Another Gonski deadline ….

We still have five hold-outs, two of them (WA and Queensland) seriously stroppy, and the probable next federal government saying (in its third policy iteration) that unless every system signs up it will stick with the old funding scheme for the short term at least.

In sum, what was proposed as a serious national assault on educational poverty has been turned into a familiar brawl among nine governments and three sectors over who gets how much of the pie.

Will it happen?

Even in the event of a Rudd miracle, and in the event of all states and sectors getting on board, and even in its now-attenuated form, Gonski will face serious obstacles. By 2016, when the real money is proposed to flow, budgets may be even tighter than they now are. If so, ways will be found to re-schedule, to trim, and to steal from Peter to pay Paul.

A Coalition government would go further. Tony Abbott has several times claimed that the present system is 'not broken', Gonski's scathing evaluation of it notwithstanding. Abbott shares with his entire party room a belief in making 'choice' more 'widely available' through subsidies to non-government schools rather then leveling up the playing field. That will have to be balanced against widespread public support for Gonski, and endorsement of it by one or more conservative state governments.

If all states do sign up an Abbott government will have two years before real money is required in which to nip and tuck, duck and weave. If one or two states do hold out (as Abbott is urging them to do), the political task will be so much the easier.

Will/would it make any difference?

Yes, no, maybe, and no again. Yes, it would cheer up the schools doing the hardest yards and the government sector generally, for a while anyway. More importantly it would reinforce two important principles: that all schools, and not just the govvies, serve common and public purposes; and that public effort should be deployed to reduce the impact on kids of huge differences in what their families can do for them.

No, it would not make much if any difference to the steady flow of 'aspirational' families into schools catering to families just like them. Any Gonski money will/would be nowhere near enough to change massive differences in schools' social, political, cultural and educational capital, the last of these provided mainly by students, to each other.

Maybe 'Gonski', taken together with other recent developments including more and more public information about schools' performance, and pressure on performance (from the OECD's international comparisons particularly), will see at least some improvement in some curriculum areas, among some groups of students and schools.

No, it will not get Australia into the top five by '25, not least because other systems will improve more quickly than ours can.

Should it be supported?