In 2011, the Gonski report recommended that government funding of schools be needs-based and sector-blind. More than 12 years later, it still hasn’t happened. And it’s by no means certain it will happen any time soon.
The idea of sector-blind schooling – funding all students according to their needs, rather than their religion – fell at the first hurdle. Sectarianism has bedevilled attempts to ensure all our kids get a decent education since the introduction of compulsory schooling in 1880.
And so fearful of the religious vote are both major parties that this time’s been no different. Providing adequate funding for the more disadvantaged kids congregated in public schools could have been a simple matter of redistributing money from privileged private schools, but no.
Former prime minister Julia Gillard was straight out of the blocks, promising that private schools would be left no worse off. That is, disadvantaged kids would be helped only to the extent that extra money could be found for education, at the expense of all the government’s other responsibilities.
So the private schools – almost all of them professing some religious affiliation – have retained their funding priority. It used to be a matter of Catholics and Protestants but, thanks to the Howard government’s introduction of a new education priority – giving parents greater choice of which school to send their kids to – it’s now also a matter of Jewish schools, Muslim schools, “Christian” schools (code for the smaller non-conformist Protestant denominations) and soon, no doubt, Hindu schools and Buddhist schools.
If you wonder why the eternal enmities of the Middle East are echoed in faraway Australia, that’s part of the reason. “Choice” is a nice idea but, from the taxpayers’ perspective, it comes at a cost. Public schooling used to be part of the way we could be multicultural and still socially cohesive.
Now we’re paying more for it to be less so. Now, if you choose to have your kid grow up never having rubbed shoulders with people of other religions, that’s another service the taxpayer provides.
Except that it involves a monetary cost we’re reluctant to pay, and our politicians are reluctant to make us pay. How to square the circle? I know, let’s short-change the (majority of) kids still going to public schools.
But not to worry. The more things keep going the way they are, the fewer kids will be left going to public schools and the less the pollies will have to worry about the raw deal they’re getting.
We’ll have more kids leaving education with inadequate numeracy and literacy, of course, but who’ll notice that – or the extra cost to the budget – when we’ll all be so busy listening to the Business Council giving yet another sermon on the pressing need to reverse our declining productivity by cutting the company tax rate.
The beauty of a new plan to have most kids going to private schools – whether their parents can afford it or not – while only the kids of the rock-bottom poor are still going to public schools is that it’s self-reinforcing.
The more the better-paid and better-educated shift their children to private schools, the more those who are left will scrimp and save to join them.
And don’t forget this: public schooling is the default setting. One of the ways private schools maintain their reputation for greater discipline is to decline students with special needs, and expel students who cause too much trouble.
The public schools have no choice but to pick up the rejects. This wouldn’t be such a problem if they were given the extra funds needed to cope with the extra problems. But depend on it: they won’t be. This will give parents even greater incentive to get their kids out of there.
The plan does have a big drawback, however. No parent ever wants to admit it but, for many of them, a great attraction of private schooling is the greater social status it confers on the parents, as well as the old-school-tie benefits it confers on the kids.
Economists see education as a prime example of a “positional good” – a product that advertises to the world your high position in the pecking order. Trouble is, social status requires exclusivity. The more kids pile into private schooling, the less exclusive it becomes.
Economists say the demand for a good or service is “inelastic” if a rise in its price does little to deter people from buying it. As a positional good, the demand for private schooling is highly inelastic.
This explains why, not content with the big government subsidies they receive, the oldest and most famous private schools can charge parents huge fees on the top. Their fees rise faster than the inflation rate year after year, even in years of a cost-of-living crisis.
It may be that, the more parents pile into the cheaper Catholic systemic and other private schools, the more the elite private schools have to raise their fees to retain their exclusivity – their status as a positional good.
And, of course, the higher their fees, the more desirous status-seeking parents are to be seen paying them. Only the Reserve Bank’s ability to print its own money beats that. Remind me, why exactly is the taxpayer subsidising elite private schools?
Economists also say education is a “superior” good, meaning that the higher people’s real incomes rise, to more of that income they’re willing to spend on the product. In theory, people are buying more education or higher quality education.
But I have a theory that two-income families are more likely to choose private school education to prove to themselves their kids aren’t missing out. If so, they’re victims of a rarely remarked economic fallacy: anything that costs more must be of higher quality.
Fallacious though such thinking may be, the rise of the two-income family helps explain the shift to private schools and suggests it has further to run. Yet another reason to question why the federal government is propping up private schools at the expense of public schools.
Since Gonski, the feds have calculated the “schooling resource standard”, an estimate of how much total government funding a school needs to meet its students’ educational needs. The previous federal government’s agreement with the states required it to contribute 80 per cent of the private schools’ standard, with the states contributing the remaining 20 per cent.
For public schools, it was the reverse: the states pay 80 per cent, while the feds pay 20 per cent. Since the feds’ taxing powers are far greater than the states’, this deal had an inbuilt bias in favour of private schools.
As it’s worked out in practice, almost all private schools are fully funded, with many being overfunded, whereas almost all public schools are still underfunded, more than 12 years since Gonski.
The Albanese government’s Education Minister Jason Clare is renegotiating the funding agreement with the state education ministers, who met with him on Friday. They’re demanding that he hasten the public schools’ achievement of full funding by raising the feds’ contribution to 25 per cent.
You’d expect a Labor government to care about public school students getting a decent education. We’ll soon find out if it does.