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Academic apartheid

By Peter West - posted Thursday, 5 August 2010


Prime Minister Julia Gillard has told us she expects great progress in the next few years. Let’s see how Australia will be “moving forward” in education in the next 20 years or so.

Federal government aid for private schools began in Australia in 1963 and has increased steadily since then. More aid was promised by the Whitlam government but only on a “needs” basis. Now aid flows to all private schools, whether they need it or not.

There are many ways in which private schools are assisted. In New South Wales assistance with funding travel to the school of choice has been just one way in which parents have been assisted with their choice of schools. But generally speaking, parents have more choice if they have the money to pay for it. And governments assist them.

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As a consequence, we have lost the 19th century idea that there was a local parish school which took in the Catholic kids, while a state school took most of the rest. We now have a stratified system of schools. I am talking substantially at the secondary level.

The first group comprises elite private schools, established for the most part many years ago by churches and supplemented by more recent offerings.

The second group contains a range of religious schools: these include Catholic systemic schools. These days this group also contains a vast range of Islamic, Jewish, Greek Orthodox and other schools.

The third group contains various specialised schools: music, art and drama schools.

The fourth group is selective government schools.

And finally we have comprehensive schools.

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Thus we have a system in which where you go is determined by how much you can pay, and how far you can get the system to select you out for special needs. At the top end, there are elements of selectivity and choice. At the other end, comprehensive state high schools have become schools of last resort. By 2030 we will have more of the same. For most schools, it will be a pattern of private affluence and public squalor. And instead of attacking privilege, Federal Labor governments have entrenched it.

The merits of selective schools have been debated, but Damon Clark’s UK research (PDF 460KB) shows substantial long-term effects for students, including better entry to university and higher lifetime labour market earnings. Selective schooling in New South Wales has increased significantly since the small offerings that were once provided at schools like Sydney Boys High School. There are now many schools in city and country centres, as well as schools which have a selective stream.

Chris Bonnor, a former principal, says: “Schools which can do so are hunting out bright kids through tests, scholarships and interviews with parents and avoiding kids with learning difficulties.

“There is also a worsening social class division with low-income children increasingly going to public schools and the richer kids going to private and selective schools.”

Professor Richard Teese of the University of Melbourne adds that selective schools concentrate the talent, while draining it away from comprehensive schools.

At the other end of the pecking order, state high schools have large numbers of students with special needs. A NSW parliamentary inquiry heard that 10 per cent of students in NSW state schools are disabled or have special learning needs. These kids make the teachers’ task more difficult, as his or her attention has to be split between the “special” child and the rest of the class.

Paradoxically, many independent schools seem to have inordinate numbers of students with special needs when it comes to sitting the Higher School Certificate exams, sometimes up to 30 per cent of their students. This gives those students special advantages in terms of longer reading times in the exam, and so on.

To compound their disadvantages, state schools are burdened by an inefficient and wasteful bureaucracy. The New South Wales Department of Education and Training was set up in 1880 as the Department of Public Instruction. It took care of the needs of a far smaller number of teachers and schools than exist today. Today’s department wastes principals’ time and energy. One principal told me that the department sent out 67 emails to schools during the two-week school break. There are endless reminders, mostly about things peripheral to kids’ learning: correct ways of referring to Indigenous students; new classifications of disadvantaged schools; management of Federal funding applications; and the latest forms of politically correct education. In one outstanding example, State Departments for many years refused public calls from parent bodies to assist boys in such areas as body image, depression and suicide, despite promoting programs to assist girls.

The state education bureaucracies fulfil some useful functions, but they do not make for the efficient running of schools. That is plain enough from the continuing saga of waste and mismanagement in the Building the Education Revolution program. My colleagues in Catholic education say that they have been able to get good outcomes and useful buildings from that program. But, they say, their colleagues in state schools have had enormous delays and continuing frustration.

States with smaller populations seem to have more efficient and smaller education departments than the large, unresponsive bureaucracies in states like Queensland and New South Wales. I support the coalition’s plan to get more value from the BER by letting schools manage their own funds.

The trend is clear. Some schools are, indeed, moving forward and getting better buildings and facilities. These are mainly the private schools and the selective schools. At the other end, comprehensive schools are already lumbered with many kinds of disadvantaged students. These problems increase when one reflects that these students will be harder to teach. Consequently, abler teachers will be attracted to the more fortunate schools, with their more compliant children.

Along with this, the comprehensive schools which need top facilities to cope with disadvantaged students are instead getting substandard facilities, as we saw from the results of the BER debacle. Remember that wealthier kids already have advantages like access to the Internet, a key difference which increases privilege. Wealthier families eat better and have better health outcomes. Put all this together, and in another 20 years we will see Australian education polarised into rich and poor, just as it is in the USA. Or, as one observer called it, academic apartheid.

Race complicates the process. The Sydney Morning Herald recently produced reports that showed it all too clearly. Selective schools are now mainly made up from students from non-English speaking backgrounds. I have heard reports that selective schools in northwest Sydney have an intake which is 95 per cent Asian, mainly Chinese and Indian. I have heard anecdotal evidence of a girl refusing to go to NSW’s top performing school, James Ruse High School, because she would be virtually the only non-Asian student in Year 7. However, Nicholas Biddle’s analysis of My School information found that selective schools have virtually no Indigenous students.

At the other end of the scale, in the decaying schools in outlying Melbourne and southwest Sydney, we have poorer kids from Anglo-Australian and Indigenous families, mixed in with poorer Africans and children of other recent immigrants. It doesn’t help that discussion of race in Australia resembles that which occurs in the USA. Nobody dares to speak for fear of being accused of racism. But race will become an issue, and when it does it will be a powerful one.

Is there a better way of moving forward? Perhaps three things might help:

First, give more power to principals to hire and fire the teachers they need and build and repair their own buildings.

Second, set up smaller units for the management of education. The Catholic education systems are models of good management, compared with their fossilised state counterparts, which are dedicated to the average, while stamping on innovation.

Third, we have to learn a lesson from many Asians. Society must work harder to educate parents, and teach them that dads who read to kids and mums who help with homework do more for their kids than any school can ever do.

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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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