own a car). Has this type of model for school funding been introduced anywhere? Was it a success? And if so, how was success defined?
Back in the dark ages one of the elements of my teaching job was enrolling counselling and distributing new students to my school. Every 2nd, 3rd and 4th semester for too many years there would be an influx of a handful or more kids, with parent[s] in tow, who were shifting from local private schools to our public school. Usually as result of ‘gentle’, sometimes not so gentle, ’suggestion’ from the admin of the private school.
Usually because ‘they didn’t fit in”. Not ‘good’ enough.
So much for social and financial equity.
I’m sure things have improved out of sight since and the private schools deserve every penny [oops cent] over and above what the federal govt. gives the public schools even though public schools are already available to all students.
Oh and an interesting side comment to the above.
Grants to schools from the govt., in those dark days, were based on initial enrolment at the start of the year.
When our ‘neighbours’ sent their ‘rejects’ to us they never remembered [despite frequent requests] to send the unspent portion of the allowance represented by the transfer of the student ‘bods’, say 1′3rd or 1/4 or 1/2 of that student’s value as per the grant.
Tiny point but it epitomised their general contempt.
Mark – Though all but a small percentage of private schools are at least nominally affiliated to a religion, which I think is in general a problem for parents dissatisfied with the public system but still wanting an entirely secular education, but possibly an advantage when it comes to charitable works.
Alister – I am assuming the default position should be be that school education is compulsory, rather than that one type of school system should be privileged over others. What was partly a practical measure in the 19th century – to achieve compulsory education it had to be free and expand rapidly, which required state action – has ossified into a point of principle in some circles.
A teacher I know at an independent Christian school once told me that they often had disabled children enrolled in their school on the basis that “they’ll be kind to them there”. But the school was a low-budget one, without much in the way of special resources (this was 10 years ago so things might have changed under the Howard funding model, I suppose) nor in the way of specially-trained staff. She felt that her school was doing these children a disservice, in fact, and they would be better off with the superior resources of the public system.
I’m afraid I haven’t seen any sign of a private school for expelled kids in Sydney yet, and I doubt Australia could sustain more than a few such schools under a private funding model anyway.
Chookie – I don’t know of any data on expelled kids and where they end up. But private organisations – often the charities of the same churches that run private schools – are major players in dealing with disadvantaged people. Except that the state competes on price in schools presumably they would do the same for kids who are having trouble at school.
Andrew Norton wrote:
I can see that currently the private school system appears to be significantly advantaged by virtue of their ability to levy fees and throw out students who they don’t think fit in. If you were proposing a system by which taxation revenue funded all school education, at the same level, with no extra funding allowed, then I suppose each system would be treated in the same way. I am not necessarily sure that this is what you’re proposing though; redirection of tax revenue to private schools seems to be where you’re going (I could be wrong). Charging fees based on the capacity of parents to pay seems like an administrative overhead when we instead could simply ensure a progressive taxation regime redirects funding to all state schools at the same level, and not worry about school fees. The problem with redirection of our money to systems that aren’t publicly-run is that you lose accountability. This can be seen with almost any privatised state function you care to examine, and sometimes almost seems to be the point of public-private partnerships.
The reason why the market won’t step in, Andrew, is because the market doesn’t want to.
Sure, the 10 kids per 200 or whatever that have special needs – behavioural, developmental, physical or otherwise – may have a demand for private schooling – but what about the other 180 kids, and their parents, who don’t want their a) money being wasted, and b) little Johnny being stuck in a class where they feel he will be held back?
In this instance the needs of the minority parents/kids are swamped by the needs of the others.
A private school for special needs – you make me laugh Andrew! And who, pray tell, would staff this wonderful school? And how much would it cost to staff it? And why would anyone do that when there is easy money to be had kicking out all the “bad kids”?
I love how free market evangelists are always so keen to institute the ideas of whatever the market wants – as if the market, people, whatever you want to call it, have some kind of inherent morality that will ensure – not just the most profitable, or desirable, but the most ethical solution will emerge – which is, perhaps, not coralling different children off into education ghettos.
So, you say:
So why aren’t they??
It also makes me laugh that you hold the jails up as the exemplar of the private sector running traditionally public things! The privatised jail sector is one riddled with problems (I’m not positing the public system as better, per se, but it was/is cheaper at being shithouse). All you need do is look to the US prison system to see how well privatising has done.
Reading Andrew Norton’s comments here are a real eye opener. It makes me wonder what real experience he has with a broad spectrum of schools as he supplies no evidence for his statement that private schools welcome children of all abilities? Perhaps reference to evidence is too much to expect in a blog comment. However, as a parent (of a now very successful young man) having researched literally hundreds of schools (public, independent & alternative) in the attempt to find one which displayed actual ENTHUSIASM to educate a child with mild physical disability and intellectual genius I can assure him that his beliefs are largely illusory. Andrew claims that the market will provide for every educational need, yet I feel that there is at least one thing that money alone will not provide and that is integrity – for that is something which has no price. I suspect it is a concept which does not fit well into much economic theory. Private schools are not charities they are businesses. As a parent I would certainly never settle for a school which saw my child in terms of his affect on their bottom line or because they were simply ‘paid to take’ him- no matter what challenges he presented. There’s so much more to life than economic theories, they should be our servant not our master. That in mind, our public system needs enough money to live up to it’s ideals and the private school supporters need the wisdom to know the difference between money and value.
12 hannah’s dad Mar 16th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Yes, funding to private schools based on beginning of year enrolments is a scandal. It seems that private schools have a constant enrollment throughout the year while public schools have a dropout rate that affects and indeed effects staffing and other resource allocations.
In my experience, no government wants to touch it despite auditor recommendations to so do.
17 patrickg You are on the money. Catering for ’special needs’ kids also distorts calculations of ‘average cost’ of public education as does the cost of providing ‘cost inefficient schools’ in rural and remote areas.
In some instances it would be far cheaper to close some small schools, board the kids at Geelong Grammar and fly the parents down to visit every other week-end.
Well, Andrew is paid by a right wing think tank to research and write on education, so I imagine the bar should be set accordingly.
Everyone:
Thanks to Patrickg [6] for mentioning the disabled and the expelled [and implied in that, "cherry-picking"] and to Hannah’s Dad [11 & 12] for reminding us about one of the many rorts and also about one of the many monkey tricks used by “private” schools to fabricate their supposedly high results.
The “private” schools have been sucking on the public tit for far too long – it’s time to give them the heave-ho. The “private” school system is an unnecessary luxury Australia cannot afford.
As for all the magnificent facilities they own: converting them into upmarket housing, shopping centres, car parks, brothels, offices, light industrial sites would all bring in a fair bit of money. Most of the facilities are on pretty valuable real estate. As for the students: the creative use of existing facilities outside the present state school system would solve that “problem” in a matter of days, not weeks.
Of course, museums could be encouraged to put on displays of memorabilia from the former “private” school system so as to keep the nostalgic and the sentimental happy.
Joe2 [9]:
Do you want to turn a big lumbering ship around? A torpedo works just fine.
Alister – I don’t see any need for a general increase in private school funding; that’s why I opposed the traditional full voucher model where all schools get a flat amount. As I would want to preserve some free schools, I expect some private schools serving low-income communities would get increased funding, but I would also take the top schools out of the public funding system entirely so any net increase in spending would be small.
‘Accountability’ is exactly what is lacking in the public school system. If you can’t afford to go private you have only legal action or politics as remedies, both of which are very expensive and time-consuming with no guarantees of positive outcomes. With nearly 10,000 schools in Australia, there is scope for real competition so markets would provide far better accountability than the current system.
Just another parent – So you would not trust a non-profit with your child? You would not have surgery in a private hospital?
AN, no, I would not have surgery in a private hospital for the exact reason I would not trust a private school with my kids — if there’s a real problem, they move you off to the public sector anyway. I saw that in action when my twins were in a neonatal intensive care ward — other babies were trucked in every day from private hospitals that did not care to maintain the expensive facilities, when they could chuck the sickest babies out to the nearest public hospital.
The state school I went to, in a middle class area, was disadvantaged in the senior years, by what we called ‘private school trash’– kids who had gone to state primary schools with us, and then been expelled from their private high schools, mostly for drug-dealing. They then brought their unpleasant proclivities to the state high school where they couldn’t be expelled.
Australia’s funding of elite private schools is a scandal and a disgrace. Parents who want ‘choice’ can have it, but they should not get any government funding at all.
Private schools are not charities they are businesses. As a parent I would certainly never settle for a school which saw my child in terms of his affect on their bottom line or because they were simply ‘paid to take’ him- no matter what challenges he presented.
I had a slightly different take on AN’s assertion that private religious schools are disposed to engage in charitable works, and that this would result in their catering for children with special needs.
Besides the fact that it ain’t happened yet, that is. ;-/
My beef is that children with special needs deserve education and it is an insult to your son to educate him through “charity”. He has the right to education funding and not to go through life seeing himself as a “charity case.”
Again, your analogies betray you Andrew – though they are apt.
What matter it if you have “private” surgery, when the only difference will be what day of the week the surgeon is working, whether his private day or his public day? When, indeed, you could very well be in the same hospital (as I was last year with my “private” surgery)?
However, it’s fitting because private schools – with the same curriculum and the same teachers, present a similar appeal; the only difference is the same on with private healthcare: No poor people, and no people with pre-existing conditions…
Market forces cater for the “popular” for want of a better word. Special needs and disadvantaged kids don’t come within those parameters ie there’s bugger-all profit in it. That’s why it’s left to public schools to educate these kids.
Emma – Unusual cases are sent to hospitals with the specialised staff and equipment to deal with them – that’s the practice in both public and private sectors. We have neither the people nor the resources to equip every hospital to deal with every possible contingency. In medicine as in many other fields, there are benefits to specialisation.
And the staff in the public sector presumably have the same basic motivations as those in the private sector. A desire to make money and do work they find rewarding more broadly. It’s mainly in public sector human services that students and patients are inconvenienced while staff walk off the job because they want more money.
Correct Andrew – that’s why public goods are so useful and deserve to be properly funded!
Free Tibet!!!
Kim, it’s a libertarian/Classical-Liberal think-tank, not a right-wing think tank.
Surely in an all-private school system, if the doomsday predictions of the soc-dems here are to be believed, and no school would take disadvantaged kids, there would spring up small boutique schools for them because if there are none able to be educated anywhere, there would be enough to open a school entirely for them?
Mmm, I thought a think-tank was by definition right-wing. All those thoughts swimming around in a confined space without any outside influence, fed a diet of pap and stale air. Not receptive to anything outside the tank.
“Mmm, I thought a think-tank was by definition right-wing. All those thoughts swimming around in a confined space without any outside influence, fed a diet of pap and stale air. Not receptive to anything outside the tank.”
I’m sure my left-wing think-tank colleagues at the Australia Institute, the Evatt Foundation and Per Capita will be very upset that their base doesn’t even know they exist!
And people defending a 19th century institutional system saying that other people are in a confined space without outside influence!
Yes, Stephen Lloyd, we don’t want the disabled mixing with normal kids, after all they might get ideas beyond their station. Call them
ghettoboutique schools and you’ll have parents flocking to them. It’s truly inspirational how the market can solve every problem.Just like Jesus really, without the moral obligation.
I just can’t understand how it’s possible to square rhetoric about choice with the fact that private schools have, and do exercise in many cases, the right to exclude children on the basis of ability. Let’s be honest, choice comes in well behind the values of competition and advantageous social positioning. Your right to choose a private school for your child is clearly constrained if that school’s prime motivation as a business is to ensure the quality of it’s “products” enhances its bottom line and your child is deemed not to have what it takes (the daughter of a friend was given her marching orders from an elite Sydney girls school with words to that effect). Personally I’m impressed by the Finnish approach – especially in light of their superior OECD Programm for International Student Assessment results – that requires private schools to accept students on the same basis as public schools do. Excellence with equity!
Andrew Norton says: “‘Accountability’ is exactly what is lacking in the public school system.” That is absolutely wrong, Andrew. The public system is intensively scrutinised, certainly internally with available public reports, but also often in the media and very selectively. Almost everything that a public school does is subject to Freedom of Information laws unless it ideantifies an individual. Conversely, private schools receive taxpayer funds with virtually no external government oversight except school developed reports on expenditure.
A part of what people are saying in this thread is that there are students (funded students) kicked out of private schools because they do not ‘add value’ to that schools cred. How accountable is that? Accountability in the private system? Don’t make me laugh!
#36 Kevin
For some years I was a year 12 moderator [quasi examiner] for a major state wideschool subject. At the end of each year all schools doing that subject sent in specified samples of the students work, the teaching plan etc. We scrutinised such to see how they met with published guidelines, set criteria, standards and so on.
In my first year I was tootling along nicely when I came across a school that had missed the boat terribly on ALL of the above, Standard operating procedure was to drop the grades of that school and have follow up. But a more experienced colleague suggested we have a word to the boss.
He looked at it and said “Oh, them again, there is nothing you can do, they do it every year and when we in the past said something the heavies came down on us.
You may as well skip looking, except for curiousity, at such and such a school and so and so while you’re at it, they are the same.”
Do I need to be more specific?
Next year it was the same. After that I didn’t bother, it was a farce, I did come in to help out a few times over the years. No change.
There were other examples of similar abuse of the system, it was endemic.
Course it wouldn’t be like that now.
Kevin – That’s information, not accountability. There is only accountability if information has consequences. Public schools generally can’t even choose their own staff, despite teacher quality being the single most important school-level variable affecting student academic outcomes.
Andrew – what is the accountability of private schools (in terms of consequences)? When has a private school of any ignificant size (aside from a Muslim school) been closed or had funding revoked for the sorts of practices that Hannah’s Dad describes above? Private schools have vehemently opposed value-added measures of performance in the past because they know that their value added is not good – all they do is pick the good kids and see what happens to them at the end. The less weel-equiped kids – that it takes genuine effective teaching to improve – get to sit exams as ‘private students’ or get sent to the public school down the road. I reiterate: Private schools take oodles of public money, and demonstrate no accountability for it.
Kevin – If parents don’t like the school, for academic or other reasons, they leave. If enough parents leave, the school goes broke. Markets are constant feedback mechanisms with strong incentives for acting on that feedback. Without overly prescriptive regulation, those incentives prompt action. This is why private schools are gaining market share, and government schools are losing market share, despite offering the same basic service at lower cost to parents. Public schools cannot respond adequately to what parents want. I’m sure many public school staff know what needs to be done, but they are not allowed to do it.
Changing schools is very different from changing your brand of toothpaste, Andrew. There are significant sunk costs involved in making a decision about a particular private school. There are problems with the whole “market share” analogy, not least of which is the fact that private schools try to attract such share (and compete with each other) more through marketing and puffery and appealing to emotions than the rational indicators of quality economists keep claiming would lead to some sort of pie in the sky educational utopia.
It’s also worth noting that the trend towards private secondary schools is not uniform across Australia. Too many of these debates contain unwarranted extrapolation from NSW and Victoria’s experience – and there are good reasons why the quality of public schools in those two states could be less than in, say, Queensland, where the private school “market share” is a lot lower.
Markets are constant feedback mechanisms with strong incentives for acting on that feedback. Without overly prescriptive regulation, those incentives prompt action. This is why private schools are gaining market share, and government schools are losing market share, despite offering the same basic service at lower cost to parents. Public schools cannot respond adequately …
Andrew, as I’m about to argue in my next blog post (or the one after that or the one after that…) this “exodus” is actually not a manifestation of choice but of an absence of choice.
I do not choose to jump into the pool if someone’s gradually pushing me in (and making the pool surrounds ever narrower).
i also take exception to
I don’t think the public school lobby is going to like the implications of what Gillard is suggesting. But it will be tricky for them to handle. ‘Equity’ is one of their cloaks of respectability…
Besides the speciousness of implying if you don’t like this one particular approach then you are against equity, you’re implying that advocates of public schools need a “cloak of respectability” – why, we’re all crack whores or something? We’re parents and teachers and interested community reps, just like the ones in Malvern only with less cash.
“Markets are constant feedback mechanisms with strong incentives for acting on that feedback” = Twaddle. This is an ideological statement that is divorced from evidence. At least one reason why there is a drift to private education is because governments has fostered it for political and cost-shifting reasons. Also, the true cost of education is very, very much higher (ie up to ten times higher) for ‘bad’ students (disabled, remote, difficult, etc). This effective subsidising of ‘good’ kids by giving kids approximately the same as the ‘bad’ kids (lets not argue relativities – the total funding to govt schools is about the same as funding to non-govs) means that public schools have to carry a lot higher burden than private schools with -effectively – less resources. Despite what you say, Andrew, parent surveys in government schools show comprehensively that these schools do ‘respond adequately to what preants want’ – even with a smaller resource base
Free market ideology is akin to a religion, with as much factual and rational basis. Yet its adherants believe in it with the same zeal as religious fundamentalists, claiming it as the solution to all our ills.
A pity real life isn’t so simple.
Mark – The survey research suggests that far more parents would send their kids to private schools if money was no object, so the lower rates of private school attendance in Qld (31.4% in 2007, national average 33.6%) probably largely reflect its history as a relatively poor state. The highest rate of private school attendance, 41%, is in middle-class Canberra, even though as I understand it the public schools don’t do too badly academically. But parents have the money to go private, so they do.
I don’t buy the Clive Hamiltonesque line that parents are just dupes of advertising. Nor are purely academic considerations driving the move. Schooling is an experience good, and if people’s kids were coming home and saying their public school was fine and they were clearly progressing well their folks would not be spending large sums to send them to private schools. I’m sure you’ve read the regular agonised op-eds in the Fairfax papers of lefty parents agonising over the move, before finally deciding that their kids are more important than ideology. Are they dupes too?
I’m much more inclined to believe people who have kids at school are on average making the right call, all things considered, than people who think they can made decisions for other people’s kids.
Andrew,
You don’t enrol your child at any private school, you apply for a place with no guarantee of receiving one. You front up with your child for an interview, most often with the principal, with your child’s reports in hand. Your child maybe also be interviewed by the principal/deputy/teacher(s) alone, and be tested. References from your church, or sporting organisations are also expected.
Many have non-refundable deposits of thousands of dollars.
There is no government oversight of enrolments compared to applications received, in respect of anti-bias, disabilities etc. Private schools select their ‘clients’ with one eye on maintaining TER percentages, and the other on parental wallets.
And even though there are highly publicised waiting lists at the most exclusive private schools, a generous donation to the building fund will ensure entry, no matter how late your application, and indeed no matter how dull your child. The duller, the bigger the donation expected.
The fact that the actual service provided to those, who can afford the fees and whose children ‘measure up’ to whatever arbitrary entry criteria each private provider solely determines, may be a ‘good enough’ service or indeed – a ‘very good service’, does not change the fact, that the private school sector is wholly incompatible with all notions of equal access, anti-bias and social inclusion etc.
We have systematically entrenched an elitist, exclusive and non-transparent school sector, but far worse – at the expense of the overwhelming vast majority of children in this country. Nothing could be more in tune with neo-liberal thinking.
In respect of the Rudd/Gillard approach in terms of a new funding model for public schools, I will have to look at the detail and impact further before making any comment.
Jo – Some private schools – the private schools the public school lobby endlessly obsess over – are like that. But they aren’t the schools driving the shift from public to private. They keep their numbers down to maintain exclusivity rather than expand to meet demand. It is the low prestige private schools, the schools hardly anybody has heard of unless they went there or live nearby, that are causing the shift.
I’d be quite happy to take those top schools out of the public funding system, because they would survive fine without it (as they did prior to state aid) and it would allow the debate to focus on the real issue of ordinary parents getting more control over their kids’ education.
Yes, actually. Ideology Over Kids works both ways.
Purely indicentally, the Age letters section is a pretty hilarious/irritating read, on balance. Especially Sunday, when the paper turns into the Herald Sun.
Mark – The survey research suggests that far more parents would send their kids to private schools if money was no object,…
Again, would they be thinking that if the public system had been properly maintained and not allowed to run down for ideological reasons by the previous government and the equally reprehensible State governments? That’s the part of my pool analogy to do with slowly removing the perimet
Ideology that was fostered for years by the right wing think tanks.
The ACT public education system is well funded (helped I suspect by quite a few parental donations as well), achieves very good results and has a very high year 12 completion rate. And yet in high school the percentage of students attending public schools is around 50%. There’s more to this than just funding or even results.
Andrew, you criticised the “public school lobby” as if it would run a staid and predictable line. Actually I note that Gillard’s proposal has been given a cautious welcome by the dreaded teachers’ unions and the “public school lobby”, and that they’re at one with me in believing that designing a genuine SES system would require addressing private school funding post 2012 – something that’s very clearly on the mind of the bureaucrats in the department, and something you would expect Julia to want to do anyway.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23386704-2702,00.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/17/2190970.htm?section=australia
There are a lot of similar stories you can find via a google news search.
I suspect two things are true about the position usually put by the liberals in this debate:
(1) A lack of acquaintance with the facts involving school choice as opposed to abstract economic decision making models. Note that many private school associations have opposed “league tables” and all the other paraphernalia beloved of those advocating market like choices. And I don’t know that it’s necessary to argue that parents are “duped” to make the obvious point that private schools wouldn’t be spending so much money on marketing, if they didn’t believe it was effective. Check out the websites of these two prominent second tier SEQ private schools and pay attention to the messages they are actually sending. In particular you might like to cast an eye over the glossy brochure (”prospectus”) JPC uses to induce people to want to go through the lengthy application process Jo was talking about:
http://www.jpc.qld.edu.au/#
http://www.sthildas.qld.edu.au/
(2) A lot of statements are made as assertion without evidence being cited. Where is the breakdown of how much of the “market share” goes to “low fee” schools?
Emma [23] and Jane [26] and Hannah’s Dad [37]:
Thank you ever so much for putting your touches of reality into this discussion.
Stephen Lloyd [31]:
Small boutique schools sound like an attractive alternative – but before we go down that path, let’s take a hard dispassionate look at all the implications – not just for disabled or disadvantaged students but for the community at large. My own bias is that the Hungarians were on the right track when they tried to integrate almost all but the most profoundly disabled children into their school system – does anyone have any first-hand experience of that system or similar systems outside the usual Big Four English-speaking countries?
Everyone:
Super Hornets, doctor shortage, “private” school system – yep, this surely is the Clever[??] Country.
Andrew, all the private schools in my area conduct parent/student interviews on application, including all the low fee catholic systemic schools, not just the GPS or independent schools.
They are also ALL expanding, building new wings and/or buying new campuses.
However, the main point I was making, is that there is no Govt oversight between applications lodged and enrolments, therefore, there is no transparency across the entire sector.
And indeed, there is pro-bias, i.e. systemic discrimination in terms of religion/cult allegiance, even before other discretionary discrimination is applied, in terms of aptitude, ability, fee access etc.
This isn’t exactly a state secret. It is what the private school sector dog whistles incessantly to inseucre parents “we choose who comes into our schools, and the manner in which they come”. (“we also summarily expel any duds, who have slipped through the gates accidentally”.)
Whatever happens after, does not change the fact, that private school’s enrolment processes are based on exclusivity, discrimination and elitism, even if this is practiced between two working classes kids from the same street in an outer suburb, with both sets of parents keen to avoid the local public comprehensive.
And why do they want to avoid the local comprehensive? Retention rates rose across the nation rose dramatically from 30% to 70% during the Hawke-Keating Govt. As I’ve pointed out before, I believe this is the period and post, where State & Federal Governments needed to massively invest in public comprehensives to meet the educational needs of mostly working class boys & girls whose jobs/roles/apprenticeships had evaporated with globalisation, and/or moved to service industries, and who were now encouraged to complete high school. Employers both public & private, and TAFE etc moved quickly during this period to adopt Year 12 qualifications for positions and/or study that had previously only required Year 10 graduation.
For the most part, however, public high schools were left alone to deal with this huge injection of physically mature young men and women into a system designed around university entrance, and not high quality vocational education. Howard turned up, gave the private school sector the green light, and ran down TAFE as an encore.
This policy failure is only now being addressed with a new emphasis on trade schools and TAFE. Howard’s 30 new trade schools policy in 2004, was a pathetic response after years of neglect. And the fact that there has been consequently huge shortages of qualified tradespeople across the nation, which required migration to fill job vacancies, just adds insult to injury.
“Today, (7/3/08) the Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, has written to all Australian secondary school principals encouraging them to apply for funding under the Rudd Government’s new $2.5 billion Trade Training Centres in Schools Program”.
The program however is only $2.5 billion over 10 years – it should have been $2.5 billion over 3 years at least. And haven’t seen any funding for TAFE announcements yet.
Mark – On the Sunday program yesterday morning Gillard ruled out reducing subsidies for schools in affluent areas, so effectively she is not suggesting, as I thought perhaps she might be, introducing the SES model but saying that funding increases should go primarily to schools with poor parents. So it is now a relatively uncontroversial ‘no losers’ policy.
I have never argued for league tables – though parents should draw their own conclusions about schools that do not release relevant performance information.
I don’t have access to data on fee levels, but MCEETYA does publish figures on subsidy levels. On the SES model, schools with high subsidies serve the poorer communities. Between 2001 when the SES model started and 2006 schools receiving high subsidies, between 65% and the maximum 70% of the government rate, increased from 105 to 134, and total enrolments increased 56%. At the other end, schools receiving 20% or less of the government rate increased from 16 to 17, and total enrolments increased 15%. So growth is strongest at the cheap end of the market.
To what degree are those figures affected by the well known distortion in the SES model, though?
Btw, on the drift to public schools in Queensland:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22422393-3102,00.html
jo @ 53:
Actually the whole comment was spot on, jo.
I attended a private boarding school in the 1950s set up for farmers’ kids and the kids of Lutheran missionaries in PNG. These days it has expanded hugely, moved up market and you have to sit an entrance exam. Like many private schools it has added a larger primary section, even a preschool, so that it can attract the “right” kids early on. There was no secondary education where I grew up. There is now, and part of the strength of the Qld state system is its coverage of provincial areas.
My two eldest attended a largish inner city state high school.
We looked at about 10 schools for my youngest, before selecting a down market Catholic school. It was always going to be the case of selecting the right school for the boy and there was no agonising. My preference would have been a particular state high school which was the other side of town and about 5k beyond reach.
I still wonder, because the teaching turned out to be weak in the areas where the kid was strong. He did well and was academic dux, but wasn’t inspired. The state school we didn’t choose was very strong in those areas.
The school we chose had a policy of taking in special needs kids to a limit of 10% enrolments. It’s the only example, anywhere, that I’ve heard of a private school being positively interested in special needs kids. But the school has now changed policy, I understand, and is tilting towards a niche academic school while maintaining its trade tradition.
Andrew N, I can tell you specifically with this school the parents had no say when it changed direction when the management changed. Of course there was parent consultation and surveys etc but the changes were driven by one person. Of course there were fellow travellers and chancers as well. I don’t believe the Board had any impact either.
The school was ostensibly inclusive but we nevertheless had to attend an interview and show our wares.
As a parent they had one rule which was frankly a comfort. They had a zero tolerance policy on drugs. One strike and you were out. No sob stories or grovelling made the slightest bit of difference. I think this policy, common in private schools, along with the ability to shed ‘bad elements’ has more to do with private school choice than parents would ever admit in a survey.
I may return tomorrow night to tell Andrew about competition between government schools and how they play the PR game to attract students, and with extra students comes extra resources, eg deputy principals, full-time groundmen, teacher-librarians etc.
No-one gets promoted if the school has closed or run down because the parents have taken their kids to the school down the road, as they’ve always been entitled to do in Qld.
Also parents are not shy about going over a principal’s head if they are not getting satisfaction. If this happens in droves there can be consequences.
Everyone:
The “private” school system has held Australia back for far too long. It has stifled too much talent and advanced too many dunderheads – just look at the appallingly low quality of Australia’s corporate and public decision-makers, the majority of whom came out of the “private” school system.
We live in a highly competitive world – we cannot afford to keep propping up a failed system that continues to hinder our ability to keep our heads above water.
Let’s not stuff around. There is only one way to fund the “private” school system. DON’T!!! It is stupid to continue throwing good money after bad. Abolish the “private’ school system altogether.
Apparently being the PM also gets you in pretty fast too
If the private school system is so bad and is ruining the education of rich kids – whats your problem with it? Doesn’t that make it easier for students who attend the public schools to get into uni?
Kim – The ‘distortions’ of the SES model would not affect the low fee schools I don’t think – no elite school is getting 65% of the government rate.
I’m not sure that this is a drift to public schools in Qld; both sectors are showing strong growth rates, with the ABS Schools 2007 report saying that a new pre-Year 1 grade is affecting the results. We’d need to pull all those students out of both sets of numbers to get figures comparable with earlier years.
Brian – A 2004 survey of government school parents found discipline was the number one reason (31%) for switching to private schools. Better education was second (25%).
As a parent they had one rule which was frankly a comfort. They had a zero tolerance policy on drugs. One strike and you were out. No sob stories or grovelling made the slightest bit of difference. I think this policy, common in private schools, along with the ability to shed ‘bad elements’ has more to do with private school choice than parents would ever admit in a survey.
Usually everything you say is spot on Brian, but I’m certainly surprised at this one! In Melbourne when I was in the music industry in the 80s, the elite private schools were churning out drug-addicted youngsters at a great rate. And I mean the elite schools. When you think about it, the kids had more money to get their hands on the wrong things.
It may be different in Brissy.
Helen, my information is subjective. I’ll try to check it out with other people’s subjective knowledge who may have a wider experiential base.
Andrew, I suspect the better education factor is false. Smarter kids, in terms of academic performance as measured by schools (doesn’t equate to better life skills, problem solving ability in real world situations etc) maybe. Yes, also better facilities and the opportunity to form networks with rich kids.
Discipline reason is also false, I suspect. If you want to produce elitist authoritarian types with doubtful ethics, maybe.
Are the parents duped by the PR? Little doubt about that one. They are being sold a pup.
I think there is a large measure of emotion in parents’ ‘reasoning’. Why else would parents who are generally sensible continue to pay humungous fees when their offspring was mercilessly bullied from the time he got there to the time he emerged five years later? They must have known what was going on.
I find middle-class institutional religion inflicted with hypocrisy as a core feature. It becomes part of the hidden curriculum.
Gotta go now. Seeya tonight.
Chris [a differentone][60]:
That’s the core of the problem …. it doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder for the talented – from any school – to get ahead.
Everyone:
Abolishing the “private” school system would not mean an end to religious instruction and observance in schools at all. In fact, abolishing the “private’ schools would strengthen the case for making such sessions compulsory – catechism and the rosary for the Catholics, Bible study and prayer for the Protestants, ethics for the atheists and agnostics, readings of al-Quran for Moslems, etc, etc.
The overwhelming need to abolish ALL public and indirect public funding [though well-concocted rorts and schemes] of the “private” school system can be understood by an analogy of the Australian “private” school system with the car industry of the ’50s and ’60s: Both produced products that were flash, luxurious, impressive as displays of conspicuous consumption, devoured extraordinary amounts of resources, readily fell apart when the going got rough, had serious inbuilt defects, needed to be replaced every few years but hung around on second-hand dealers’ lots for ages ready to to trap the next user …. and eventually …. were made obsolete by cheaper, more robust, more adaptable, better designed, longer lasting, more efficient imports with far fewer defects and far superior after-sales service.
Don’t like the analogy? Bad luck.
On private schools, two things:
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- In debating whether it’s a rational decision based on research into quality education or simply being sucked in by advertising one shouldn’t forget the fact that many private schools students are the children of private school alumni. There is an ethos that private schools are better because they are, because they produce inherently better people. Private schools do drum this in either implicitly and/or explicitly. And even in the case where parents are not private school alumni there’s still this idea that they’re better. It’s symbolic of status rather than objective criteria re quality.
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- The idea that private schools reject the disabled or expel ‘problem’ kids probably has some basis but runs contrary to my experience. My brother who went on a run of delinquency following my parents’ divorce was taken in by a fairly posh Catholic boarding school. The teachers there gave him special attention and helped him turn around.
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Just sayin’
Gillard and Co may be thinking of introducing some sort of decile funding like the Kiwi scheme.
Graham Bell – Love the analogy!! The extension is that we need a ‘national plan’ for education to fix the problems (which I agree with).
Aidan – I agree with the idea of ‘decile funding’, but as I have said in a previous post, the relative costs of educating a student from the bottom decile in a manner that will provide substantial improvement in outcomes relative to those students in the top decile is about ten times the cost. Students in the bottom decile can be up to seven years behind their peers at Year 7 (called the seven year gap in the UK). Addressing this as an issue is critical. If decile funding can deliver this sort of range of funding, then great.
Currently, and almost since the demise of the Whitlam government in the 70’s, we have given up on equitable educational outcomes, which is why we have one of the widest ranges of achievement in the world!
Graham Bell wrote:
If I wanted bad car analogies, I’d stick to slashdot (bit of a running joke over there). Just sayin’.
I think the main difference between private and public schools was the private school students had much better quality drugs. That being said, at least where I was, the two things that would be most likely to get you expelled were violence and drug use (even cigarettes and alcohol). In contrast, struggling academically usually ended up getting you extra or separate lessons (eg remedial english instead of latin).
Most of the students I know who were expelled ended up going to other private schools rather than into the public system.
Brian if this is true, then isn’t the way to solve this problem getting the appropriate information to parents so they can make an informed decision?
In my experience, religious based schools excel at producing the most devout atheists. Having science or maths classes followed by religious education demonstrates quite a strong contrast in thought processes required.
Don’t know about that. The kids I hung ’round in high school were private schoolies and much much wilder than the state high school kids I went to school with. There wasn’t a major discrepency in income between the two groups btw.
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There is a lot of cultural generalisation vis a vis state and private schools. There are ‘poor’ private schools and ‘rich’ state schools.
Agree with you there and presumably thats one of the major points behind Gillard’s proposal.
True. I don’t consider myself an aetheist, more an Einsteinian pantheist if that makes any sense. But I was a devout little Altar Boy once. And then I boarded at St Josephs, found a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the library and saw the light!
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Hallelujah!
Helen, it’s not the 80s anymore. Private schools these days are extremely intolerant of drugs. It’s instant suspension for use, and instant expulsion with the cops called in for dealing.
This is due to parental pressure, which is a tad hypocritical, because these same parents were not above a bit (or a lot) of recreational use themselves in their salad days, but there you have it.
Adrien [71]:
Indeed there are.
Abolishing the “private” school system would free up sufficient resources to reduce the unnecessarily wide gaps without imposing sameness, blandness and torpor across all of education..
Differences between one school and another are not only inevitable but necessary too – but, for a change, let’s have differences based on worthwhile criteria [such as merit or perseverance] instead the present inefficient system of differences based on, say, money or tribalism or locality.
Helen, I decided that the best thing to do was to ask the boy (well, no longer a boy) and I’m not surprised at his answer.
He said that heaps of kids at his school used drugs at parties and stuff, but only a couple were ever expelled. Some of the teachers would have known what was going on but they don’t always dob and they need very specific evidence if they do.
I knew that the school couldn’t eliminate smoking in the toilets, so I asked whether any kids used drugs at school. Only a few, he said.
So it seems that you only get expelled if you are stupid enough to get caught.
If anyone reading this thread has not read the recent one put up by tigtog they would do well to have a look. The number of people speaking well of their state school education was a little suprising and very heartening.
But Chris, I’m not sure who would get what information to which people that would make any difference. Here schools usually have an open day where they display their wares to prospective students and/or their parents. I was highly impressed with a couple I went to.
Everyone:
There are a great many excellent individual teachers in the “private” school system. These teachers are far too valuable to be demoralized and antagonized by ineptness and poor planning in the abolition of the “private” school system. They must be no worse off – and preferably, a lot better off – in a new nationwide school system.
If this means spending hundreds of millions of dollars to keep former “private” system teachers directly affected by the reform happy then so be it; it would be a very cheap price to pay for retaining some of the best teachers in the world.
Planning an effective and just method of protecting the careers of these excellent teachers should take no longer than a week.
Once that is done – and means found to keep existing libraries, laboratories and physical training facilities intact for immediate re-use – then abolish ALL funding for the “private” school system. Good-bye and good riddance!