Education: Choice? What choice?

Even more unconscionably, some teachers and principals are starting to talk about an emerging "de facto apartheid". In a recent survey public school principals expressed their concern about an increasing concentration of Indigenous kids in public schools and a corresponding flight of white kids to other schools, especially in rural areas.

But it is in investment in capital works that the fruits of our 30 years of public funding of private schools show up most starkly. Educational economist Adam Rorris has demonstrated that the amount the UK and the US invest in capital works for their public (government run and open to all) schools has been line ball with what Australia invests in capital works for its private schools. Our public schools languish many, many millions of dollars below them in investment. An indication that public funding of private schools has directly - and negatively - impacted on the corresponding investment we are willing to make in our public system.

Much noise is currently being generated about the fact that not all private schools are as rich as the elite schools. Indeed, private school advocates often argue that many are just as under-resourced and under-funded as some schools in the public system. Yet, if sending your child to a fee charging school is a choice, as such advocates also claim, then why on earth would parents freely choose to send their children to crappy, run down private schools? Either such parents have rocks in their heads, or - and I suspect this is much more likely - the nearby public schools are even more under-funded, under-resourced, run down and neglected.

So what does it say about the effect our three decades of investment have had on choice when the only one many families can afford to make is between two neglected, unsatisfactory schools?

I have never been able to understand how the under-funding and under-mining of our public schools can enhance anyone’s choice.

Choice

Most parents never have had and never will have much choice of schools. If you are on an average income and have more than one child, it remains very expensive to send your children to private schools- even the so-called “low fee” ones.

Even for better off parents, private school fees are hard to find. In fact, they may well be the best contraceptive ever invented.

Yet surely the billions taxpayers have poured into private schools has kept their fees lower and therefore made them more accessible to a wider range of families? Trouble is, elite schools remain desirable precisely because they are hard to get into. It is the kid’s Cranbrook reject that make Cranbrook the best.

Unlike other countries that publicly subsidise private schools (and there aren’t many) Australia’s subsidies are not tied to fees. Indeed, in 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that elite private schools had increased their fees by as much as 53.4 per cent over the last four years.

After all, the market will charge what the market will bear. As we have seen with the child care rebate, the health rebate and the first home buyers’ scheme, whenever government’s subsidise private provision, they simply deliver a windfall to the private providers, who - as sensible business people - immediately raise their price by the level of subsidy. That’s why vouchers, differential vouchers, tax credits et al are not a solution. Giving huge sums of public money to private schools is not only unconscionable, then, it drives up the price and so is economically stupid.

The problem with parental choice, particularly driven by league tables, is that everyone chooses the same schools. Parents already sleep in playgrounds of desirable public schools to get on the waiting list. They already pay non-refundable deposits merely to stay on the waiting list for desirable private schools. Parents have been prosecuted for offering bribes to teachers to get their children into selective public schools. And real estate values in suburbs surrounding public schools with a “good” reputation already effectively discriminate against those on lower incomes.

What we really do when we attempt to give parents choice is give some schools choice over which kids they will and won’t enroll. And it is hardly surprising that the most desirable schools enroll the most desirable students. The poor, the smelly, the troubled and the troublesome are lumped into the designated “loser” school in the area. And both ends of the spectrum then become self-perpetuating.