In defence of public funding of public schools
David Zyngier
By David Zyngier
The current debate about government funding to private schools is misdirected. The issue is (or should be) not at what level should private schools be funded, but whether they are entitled to any funding at all.
Unlike other countries in the OECD, Australia is almost alone in the way we have transferred responsibility for education from the public to the private sector and, according to the former Director of Education for the OECD, the system does little to address inherited inequality.
It is not just that this system is socially unjust; in a globally competitive world it is both stupid and disastrous. OECD results indicate that the top performing countries (Finland, Ireland and Canada) have inclusive and comprehensive education systems where public, private and faith based schools are complementary and not competitive.
The major economic reforms of recent governments in Australia, whether Labor or Liberal, pushed for a reduction in government responsibility, including in school education. This continues today with the calls for increased public-private partnerships and corporate support of public schooling. Their effects on education are profound. Marketisation led to the reorganisation of schools around market principles and the philosophy of user pays. Privatisation has seen increasing levels of public funding shift to private providers—public funding of private effort—the free market goal of ensuring diversity and choice.
Many schools have started to lose their middle-class families and accumulate the cultural and social deficits created by this loss, making it even more difficult to cater for all students. The result is that schools in poorer areas have become residualised.
If competition drove school reform then the winners were schools serving wealthy suburbs. Reforms have led to low SES schools being drained of the most capable students and higher concentrations of students from the most disadvantaged communities.
The policy of marketisation has only encouraged competition between private and higher-status public schools, polarising and further stratifying the level of schooling. This policy is governed by principles of social and academic segregation both between public and private and between high- and low-status Catholic schools. Funding policies and free market principles further reinforce the effects of social geography, resulting in the intensification of parental school choice.
Selective, discriminating and high-status secondary schools also provide an important bridge into the most prestigious and lucrative tracks in higher education through institutional reliance on Year 12 scores as basis for ranked assessment. Such performance is closely related to socio-economic status.
It is not a mystery that schools which have students from “below average income populations” are also reluctant to advertise “below average” academic results. However, as these same policies work to concentrate disadvantage and advantage, schools in disadvantaged areas have to deal with an increase in social problems above those in middle class neighbourhoods – if public schools actually exist there. Schools that can choose students can also choose to rid themselves of problem students.
This segregation is then delivering a serious and growing social division between schools and between communities. This drift (flood) away from public schools has been termed white flight, or the flight of social capital, and may have devastating effects on education outcomes, bridging social capital and social cohesion. In some disadvantaged communities we can witness the daily exodus or migration of busloads of students who bypass the local public school for a more prestigious and distant private college.
It has been argued that choice and competition provide the opportunity for higher levels of parent satisfaction with schooling, better academic achievement, the reinvigoration of government schools. But the reality is that the policies of the past—that continue with the election of the Rudd/Gillard Labor government—are creating one school system for the rich and another for the poor. It is a situation that leaves those who are unable to scramble for what they see as the best remaining schools in an under-funded public system that is moving from comprehensiveness to segregation.
The Gonski Review is a once in a generation opportunity to address these issues. If it does not, the real risk is that Australia will continue to have an entrenched discriminatory system that works very well for some families, but fails too many others. A system that will ultimately affect young people’s lives and their future opportunities.
Dr David Zyngier is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University.