Parent Power - should the free market decide school curricula?

An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms - like market process, or intelligent voting systems - to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent not what any one person in the group thinks, but in some sense, what they all think.

Committees are susceptible to many shortcomings which negatively influence their decision-making ability. They are liable to work from unquestioned assumptions. If there is a lack of diversity and independence in the committee, assumptions can go unexamined for long periods and the committee reinforces its own views. Group think takes over and possible alternatives recede into the background.

A further argument against curricula being developed by homogenous groups is the ease with which fads can be introduced into the curriculum. Over the last 30 years a plethora of innovations - such as the whole language approach to reading, fuzzy maths and functional grammar - have been foisted upon unsuspecting children and the long-suffering taxpayers of Australia who have to fund these experiments.  Because the NSW education system is governed by a centralised board, these are not small, localised experiments tested to see if they actually work in practice. They are implemented in every school across the state. Considerable resources are invested in training teachers to adopt these new ideologies, resources that are wasted as soon as one fad is replaced by the next. A whole generation of school children becomes the guinea pigs upon which the latest fad is tested.

I suggest that the collective wisdom of parents would do a much better job of answering the question, “What ought high school students learn today in order to be well prepared for life beyond school?” than any committee. A parent body drawn from the whole population has three characteristics, it would be diverse, independent and decentralised.

By independent I mean that parents are relatively free from the coercion and influence of others when deciding on what education their children will receive. Parents do discuss schools with each other and are influenced by friends, family and advertising, but ultimately the decision is their own and, since it is so important, they are likely to rely on their own judgement rather than the judgement of others.

The benefit of having a large diverse parent body working actively to solve the problem of what makes a good education is that some parents will take a punt on unusual and radical ideas. Most of these will not work, and the market will quickly recognise this and these experiments will die a natural death. But a few of them will succeed and flourish. This is exactly how innovation happens in other markets, but it is virtually impossible for it to happen in education when curricula are developed by a small committee of educationalists who must attempt to be answerable to everyone.

Having established the many benefits that would accrue to students if parents were granted the means to directly influence the content of school curricula, let us now consider what would be necessary to give parents such power and how such a system might operate. There are two indispensable prerequisites if parents are to have direct influence on the quality of our schools. The first is that parents have control over where they spend every cent of their education dollars. The second is that the educational marketplace is such that providers of education have the freedom to offer a variety of educational products.

How would this work in practice? The scenario I propose gives parents the choice of where they spend their money and facilitates an education marketplace that allows providers to offer a range of educational solutions. In this scenario, schooling remains compulsory. Parents must send their children to a government accredited school. But the criterion for accreditation is not that the school fulfils the NSW government curriculum. Schools are accredited if they meet the following two standards: first the school is obliged to make its curriculum available to parents and to explain in plain language what it intends to teach students; second the school must demonstrate that it is in fact teaching its curriculum to its students.

Some opponents of transparent reporting of student achievement claim that less well-funded schools, or schools that teach children from underprivileged backgrounds, would be shown in a poor light if student assessments were made public. Obviously the results of a school that caters for students with learning difficulties or special needs will be far below a school that specialises in gifted education and so comparing absolute levels of student achievement is not always meaningful. But there are forms of student assessment that measure progress rather than achievement and this can be very meaningful for parents wishing to compare schools.

The second important aspect of this scenario is how schools are funded. The easiest way to give purchasing power to parents is through a system of school vouchers or tax credits. These measures have the advantage of lending assistance to low income families without removing the spending power from parents.In this scenario, government and non-government schools would compete to attract parents on a level playing field. All schools would be accredited in the same way. Schools would be free to go it alone and seek to sell their brand of education on the open market or they could group together to adopt the services of an independent examining body. Such examining bodies would develop a leaving exam and associated curricula, and then make these available to schools and provide training and guidance in the implementation of their curricula. A system similar to this has been discussed recently in the UK. This would be applicable across the country and would also go some way to solving the problem highlighted by Brendan Nelson, of parents moving interstate and encountering incompatible state education systems.

Another issue is how tertiary education providers would cope with greater diversity in primary and secondary school curricula. Universities already have mechanisms to evaluate students who have studied the International Baccalaureate or sat leaving exams in countries other than Australia and they have devised comparability scales to accept students from any of the states and territories. This indicates that universities are willing to accept students with various forms of secondary education.

Under this scenario of curriculum competition and school vouchers or tax credits, the collective wisdom of the parent body would be brought to bear on the question of what constitutes the best education for Australian children. The net effect would be that educational outcomes would improve, parental interest in and engagement with education would increase, and innovation and development in education would be stimulated.