Gonski Report entrenches the two-tier system of Australian education

Vanguard March 2012 p. 9
Nick G

The review panel into school funding set up by Gillard and headed by chairperson of the Stock Exchange David Gonski handed its final report to the government in December.

It has now been made public.

In a nutshell, it is critical of the present funding arrangements for schools and, whilst making some welcome suggestions for funding that gives priority to the lowest performing students (who are overwhelmingly represented in government schools), it  nevertheless continues the commitment of both major parties to the segregation of schooling primarily on the basis of class.

Nowhere does it question why Australia, alone out of all the OECD countries, has over a third of its students in private schools.

Nowhere does it question why Australia, alone out of all the OECD countries, provides large amounts of government funding to the non-government schools sector.

It simply takes for granted that this is what Australian parents want and that funding arrangements that support this two-tiered system should continue.

The Gonski panel does recommend that the nexus between the government funding of private schools and the average government school recurrent cost (AGSRC) be cut.  This was a mechanism by which private schools received per student funding based on the cost of educating a student in the government sector, but it ignored the fact that the higher cost of educating students with disabilities, and students with a whole range of educational disadvantage – the vast majority of whom are in the public system – delivered a funding windfall to the private system.

The Gonski panel accepts without a murmur the reactionary pledge by Gillard that no private school will lose one dollar of government funding as a result of changes to the funding system.  Instead it proposes mechanisms to deliver on this pledge.

The Gonski review was conducted in an environment in which the worst elements of two of the OECD’s poorest performing school systems - the US and the UK – have been imposed on Australian schools by Gillard in the name of education “reform”.

The reactionary neo-liberal prescription for education has been to further open the schools sector to market forces. Gillard euphemistically calls this the “choice agenda” and it is backed by the Gonski panel.  It has been accompanied by the US pre-occupation with standardised testing despite the fact that NAPLAN results have not improved since the introduction of the testing regime and the gap between Indigenous and other students has been maintained.

Before Gillard, Rudd had completely aligned the purposes of education with the boosting of productivity as a justification for the education “revolution” that he promised to introduce if he was elected.  Capitalist education was defined solely in terms of the requirements of capital accumulation.  The imperialist perversion of what occurs in our schools was heightened by the social democratic adherents of neo-liberalism.

There are certain elements of the Gonski report that will be welcomed by advocates of public education, and these are a tribute to the persistence of campaigns to expose and reverse the unfair funding that has turned public schools into the poor cousins of the privates.

However, a fully resourced universal system of public education will only be delivered when we have seized our independence from imperialism and have the power to rebuild our schooling system.