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Priorities in education

By Jack Keating - posted Friday, 8 February 2008


Some unique features of these systems are their high degree of autonomy and associated closed or fenced cultures, separate and different public funding systems, and competitive relationships. These are all supply side features that are not matched with demand side attitudes, as various surveys show that parents differentiate school mostly upon their perception of what is a good and not so good school. However, the supply side governance and financial arrangements and the associated policy cultures have the effect of restricting school education policy in Australia.

All state Labor Governments have stated or de facto policies of winning back market share, especially in secondary education where the enrolment losses have been greatest. Government schools have been losing middle-class students who tend to have stronger educational outcomes to the non-government sectors, thus threatening to residualise the government sectors.

A curiosity of Australian schooling is that its supply side Balkanisation contrasts with a susceptibility to liberal ideologies of self governance and competition between schools. The sectoral isolation and different governance, accountability and financing arrangements have resulted in an unequal distribution of market power between the sectors, especially in a context of rising middle class affluence. As a consequence the government sectors, that have the poorest market deal, have attempted to deliver market power internally.

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The means of achieving this invariably is to allow the government systems to become more internally selective. To an extent this strategy has been successful as most states have a number of government schools that can compete with the highest performing private schools in scholastic outcomes. However, the cost is to internally concentrate educational disadvantage and under achievement, an outcome that sits uncomfortably with traditional Labor values.

At the same time, the broad social drift of better off students from the government to the non-government sectors and poorer students from the non-government sectors to the government sectors has continued. This drift on top of the increase in selective practices has produced a high concentration of poor students in schools with declining enrolments and weak scholastic outcomes, mostly in Labor electorates.

The issues also go beyond the government school sector. The New South Wales and Victorian Catholic Education Commissions have both published studies that reiterate the historical role of the Catholic system in educating the “poor” and that express a concern that they may not now be doing this.

A further symptom of the policy restriction is the susceptibility of schooling in Australia to solutions to educational under performance that dismiss system effects. The argument that educational outcomes are mostly determined by the quality of the teachers now resonates in policies of most school systems and the main political parties - including the Labor’s Education Revolution. This argument allows an ignoring of the impact of selection within schooling and the impact of other school factors that will typically occur under situations of falling enrolments and market duress.

The teacher argument has substance both intuitively and in its research base. However, there are other factors that have an impact and they include students’ social background, the mix of students in a classroom and overall school effects. Efforts to improve the quality of teaching should be applauded. However, they should not be part of an ideology that ignores the distribution of good teachers, the mixes of students, the resources they get, and the conditions under which good teaching can take place.

There is a good case for a Labor government to deliver an educational revolution. The human capital imperative will get its best returns in the Labor heartlands. There are areas in most of the states and territories where school completion rates are barely 50 per cent, and there are many schools where the situation is far worse. Poverty in Australia is highly concentrated in families of school-age children. The marginal returns to investments should be highest in these areas and among these families.

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However, this revolution needs to confront dominant policy frames that on the one hand are influenced by a cultural of sectoral closure and competitiveness and on the other by the associated ideologies of what influences educational outcomes. For the Rudd Government to reiterate these ideologies and ignore the impact of the sectoral stand offs would be a significant disappointment and missed opportunity.

The core historical reason for the sectoral fragmentation is the weaknesses of the unique settlement in Australia of what constitutes public schooling. It has been established as an institutional rather than educational or cultural form, and this has been reinforced through the unresolved conflicts over public and private education of the last half century.

There have been several attempts by individuals and organisations to articulate a new concept of public schooling in Australia that locate public education in what is delivered to students rather than the institutional form of schooling. All have faced major obstacles of institutional and cultural rigidity, and a certain degree of supply side self interest.

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About the Author

Jack Keating is a professorial fellow in education at the University of Melbourne.

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