If I had one wish for Australia it'd be this. Ban private schools.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Turnbull government has been caught hiding funding figures for Catholic schools but it beats me why such funding even exists. Indeed, it beats me why private schools exist. Why they're even legal.
Private schools don't necessarily produce bad people, although it's true that (as a 2013 Crikey survey found) most cabinet ministers attended them. Private schools are just very, very bad for the country.
Public money is our money. It's there to fund stuff in which we all believe and from which we all benefit – stuff that makes Australia fairer, more creative, more harmonious, more successful.
We're across it. That's why Peter FitzSimons' petition against Gladys Berejiklian's $2 billion stadium rebuild gathered 150,000 signatures inside a week. "We are tired of taxpayer dollars being lavished on …Sports Big Business while community sport withers on the vine…" wrote FitzSimons. Everyone agrees.
Yet when it's schools withering, we're fine. Every year we pour $53 billion into a system that can only divide us, with a quarter of it – $12.7billion – going straight to educational big business.
And for what? What does it buy, this immense spend? It buys a system that deliberately tribalises children before they can read, that has parents selling their houses for school fees, stressing about homework and entry exams and increasingly investing in private tutoring for four year olds. Yet for all that effort and angst, it's a system that leaves us (as recent news yet again makes clear) less well educated with each passing year.
Increasingly, education seems like happiness: despite (or because of) a vast global industry devoted to generating angst, the harder we try, the more elusive it becomes.
Private schools heighten inequality, privileging the privileged, hogging the teaching talent and siphoning off kids already equipped with reading backgrounds, so depriving the public system of beneficial peer-to-peer learning.
Three arguments are usually advanced for private schools. One, choice. Parents should be free to choose expensive or religious education for their kids if they wish. Two, quality. Private schools offer better education and, regardless of politics, the kid's interests should prevail. Three, burden: private schools, far from siphoning wealth from the public system, lightens its load.
None of these arguments stack up. Take choice. Choice relies on comparison, product to product. But education is not shampoo. You can't try a school for a few weeks or years and know that how your kid tracks is a direct result, or how things might have been different elsewhere. So comparison is illusory.
Quality? Many parents send their kids to private schools, even when they don't approve, because they think the education is better and there's at least a modicum of discipline. And yes, private schools are more able to impose order and sack teachers for non-performance. But, given that these students are already more biddable and more literate, it's impossible to prove any net educational benefit.
Three years ago, David Gillespie (author of Free Schools) argued persuasively that, once you correct for socioeconomic advantage, even the most expensive schools add nothing to educational outcome. This may be one reason why – it's now reported – more wealthy parents are choosing to put their kids in the public school system.
And that leads immediately to the idea of burden. Does anyone suggest sport's Big Money dudes – the sponsors and gravy-trainers, the owners and big-bucks players – are taking the burden off the public sport system?
No, they're creaming off the talent, quarantining it from public access for vast private profit and getting a public leg-up on the way. This is so wrong on so many levels. What's weird is that we can see it with sport, but with schooling – where the bill is six times the size, and annual – we're blind.
But honestly – burden? According to the ABC, almost a quarter of the $53 billion funding of schools ($12.7 billion) goes to private schools – which educate roughly a third (34 per cent) of populace. So each private school student sucks almost two-thirds as much as each public one. Before the benefit of their $30,000 in fees.
In other words, for every private school student the burden decrement on the public system is fairly small, but the personal advantage is immense.
This is manifestly unfair. Private schools heighten inequality, privileging the privileged, hogging the teaching talent and siphoning off kids already equipped with reading backgrounds, so depriving the public system of beneficial peer-to-peer learning.
But the best argument against private schools is productivity. Squabble all you like about divvying up the pie but far more useful – and more fun – is growing it. Technically, yes, education is a burden, but as an appreciating asset it's more house than car; an investment.
Forty years ago, Finland stunned the world by nationalising schools, revering teachers, ending streaming, entering school late, shrinking the school day, reducing homework and extending holidays – then topping every test.
In an extraordinary turn-up Dr Pasi Sahlberg, who as minister designed the Finnish system, will move to Sydney next year, to teach. Maybe we can persuade him to fix our schools.
If he needs more than Gladys' stadium money, we could give him WestConnex as well.