Academic apartheid

“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.