Means testing education benefits

Surely, in any circumstances, but particularly in these times of protracted government budget deficits, there is a case for reducing this $442,000 bonanza by debiting some charges to wealthy parents who use public schools.

In more normal times of public finance, there is a case for debiting such parents in exchange for lowering personal income tax rates. 

Beyond these steps, there is also a case for phasing out all education subsidies eventually for all wealthy families, whether it be through fees or some other way.

If the case for means testing these subsidies appears so obvious, how did they ever begin?  For this, let's now revisit the arguments of Attorney General Mr James Stephen, who sponsored the idea of free education for the rich in Victoria's Education Bill of 1872.

Having presented first his case for compulsory education to the Legislative Assembly, Stephen moved on to the question of free education: "Education being made compulsory, a fortiori,  it would be sheer tyranny to fine a man who cannot send his children to school because he has not money to pay the school fees." (Victoria Parliamentary Debates).

For Stephen, the alternative of excusing poor people from school fees, in line with previous practice, degraded them.  And so he concluded, "Once admit that all children whether rich or poor, ought to be educated and it seems to me to follow, as a matter of course, that the State must pay for the education of those children".

If this wasn't sophistry, it became so when combined with his earlier argument for compulsion. 

Less than 20 sentences before arguing for free education, Stephen had drawn attention to two classes of children absent from school: “the waifs and strays found in all large cities”; and children in remote districts. Acknowledging that poor school attendance of the latter was partly an unintended consequence of government’s pro-settlement policies, Stephen claimed:  “It will require something more than the simple inducement offered by free education to cause these people to send their children to school, and that something more is a compulsory provision" (emphasis added). 

So the intellectual case for legislating huge government benefits for rich folk these past 140 years rested on arguments that: the ineffectiveness of a free education provision in combating truancy called for a compulsory provision; and the inequity of a compulsory provision in combating poverty called for a free education provision.