Just in time for school holidays!
Following on from this recent discussion about effective spending investment in education, the CEO of the Australian College of Educators, Margaret Clark, has published a dissection of recent claims:
http://www.apo.org.au/commentary/jensens-class-size-claims-need-be-unpacked
Policy boffins, and those who would like to know more than the superficial treatment these issues get in the papers, are encouraged to take a look.
Readers may recall that this recent report from The Grattan Institute bemoaned the fact that, for all the extra money poured into education over the last decade or so, Australia’s performance had little improved (that would be because we were already at or near the top, and always had been). On this point, Clark makes a useful observation (emphasis added)…
It is also worth noting that a significant amount of increased spending per student, over the last decade, is associated with increases in commonwealth funding for non government schools…
Strangely, that point didn’t get an airing in the media coverage of these issues — the subtext was allowed to run, unchallenged, that it was public schools which were increasing in cost for only a little extra performance…
I always thought that Melbourne Faculty of Education commissioned Jensen and the Grattan Institute to promote Melbourne teaching graduates.
The report was published as Victorian schools were holding interviews to select their 2011 staff.
Melbourne runs the Teach For Australia program where university graduates complete 6 weeks education theory before teaching in schools for 2 years earning $40,000 instead of $58,000. Victorian TAFE teachers have been trained under a program with similar amounts of theory for decades [by a Melbourne University affiliate]
Perhaps Jensen was also supporting the current practice of teaching profoundly disabled kids in a mainstream class. EG Victorian School for the Blind closed and blind kids go to normal schools with limited access to Braille classes – leaving the kids functionally illiterate. The parents of blind students have set up a private school for blind kids
” It is also worth noting that a significant amount of increased spending per student, over the last decade, is associated with increases in commonwealth funding for non government schools…”
The Productivity Review of Government Services has govt school per student spending increasing 6.5% in real terms between 2003-04 and 2007-08 and no real change for non-government schools.
I’m not quite sure why, as private schools are funded as a % of the government school rate, so they should move together.
Other things being equal, a shift to private schools should reduce average government spending per student as the maximum amount for a student at a private school is 70% of the government school rate.
Nice article, though at various points there were typos or misplaced words that detracted from her argument.
As a teacher I thing we should certainly highlight this aspect of teacher quality improvement – “Evaluate and provide feedback to develop teachers once they enter the profession and are working in our schools”. Doing this right, particular in the critical first five years of teaching would both improve teaching quality, I believe, and reduce the drop-out rate of new teachers.
Andrew,
As noted before on similar threads, all things in education are never equal and those leaving the government schools for non-government are usually the most advantaged students already, and so the teaching job at government schools gets harder. So it might be cheaper, but our overall outcomes will probably be worse, at least in terms of across the board equity issues.