Margaret Ludowyk writes: I heartily agree with Brendan McDougall — let’s abolish, or nationalise, private schools.
The most divisive and un-Australian public policy in Australia is the inequitable funding of our school system. It divides us by wealth and by religion. It is wrong and has to change. No other developed nation funds private schools like we do.
State government funding is gobbled up by building new schools to keep up with population growth while private schools build bigger and better theatres, swimming pools and bistros. Private schools have excess funds so can poach teachers from state schools. State governments have tight budgets and can’t compete with teacher salaries. We need to gradually reduce funding to private schools and immediately boost funding to state schools so that over time all parents, including all MPs, will choose their local public school. If Finland can do it so can we.
Owen Evans writes: [Brendan McDougall’s] article really is bizarre. On one page Crikey is complaining, quite sensibly in my view, about limited competition in media, public utilities and food retailing. On the other hand it wants a monopoly on education. Worse still, it wants to give this monopoly to the segment of the industry that is the weakest performer and has been for 20 years. A segment that, by the way, has no accountability for performance because it is protected by the government.
Private schools fire principals and go broke regularly. Public schools do not. As a policy this would be equivalent to the forced merger of Coles and Woolworths with the NSW government to run the shops under regulation of the Commonwealth. Good lord what a mess that would be.
Having seen NSW Education, and particularly School Infrastructure NSW, up close as a customer, I have exactly zero units of interest in forcing any student into its claws. A more interesting solution might be to abolish public education and give parents vouchers to send children where they so choose. Perhaps a more palatable outcome for the unions and bureaucrats who run public education would be to charge GST on education (this will, of course, only apply to private education as public has no fees), which may bring some people back to the public system and would provide more funding.
Abolishing private education might appeal to employees of the public sector school systems but it clearly would not appeal to anyone else.
Judy Hardy-Holden writes: Brendan McDougall I salute you. I left state teaching in Queensland 30 years ago and we were decrying the inequality of resourcing then. My heart has bled every time school funding is mentioned ever since — and as you say, it is getting worse.
This inequality goes back to my bête noire, John Howard, with his spurious crow of giving people “choice”. It turns out it gives the choice to choose elitism over equality of outcomes. You don’t achieve a healthy society with snobs at the top and yobs at the bottom.
Maybe if we chose to deliver better educational opportunities for all, and especially those who can least afford it, we would find it is easier and cheaper to build educational facilities than it is to build remand centres, detention centres, juvenile jails and educate warders for prison service.
Paul Brown writes: I retired from my state secondary college 14 years ago at age 60 due to burnout. I valued my mental health and taught in a developing country, Vietnam, where the parents and society actually value the teaching profession.
While the federal governments ignore this problem, it will make the whole system begin to break down. I saw this in 2010. I was not alone and many other teachers either retired early, moved jobs or went into the private sector. Public education really is in crisis but nobody’s listening.
By what measure ?
Houses and rentals within the catchments of high-performing public schools attract significant price premiums.
Private schools have the inherent advantage of being able to reject and eject disruptive or underperforming students. Normalise for that and their academic outcomes are no better than public schools.
Public school students perform better at University.
All despite public schools having nothing close to the budgets and facilities of private schools.
Public schools are in a fight with one arm tied behind their back and a bung knee, and still, at worst, holding their own.
It appeals to people who think education should be equitable and class stratification is bad.
I can’t approve it a thousand times, but you have it in a nutshell.
Owen Evans’ take is bizarre to say the least.
No it doesn’t want a monopoly, it wants a a fairer level playing field. Private schools get way too much government funding. The proposal is to stop, or at least greatly reduce government funding to private institutions. The private schools can still exist, they just have to do it without government funding.
PS: What would be wrong with the government providing education to everyone for free in public schools anyway?
Owen’s analogy of the government’s ” forced merger of Coles and Woolworths with the NSW government to run the shops ” is laughable to say the least. What it would be more like is if the government was currently funding Coles and Woolies and then stopped funding them so local shops could compete.
You might also want to examine Evan’s claim that the public sector schooling is ‘the weakest performer’ in the education industry. Now, why would that be the case? It’s like giving kids half-rations of food and then complaining that they’re not keeping up with the well fed.
I’d want to examine it full stop. Apparently, once you take socio-economic factors into account, private school kids perform no better.
He’s speaking from a position of undue and probably unearned privilege. It’s the equivalent of the monied classes labelling any attempt to reform equity and equality in any society as the “politics of envy”.
They’re basically too self-obsessed to realise that the tumbrils and the guillotines are only getting closer.
Education and healthcare are human rights. Supermarkets are not.
Is it anti-competitive to wish for future generations to compete on a level playing field?
Seems the vast majority of folks who like to bang on about competition do it from a pedestal.
If we have a private school system where they are massively subsidised by the taxpayer, then the public school users, rich and poor, have every right to complain that their tax dollars shouldn’t essentially be paying for your kids as opposed to all kids. Given both don’t survive without public money, I don’t see why “private” schools exist. Government or private industry being incompetent….both have their moments, but only one has the wellbeing of the population as a core concern.
The headline is misleading: no one is literally arguing that private schools should not exist; they are arguing either that they should not receive government funding or at least receive funding proportionate to the number of non-fee-paying students they enrol and, if they do receive public funding, they should accept the same rules for acceptance and rejection of students as public schools. These conditions for receiving government funding are patently fair and reasonable.
The sheer ignorance concerning teachers and students in public schools that has been on display in many of the anti-public school comments lately is mind-boggling. So is the amount of public money wasted by expensive private schools receiving government grants while they construct monuments to economic power whose luxury bears no relation to education as such. When you consider that academic results are the same once allowance for socio-economic status of parents has been made, their value for money approaches negative figures and the average taxpayer has the right to take offence. The fact that that multi-million dollar grants to them are considered tax-deductible means that the rich can reduce their tax burden by donating to the institutions that privilege their offspring. It made some sense before secondary education was open to all, a hundred or so years ago. Now, however, it amounts to no more than robbing the poor to pay for the luxuries of the relatively rich.