Tome Greenwell,co-author of Waiting for Gonski, has submitted the following comment on t our post Canada is No Solution. The comment is published in the interest of frthering public debate on an important issue in school funding in Australia.
In Ontario around 93 percent of students attend public schools. Two thirds of these public schools are secular, while one third are faith-based. But all are fully publicly funded and completely free; and all are required to enrol students from a local enrolment zone. The socioeconomic profile of the students in the faith-based schools is almost exactly the same as those in the secular schools. Social segregation is much lower in Ontario’s schools than Australia’s. The very small fee-charging private school sector serves around 7 percent of students and receives no public funding.
Trevor Cobbold appears determined to defend the status quo in which Australian private schools receive huge public subsidies but can continue to charge fees as high as they wish, enrol (and not enrol) whoever they like and expel whoever they want to. This is because he believes it would introduce a “structural contradiction” for some fully publicly funded schools to be religious and discriminate in hiring staff. This is an extraordinary position for someone who knows Australia’s school system as well as Cobbold does. We already have a system where lavish public subsidies to religious schools often exceed the funding at comparable public schools. And these schools enjoy exemptions to the Sex Discrimination Act. How is that situation redressed in any way by allowing those schools to continue to charge fees? How is it improved by allowing them to enjoy significant resource advantages (public subsidy + fees) which gives them a competitive advantage over public schools?
The heart of the matter is how we dramatically reduce the intense social segregation in our school system. Cobbold says we must fully fund public schools and stop overfunding private schools. That’s absolutely necessary but nowhere near sufficient. Even if that happens some time in the middle of next decade – and I’m not holding my breath – private schools will still enjoy net resource advantages through the combination of their SRS entitlement + unregulated fees. As those resource advantages attract the able and affluent, the unregulated fees and enrolment practices will continue to push the disadvantaged away. Money is important. But public funding must entail commensurate public obligations and regulations. And we can only make the demand that fees are prohibited if full public funding is there to replace it.
Despite the valiant efforts by so many supporters of public education, of which Trevor Cobbold is a superlative example, we have to be honest about what we have achieved — and what we have not achieved. Twice this century, Labor has been elected to government and has committed to a plan to deliver needs-based funding… some time beyond the forward estimates, in a couple of elections time, next decade. The reality is that Labor is not prepared to spend any serious political capital on creating a level playing field for Australian schools to operate on. And public education advocates have proven unable to exert the necessary leverage to change its behaviour.
Australia has now been trying and failing to implement a needs-based funding system (overlaid with a user pays element) for half a century. Ontario fully implemented a needs-based funding system over a quarter of a century ago. It helps when 9 out of every 10 voters sends their child to a public school.
By putting full public funding for private schools on the table (in return for prohibiting fees and selective enrolment practices) we create the possibility of a coalition big and broad enough to truly challenge the status quo. As Jane Caro points out in ‘Rich Kid Poor Kid’, private school fees are now a major cause of bankruptcy. She quotes Australia Institute research that Australian families spend an average of $5,000 for each year of high school. In other words, unregulated private school fees are a huge cost-of-living issue, and reducing the cost of living is an issue that appeals very widely. And politicians know it appeals very widely.
Any serious assessment of this strategy has to begin by recognising that the private school sector is not a monolith. There are high-fee schools and low-fee schools; different denominations, religions and educational philosophies. The interests of parents, educators, proprietors and peak bodies are related but different. It is likely going to be more appealing to those who are less advantaged and more committed to a choice which reflects their moral convictions, rather than the pursuit of naked privilege and exclusivity.
For the last half-century the private school lobby has been made up of what Gough Whitlam called an alliance of God and Mammon, an unlikely coalition of low-fee systemic Catholic schools and high-fee mostly Protestant schools. The particular power of this coalition is that whenever exclusivity and privilege is challenged, they do not attempt to defend the indefensible but change the subject. They present it as an attack on low-fee schools and make it a debate about the value of ‘choice’. And so they have been able to hide taxpayer support for extremely wealthy and exclusive schools behind the fig leaf of religious choice.
Maybe it’s time we stopped playing into their hands?