Main capitalist parties threaten public education

Vanguard August 2010 p. 5
Nick G.

Melbourne Age columnist Kenneth Davidson hit the nail on the head when he stated that “Gillard ranks as a failure on education”.

Davidson singled out the computer roll-out (“a second or third-order education priority”), the BER funding (“Elite schools with swimming pools got as much money as schools with playgrounds that are dust bowls in summer and bogs in winter”), and NAPLAN testing and the My School website (“Teaching for the tests impoverishes education and intensifies residualisation as the few parents with options scramble to get their children out of ‘failed’schools”).

However, his main reason for failing the now Prime Minister was her announcement in 2007 that the government would extend to 2012 the “reprehensible funding system for non-government schools” introduced by Howard and due to expire in 2008.

Funding database innacurate
In Opposition, Gillard had derided the Liberal’s socio-economic status (SES) funding model as inequitable and serving to widen the funding gap between private and public schools.

It did that in two ways.

Firstly, the SES data was not based on actual student information. That would have been difficult and time consuming to collect. Instead, the residential addresses of students were matched to Census Collection Districts (CCDs). These comprise approximately 220 families in a particular locality and the data from them is only available as an average across the 220 families.

The single child of highly paid professional parents, and the three children of the single supporting mum who is in and out of low paid employment may share the same CCD, but they take different educational and social advantages into the schools they attend.

The averaging means that the richer kids will look poorer and the poorer kids will look richer. Based on this, the richer kids’ elite schools will not appear to be so wealthy, and the poorer kids’ public schools will appear to be better off than they are.

For instance, Haileybury College in Melbourne, which has students from families that can afford around $20,000 per year in fees, has an SES score of only 108, implying it is only the 275th most wealthy school in Australia. Geelong Grammar has an SES of 111 (221st) and The King’s School, recognised as one of NSW’s wealthiest private colleges, has an SES of 116 (149th wealthiest!)

Guaranteed funding to elite schools
The second way was the application of a “funding maintained” principle according to which any school that would have received less than its old funding under the SES model kept its old funding level; and any schools that would have lost funding because of changes in the four year cycle of census data collection were maintained at their old funding level until inflation caught up.

In the 2004 election fought between Howard’s Liberals and Mark Latham’s Labor, Latham promised to eradicate the inequities of the SES funding formula bringing down upon himself a predictable storm of opposition by the entrenched and highly organised private school lobby.

Rudd and Gillard decided to placate the forces of privilege by guaranteeing that “no school would lose funding” if they were elected. Rather than allowing the SES model to expire, they continued it.

Funding review will look after the privates
However, Gillard subsequently announced a review of the federal funding of education.

The Australian Education Union recommended that its terms of reference include consideration of “how Australia’s school funding system can ensure the principle of universal access to quality education for all children is realized in practice and the funding arrangements necessary to ensure that all children and families have access to education of the highest quality in their local community”.

This eminently social democratic objective was rejected.

Instead, Gillard set up a review panel led by David Gonski, a lawyer and investment banker, chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange and Coca-Cola Amatil. He is an ex-student and current chairman of Sydney Grammar School where fees are more than $23,000 and the school gets $3.5 million annually from the Commonwealth. The panel is stacked in favour of the private schools lobby.

Its findings are in any case pre-empted by a Gillard commitment that “following the conclusions of the Funding Review, the same Funding Guarantee will apply”.

The big “choice” fraud
Further, the terms of reference include the “role of government funding in providing parents with choice among diverse schools”.

This continues the huge con job that has been done on the people of Australia which now has more students enrolled in private education (around 36%) than any other OECD country.

The con job consists of selling the notion of choice as a public good.

It was at the heart of Gillard’s tenure as Minister for Education.

It is behind the My School website and school league tables.

It is a con job because it says to parents that they are responsible for the quality of education that is provided to their children.

It is a con job because it is an abrogation of the responsibility of governments to guarantee access within communities to a free, secular and public school that offers high quality education.

Supporters of public education are faced with a bipartisan embrace of competition and choice in schooling.

Both Labor and Liberal are committed to transferring students from public education, from the only system of education in Australia that has a legal responsibility to provide schooling for all citizens regardless of class, gender, sexual preference, disability, learning aptitude, religious belief or disbelief.

Further attempts at the privatisation such as the US charter schools or a voucher system can be expected.

We demand, by contrast, the right of every family to a well resourced, high quality public school in their own community.

Reject the phoney “choice” agenda in education!
Government funding for government schools!