CHAPTER 10
THE EDUCATION DEBATE
Education is a bewildering business. In the past twenty years Australian schools appear to have improved in many ways. Student/teacher ratios have fallen markedly. Buildings are less crowded and better appointed. The curriculum is more diverse and more attractively presented. High quality teaching materials and resources have been developed in every subject area and are freely available to teachers and students. Specialist assistance in art, music, sport and drama is now common in primary as well as secondary schools. Remedial courses for disabled or disadvantaged children exist that were not available before. Retention rates in secondary school have improved. Most young children begin school with some pre-primary or kindergarten experience behind them. Libraries and laboratories are very much better endowed and equipped. Computers and video facilities are becoming widely available at both primary and secondary levels. Counselling facilities have expanded and much effort is made to improve students' self-esteem. Excursions to take part in community activities are now relatively frequent. Teachers are less authoritarian and more responsive to student rights, interests and sensitivities. Teachers are now more highly qualified (at least formally) than ever before. In-service and professional development courses to improve teacher performance are readily available. Teacher contact hours have been reduced and preparation time during working hours has increased. Administrative assistance exists at regional and head offices. In short, almost everything that money can provide has been provided. And yet, at the end of this long process of expansion and improvement, a community-wide controversy exists about whether the education system is now more or less successful than when the process began.
Some accounts attempt to talk down the importance and seriousness of this controversy, but it should not be so lightly dismissed. Those who would so dismiss it tend to measure the success of the system by the quality and quantity of the inputs and not by the quality of its products, which is like judging a sporting team by the quantity of seating in its stands or the colour of its jumpers rather than by success on the field. Yet even when this simple fallacy is exposed another often goes unnoticed. The debate has been about whether educational standards have or have not declined. The fact that this is what is being debated would seem to be itself an indictment of the education system. In effect this question asks whether the massive increase in resources has or has not only just managed to prevent a decline in educational standards! Expenditure per primary and secondary school pupil (at constant 1987 prices) has increased from $1248 in 1967 to $2799 in 1985, an increase of 125 per cent. (1) The relevant question should be whether educational achievement has improved in proportion to the increases in input. And, as resources have doubled, then (all other things being equal) we should expect something like a doubling in achievement. There are very few wholehearted defenders of the schools, and not even the most positive and optimistic believes that they have been this successful.
Much of the public debate on school achievement has focused on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy, for the obvious reason that a school which fails to equip its pupils to read, write and compute well has not provided them with the grounding necessary for the acquisition of other skills. Yet it might also be questioned whether the schools have done well in those other areas -- in science or social studies, for instance. Many of Australia's most distinguished thinkers, writers and social critics believe that our education system is failing to produce literate, intelligent, self-critical, responsible future citizens. Most of the critics are, however, outside the educational establishment, having made their mark in a wide variety of traditional disciplines and professions. Although our universities and colleges of advanced education contain dozens of educational theorists, no substantial reply to the criticisms of the education system has ever been made.
Professor Peter Karmel, who chaired the 1973 Schools in Australia report which led to rapid expansion of Commonwealth educational activity and the setting up of the Schools Commission, accepts that one reason why there is much public scepticism about schools is that "the large increase in resources devoted to education had not produced any obviously visible outcome". Karmel himself believes that "The education process is a long one and it would be absurd to expect immediate results from additional inputs", but he gives no reason for preferring a long-term perspective to a short-term one. Karmel also notes that expenditure on schools has not been curbed by public criticism. "Notwithstanding the chilly atmosphere in which educational institutions have been operating, ... in the school sector resources devoted to education for current operations have continued to expand. Over the last decade, recurrent expenditure per pupil in real terms has increased by between 4 and 5 per cent per annum in both government and non-government schools". (2)
Nevertheless, governments are coming to share many of the doubts about educational spending being voiced in the community. This has never been more forcefully put than by the then Commonwealth Minister for Education, Susan Ryan, speaking in 1985:
I want to make it clear that the Commonwealth is deadly serious about its increasing concentration on outcomes; that is, with what comes out of the education system, not just how many billions we pour into it. It is clear that the community wants quality education, and it is to this demand that the Government will respond. The Commonwealth Government is no longer prepared to pour buckets of money into the education system in an indiscriminate manner. (3)
Michael Hogan has observed that "Despite massive grants and very expensive capital works programs it is questionable whether the quality of schooling in the poorer areas of the main Australian cities has approached much closer to a socially acceptable standard in the 1980s than was the case in the 1960s". He adds that "It is time that the use of such funds should be directed beyond the traditional targets of capital expenditure on school buildings and recurrent expenditure for teachers' salaries into a concerted attempt to redesign what happens in the schools themselves and to attack the culture of alienation, apathy and despair which can permeate a whole school from senior teachers to junior pupils". (4)
What is required from educational policy discussion, then, is a search for the missing ingredients in current practice: educational success, and its principal determinants. This cannot be carried out directly because the teachers' unions will not permit any such investigations, and if testing could be performed it would take time before an adequate body of data could be built up. Rather, we have to work from other indications, wherever they may be found. The particular theme of this book is the place of the family in social policy, and there is certainly much to be said about the place of families in education, but before proceeding to that subject we need at least a rough sketch of what leads to educational achievement.
EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT
A recent film, Stand and Deliver, is one possible starting point. The film tells the story of Garfield High, a predominantly Hispanic slum school in East Los Angeles, plagued by drug-taking, vandalism, gang warfare and economic depression of a kind not totally unfamiliar to Australian teachers, The hero is a middle-aged Bolivian-born electronics expert, Jaime Escalante, who in 1982 chose to return to teaching in this unlikely setting. (Escalante is played with conviction by Edward James Olmos who himself grew up in East Los Angeles.) Unable to teach computing because the school had no computers, and unwilling to teach the low-level maths program which the school had designated as suitable for slum teenagers, Escalante decided to badger and cajole his pupils into aiming for the highest possible target: the advanced calculus exam set by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton.
The most interesting aspect of the film is what it shows of Escalante at work in the classroom. His methods are at once both unorthodox and highly conventional. He does not attempt to get students to like him -- he aims to have them take pride in themselves. He has a sense of humour and an affection for his class but those who seek to distract or destroy the teaching process he simply excludes from the class until they are willing to return on his terms. He employs a little showmanship, but its main purpose is to lighten a great deal of hard slog. Much of his instruction is simply rote repetition, but he has a talent for getting students to see the deeper patterns and beauty of mathematics. He stirs up their pride in themselves as (mostly) Hispanics, but he avoids cheap political answers and does not permit them to blame "society" or anyone else for their plight. He dares the students to risk failure, persuading them that the only alternative is the kind of automatic failure to which their surroundings will condemn them anyway. Self-pity has no place in his scheme and even sympathy is for the most part withheld, but his generosity with his time and knowledge is unlimited. The key concept in his approach is "ganas", desire.
Escalante's methods worked. At the end of the year all but one of his original students sat the exam which only two per cent of American students attempt, and all eighteen of the Garfield High team passed it easily, six of them with perfect scores. The authorities were so surprised at the result that the pupils were required to sit the exam again under official supervision, and the process engendered a crisis about whether "the system" is stacked against any such unlikely successes. By now their determination to succeed and their affection for Escalante was enough to get them through the crisis, and they demonstrated once again their ability.
The most unexpected thing about this story is that it is true. Had it been only cinematic fiction it would certainly not have produced the suspension of disbelief that fiction requires. As it happened Hollywood showed no interest in backing such an improbable story, despite its truth to reality. Furthermore, Escalante's success was not a once-off event -- since 1982 the school has increased its calculus success rate every year, with 87 passes in 1987. Stand and Deliver, though it made no great impact in Australia, deserves to be what Summerhill was for the progressive educationalists of the 1960s, and Jaime Escalante should become as familiar a name as A.S. Neill's. One simple and cheap method of improving Australian education would be to show the film every year to all senior school students and teachers.
Stand and Deliver cuts across educational orthodoxies. It shows, as progressives have long insisted, that schools need not neglect as hopeless failures those at the bottom end of the social spectrum. It shows, as progressives have also believed, that in the right circumstances learning can occur at an astonishing speed, and that it can be tremendously exciting. It suggests that the conservatives' insistence on a return to basics is too modest a goal. But, equally, it implies that the progressives' insistence on relevance also lacks ambition. It indicates that we all have a capacity to appreciate the beauty of abstract thought and structured reasoning. It endorses the use of simple rote learning as a means of mastering those structures. It accepts the challenge of examinations as a means of demonstrating achievement. And it shows that real achievements are the secret of genuine self-esteem.
In the past twenty years there have been endless debates about curriculum design and content. Much of this has been a search for something magical, as if it is possible for a curriculum by itself to solve the problems of the classroom. The importance of all this has been much overrated. Some of it has hoped to tap directly into the interests of the students and to lead on from there to larger interests. This approach overlooks the fact that many students find it perfectly possible to cultivate a state of mind which has no interests at all which are even remotely educational. Teachers are then forced into the position of having to lower themselves to the lowest common denominator and thus to neglect those who do not need such condescension. As a matter of fact, neither do those who act as if they do need it. Almost all of these students are perfectly intelligent young people. They are merely using their intelligence in ways which are counterproductive for themselves, for their classmates and for their teachers. Lowering the level of classroom teaching does them no favours at all. Escalante's principle here is that "Students will rise to the level of expectations" held by their teachers and their society. This principle is also, as Stand and Deliver shows, the key to the discipline problem.
The main complaint that many older students have about school is that it is too childish for them at a time when they want to be able to show that they are adults. Reducing the level of the curriculum does nothing towards raising these students' estimate of the value of schooling; it only confirms their suspicion that -- as they see it -- this is an artificial environment in which people play compulsory but pointless middle-class word games. It was partly because calculus is untainted by this infantility that it proved acceptable to the students of Garfield High. What appealed to them was the adultness and toughness of the subject. Calculus is not impossibly difficult, and they did not find it so. The difficulty of calculus is not much greater than the complexity of the social world which bored teenagers construct for themselves.
The example shows also that students do not need to be taught about what goes on in the world immediately around them. They already know as much as they want to know about that world. Why sit in the classroom hearing about the world that they have already explored for themselves and become bored with? Instead of narrowing students' horizons, education should take people to worlds which are beyond their everyday social environment. Far better to teach them Egyptology or classical Indian dance or the evolution of the flowering plants -- but not as a form of entertainment. Calculus was not a diversion in Stand and Deliver. Given a choice between all the subjects best calculated to hold the interest of such a class, it would rank well down the list, along with English grammar, trigonometry, religious studies, Latin and classical music. Escalante persuades his students that "Maths is the great equaliser". The point might be generalised: knowledge itself is the greatest social leveller. In this it differs essentially from fashion and savoir faire, much of which is designed to reinforce arbitrary privilege and social status.
In most schools most of the time the most basic classroom problem is behavioural rather than educational. It is just pathetically easy for a few students who do not want to learn what schools have to teach to monopolise all of a teacher's time, attention and nervous energy. Few teachers are cut out for this war of attrition, while many teenagers thrive on it because it gives them a sense of their own importance which they have not found elsewhere. For those students this is a war which they cannot lose, for if they make the teacher irate they have scored a victory and if they get their way against the teacher's wishes then they have also won. Or at least, they will win all the battles, but eventually they lose the war. Education is a long-term process, and long-term goals are difficult to pursue against those whose whole minds are geared to short-term advantages. It takes a special kind of person to continually shrug off the lack of respect and affection which many teachers experience through no fault of their own. Looked at in this way the wonder is not that we have so many second-rate teachers in the system but that so many good ones remain there.
Jaime Escalante's intuitive grasp of the requirements of educational success is not freakish. Many others have come to the same conclusions, though often only through painful experience. There is nothing in his approach which would have seemed unusual to a good teacher forty years ago. (5) In the United States, this teaching philosophy has acquired a name and some institutional momentum as the "effective schools movement". Don Edgar has summarised its main tenets as follows.
First and foremost, an effective school has a strong principal with a vision of what his/her school can achieve, willing to buck the system and militantly committed to academic achievement. The teachers at such a school are also mavericks, willing to innovate, to tutor pupils outside school hours, to work with parents, and above all, holding high expectations for their pupils.
The spirit of such a school is a united thrust to help children learn, where principal, teachers, parents and students have the same vision of breaking through the poverty barrier. Such schools, however, are not sops to an idealised "democratic togetherness". Instead, there are:
- clearly stated and promptly enforced school rules and penalties
- daily visits by the principal to classrooms and rigorous supervision of staff
- meaningful parent participation in the school program (not just lunch stalls and endless meetings)
- close monitoring of students' progress
- criterion-referenced tests to determine reading groups
- an end to the practice of social promotion from grade to grade and the creation of "promotional gates" at grades 4 and 7, with special reduced-sized remedial classes for those children who were held over because of failure to achieve the basic competency level
- teaching assignments determined by expertise, not teacher preference
- highly-structured, self-contained classrooms modified by some team-teaching and tempered with affection and consideration
- using effective teaching materials (not necessarily those "approved" by the authorities), especially in phonics, maths, word problems, and ethnic (Black) history, culture and literature
- teachers who routinely dispense homework and literary assignments and who devote time to discussing problems with their students and encouraging the interest of parents. (6)
Edgar goes on to comment that "all of these characteristics have one theme in common: that with consistent effort, all children can strive for and achieve excellence and that striving for standards is not an elitist attack on notions of "equity" and "access" but the only sensible goal if these notions are to mean anything at all". Edgar also adds that there should be clear limits to school intervention in family life. "Teachers are neither social workers nor surrogate parents other than by default, and ... the teacher's role should be more specific, less affectively involved, more rational, more intentional and more concerned with the whole group than a parent can or needs to be". On the other hand, "All the research known on this topic shows how strongly every parent feels about the importance of schooling. ... [P]arents will help if they are made feel competent to help". (7)
It is an obvious truth that education at school is continuous with and very much affected by the educational and emotional processes which take place in the child's home -- yet it is an oddly neglected truth. It is of course a truth which cuts in two directions. Family indifference or stress may cause a perfectly capable child to be unteachable even by the best of schools. And conversely, students may progress rapidly in a mediocre school if they enjoy a stimulating home environment. It is also a truth which undermines the emphasis placed upon material factors by some popular educational theories and by much standard educational practice. There is by now much evidence to suggest that the crucial determinants of children's development are intangible factors such as parental interest.
The best known analysis of this question was conducted by James Coleman in the United States as long ago as 1966. Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity Report concluded that "differences between schools account for only a small fraction of the differences in pupil achievement". (8) Subsequent American research has confirmed this finding. According to American child psychologist Jerome Kagan,
During the first half-year [of life], the infant born to parents who have not attended college is not very different from the one born to parents who graduated from college. Yet, by age six, the differences between the two youngsters are dramatic. Something has happened in the intervening years to produce the divergent psychological profiles; it is likely that the reasons for the difference at age six lie with family experiences. (9)
Kagan's observation applies to pre-school development, but much the same continues to hold throughout the schooling years. Australian educational sociologists R.J.R. King and R.E. Young also note that "The positive association between parental encouragement and adolescent academic attainment has been repeatedly substantiated" (though they add that "the ways in which parents convey these attitudes vary across families"). (10)
Moira Eastman says of this that
the implications of this research have been poorly comprehended. Educational research and practice has continued as if the findings were the reverse of what they actually are: as if children's learning in school were primarily related to school policies and programs -- curriculum, books, buildings, teacher training programs and so on -- and only very marginally affected by family factors.
She adds that
we now have a much clearer picture of what are the factors which distinguish those families who create competence, spontaneity, self-esteem, confidence, energy, intelligence and cooperation from the families where self-doubt, depression, hostility, aggression and failure prevail. The key lies, not in the family's material resources, helpful as these may be. The distinguishing variable or variables reside in the way family members relate to one another. (11)
Family factors are not the same as socio-economic status. The fact that educational potential is relatively independent of income is not difficult to show. Basic education is, for the most part, not expensive. Most people own a television set which (although the general standard is poor) does put out some quality programs which will expand a child's world, if parents seek them out. Books are often reasonably affordable even new, and are cheap if bought second-hand. Public library services are free and their resources are very great, in poor as well as wealthy areas. Reading regularly with children requires only a commitment of time. Talking intelligently, in a manner which encourages children to question and reason objectively, is even less costly. Even poor parents can cultivate these practices, and many do so far better than some well-to-do families who take their success and privileges for granted. The essential ingredient here is Escalante's "ganas". The largest barrier to educational success for poor families is lack of access to good schools, and -- as the later part of this chapter will attempt to argue -- this barrier is created by public policy, not by lack of family income.
We do not need to take these connections between family factors and educational success as rigid and invariable. Schools can succeed even against a background of parental indifference or hostility. Escalante's students came from economically deprived backgrounds; their families also showed little interest in their schooling (and in some cases opposed the efforts of the school). But this does not invalidate the main tendency of the research. In any case, Escalante's success involved a shrewd combination of authority and affection, a combination which elsewhere in this book has been taken as the central strategy of all effective parenting. Escalante did not become a substitute parent, but he did provide his students with both the confidence for risk-taking and the criticism by means of which they could measure and regulate their attempts at improving their lot.
These findings on the importance of family factors appear deceptively commonplace, which may be one reason why they have been so much ignored. Another probable reason for overlooking them is that it may seem that not much can be done about them by policy-makers. Certainly it will take some time before they can be properly digested and policy planning can begin to incorporate them. The immediate response should be to promote public awareness of their importance. In the longer view educational planning will need to aim at bringing together schools and homes, at building cooperatively upon the strengths which both possess. There are some simple but effective ways in which this can be done. Teachers can encourage parents to be seen in the classroom and to take part in class activities; they can set homework and reading which requires parent participation. Many teachers and parents appreciate the importance of these practices, and there is no shortage of academic research to support their more intuitive preferences.
However, if this is the right general direction to pursue then perhaps we need to go much further than is presently envisaged. Perhaps we should deem it to be part of their professional duty that teachers visit regularly the homes of each of their students, particularly at the primary school level. The present sharp separation between home and school is, after all, one of the more bizarre features of our society. Most children would be delighted to observe, on their own home territory, some interaction between the most significant adults in their life. Teachers could learn a lot about the particular circumstances of each child. They could discover more of the expectations that parents have for their children. Their role would be not that of an amateur social worker but to establish a sense of connection and to pass on some simple skills. Parents could be reminded -- if they need reminding -- that they have an important part to play in the educational process. Teaching might well become easier if visits led to an improvement in support from families.
A home visiting scheme of this broad kind, the La Trobe Parents and Reading Project, has been conducted and described by Derek Toomey, Toomey observed that programs which encourage parents to participate in the school, because they tend to attract only a minority of parents who are already well-motivated to help their children, are "likely to do little to reduce educational inequality and may well increase it". (12) The La Trobe project sought to overcome this barrier by having teachers and aides visit the child's home. In a pilot test involving a number of disadvantaged pre-schools the result of this approach was that almost all of even the poorest families actively encouraged their children's reading, and rapid improvements in reading performance followed. According to Toomey, "At the heart of the success with these families is the loving, caring attitude of the parent toward the child, the child's enthusiasm for reading, motivated by the school and/or other factors, and the child's responsiveness to the parent". (13)
When, however, the project attempted to achieve the same results with older primary school children the results were less impressive. There were three reasons for this failure: the home visits were conducted by a specially-appointed aide, not by the teacher; the visits were few and infrequent; and the aide preferred to visit families already enthusiastic about the program. We may doubt that special aides are the appropriate response here. Parents do not want to meet intermediaries, they want to get to know their child's teacher. This may be particularly true of those who do not normally participate in activities at the school because they lack the social confidence required to do so. Toomey also observes that, when non-specific extra funding is made available to schools, teachers use it mainly to hire aides to lighten their workloads, not to improve home/school relations. Clearly, to make a program like this succeed educational policy needs to be specific about how the program will operate and who will do the visiting.
Interestingly, Toomey is sceptical about the value of parent participation in school management and policy-formation. He comments that "A recent review by Hawley et al. ... cited five studies finding no relationship between parents' participating in decision-making processes and student achievement". (14) He believes that this strategy for improving home-school relationships is least likely to succeed in disadvantaged areas. He notes also that the Victorian government "has set up a special school Council Support Unit and in each region a school Council liaison worker to support parental participation on school Councils, but has devoted no resources to supporting parents as educators of their own children". In his view, "We need to get to parents through television and radio, the community language press, the churches, the workplace, the social club, the library and the local video loan club". He concludes that "Above all we have to avoid the tunnel vision which sees only schools as the site of legitimate school learning and we need to target available resources to supporting the families' efforts of those who need it most -- students of below average ability whose parents do not feel confident in assisting their learning at home". (15)
To pursue the theme of home/school interactions we need to consider those family factors that might hinder educational objectives, and that might help explain why high educational expenditure apparently has led to little or no improvement in performance. The three most obvious changes in children's lives in recent times are that their mothers are more likely to be in the paid workforce, their parents are more likely to be divorced (and perhaps re-married), and they themselves are more likely to spend much of their spare time watching television. The first of these changes may be less significant than it at first appears. Most mothers of young children who work do so part-time, and to some extent their paid work only replaces work in the home. It is the second and third changes that need to be discussed here.
TELEVISION
Australian children up to age eleven spend on average 1 hour 40 minutes per day, or twelve hours per week, watching television, compared with about 20 minutes reading, 25 minutes on outdoor activities and (for the 5-11 age group) 17 minutes on homework and study. (16) One simple way to lift children's interest in education, and to revitalise family relationships, might be to get rid of the television set. This need not be for a very long period -- twelve months would be quite adequate but a shorter period would do -- and at the end of this time an evaluation of the results could be conducted. Nor need it be painful. One common finding is that children miss television very little; many seem relieved to lose it. Few suffer from any serious "cold turkey" symptoms, and those who do are perhaps those most in need of "drying out". At present few families give themselves the chance to weigh the pros and cons of the matter experimentally and objectively. (17)
The central issue at stake here is the child's confidence in his or her individual capacity for play, invention, fantasy and wonder -- in other words, those things which make childhood so fresh and distinctive and which form the basis of adult creativity. Whether television does or does not dampen this self-confidence can be debated academically, but the matter is not essentially an academic one. The point is for families to try the experiment with an open mind, to discuss it themselves, and to reach their own conclusions.
Children, like all young mammals, are born curious. Language makes their capacity for questioning and investigating even more potent than that of animals. Television brings the world to the living room in vivid colour. We would therefore expect the combination of children's curiosity and television's wide-ranging imagery to be a lively interaction, yet very often -- even when the programs seem interesting to adult eyes -- television seems to act more as a sedative than as a stimulant. Children usually appear mesmerised; they rarely talk about what they have seen; they rarely go away determined to find out more about the subject.
As an educational instrument television has turned out to be roughly on a par with the dullest of old-style schoolmasters or the most vapid of progressive educationalists. Much of the time it manages to combine the spuriousness of the second with the tedium of the former. Its real genius is of course as a baby-sitter, in which capacity it performs the dual role of pacifying the restless natives while persuading their tribal elders that the programs fulfil the missionary task of civilising and educating them. There is no evidence that its missionary gospel is good news. At the very least, after three decades of TV, we would expect children's knowledge of world geography -- the ins and outs of the global village -- to be vastly greater that that of their pre-TV predecessors, yet this is far from being the case. Without some grasp of geography it is of course impossible to take an intelligent interest in world affairs. If geographical understanding has not been improved by television, what has? The question is not easily answered.
Television-watching skills -- "media awareness" -- cannot replace reading skills, simply because the culture of the book is immensely richer and more powerful than that of the screen. Many more children will read Roald Dahl or C.S. Lewis or Asterix or Alice than will encounter them on television; and the performance itself should be regarded as only a prelude to the original. Those who never acquire the reading skills to enjoy the original have been deprived of something special. Similarly, television can introduce a child to the phenomena of the natural world far more excitingly than can a textbook, but it does not usually teach the principles which will give the child a chance to become a competent biologist.
Tele-addiction has one possible side-effect which is not often discussed: it may tend to cause parents to lose confidence in their own capacity as teachers. Children learn far more at home than they do at school, not in the formal sense, but in what they pick up incidentally from conversation and as a by-product of other family activities. But some parental "teaching" is more direct than this. When a child asks why cars have gears the usefulness of the answer will depend less on the parent's knowledge of the subject than on his or her willingness to explore the question. This willingness has to be cultivated -- it requires practice and skill in the interaction between the limited but nimble mind of the child and the broader but duller mind of the adult, and such skill takes time to acquire. It requires a capacity to hear what exactly it is that the child needs to know. It is not a skill well cultivated by years of silent communing with the flickering screen. And the less it is practised the less children will see their parents as people interested in their questions. If, in addition, they come to feel that asking too many questions will disrupt the routine of instruction at school then their curiosity will lack connection with the adult world.
EDUCATION AND DIVORCE
The era of child-centred education turned out to be the era of high levels of divorce, a conjunction which raises questions about the interaction between the two. The most complete research on this issue, Paul Amato's Children in Australian Families, argues against a "simple deficit model" which assumes that children from disrupted families will do worse educationally than children in intact families. His research for the Australian Institute of Family Studies concluded that children from one-parent families appear to be equivalent to children from intact two-parent families in a variety of measures of general competence -- reading ability, practical life skills, self-esteem, social competence, self-control and independence. However, children from step-families did somewhat less well than either of the first two family types. Amato suggests that "gaining a new parent can be more debilitating than losing an old one". As Amato acknowledges, these results are likely to appear surprising to teachers, who tend to expect less from children of sole parents than from other children. (18) In his view the educational disruption caused by divorce is likely to be short-term only. It is to be seen as an emotional crisis rather than as a lasting educational setback.
However, Amato also acknowledges that there is something to be explained in these results. It is a basic assumption of his book that for a child to lose contact with a parent, whether through death or divorce, is tantamount to losing "a major source of nurturing, information and material support". Both his relatively good results from children of one-parent families and the lesser results from children of step-families seem to defy this basic assumption. Amato also argues that "lack of attention from fathers was related to low self-esteem, low self-control, low life-skills, and low social competence among sons and daughters of primary school age". He adds that "these findings indicate that the importance of the father-child bond should not be underestimated by practitioners working with problem children". If attention from fathers is so crucial we would expect its absence to be even more apparent in the lives of children disrupted by divorce than in intact families where the father is unresponsive, remote or work-obsessed. Fathers not living with their children are not likely to have more time with them than fathers in either intact or step-families. While it is possible that in some cases non-custodial fathers will maintain close relationships with their children the evidence is that they tend not to do so. Amato reports on research showing that after divorce "contact between most non-custodial fathers and their children declines rapidly"; and his own work concluded that twenty-six per cent of such children never see their fathers. (19)
We have, then, a paradox: support from fathers is crucial to the growth of competence, but children who lose close contact with their fathers through divorce are unaffected by the loss. Amato tries to resolve this paradox by suggesting that intact families may exhibit levels of "father absence" not markedly different from that in separated families. He contends that "For many children, the actual loss of support from fathers after separation and divorce is probably minimal". He bases this surprising claim on his finding that between one third and one half of all children, whether in intact families or not, would like to spend more time with their fathers. However, his own evidence will not bear the weight of interpretation that he places upon it. In his survey about three-quarters of the children responded that their fathers talked to them "a lot" and two-thirds said that their fathers were "very interested" in them; only 13 per cent said their fathers did not talk to them very much and 11 per cent said their fathers were not very interested in them. (20) To establish Amato's claim that separation and divorce do not reduce children's support from their fathers we must suppose that most separations and divorces come from that small section of the population of families in which fathers play only a minor role, and this is a supposition for which no independent support is given. (These figures include responses from children in one-parent families but are weighted to be representative of the general population. Therefore some of those children who did not get father support would have been children in one-parent families, a fact which further reduces the plausibility of Amato's hypothesis.) If there were a well-established theory showing that families exhibiting "father absence" are likely to end in divorce then Amato's account would be moderately plausible, but the review of this subject in Chapter Seven found no evidence to support this claim, so on those grounds Amato's position is not particularly plausible.
Obviously there is much here that we do not understand, and more work is required. Moira Eastman cites an American longitudinal study which did find significant educational as well as emotional disruption after divorce. (21) And, as Amato notices, many teachers are convinced that they have to patch up the after-effects, both educational and emotional, of the divorce revolution. Others have observed that divorce tends to make children "grow up" very rapidly. This enforced emotional development is contrary to the body of educational theory which speaks of children learning and maturing "at their own pace". It is possible that Amato's step-children often react against their new step-families or against their schools because they have exhausted their emotional reserves in coping with the first transition to a one-parent family. Amato's own insistence on the general importance of fathers is enough to make us wary of claims that divorce and separation do not disrupt a child's normal growth to competence. Beyond that the research evidence will permit no strong assertions. Common sense will have its own views on the matter, but common sense is not a recognised court of appeal in disputes of this kind.
PARENTS, KNOWLEDGE AND DISCIPLINE
The psychological findings about the educational importance of family practices have implications for policy and planning on the larger scale also. Before discussing these it will help to turn to look in some detail at the most important Australian analysis of relations between school and home.
The general theme of Making the Difference, a study of the lives and beliefs of a hundred high school students, published in 1982 and written by R.W. Connell, D.J. Ashenden, S. Kessler and G.W. Dowsett, is indicated by its subtitle, schools, Families and Social Division. Half the hundred pupils were sons and daughters of tradesmen, factory workers, truck drivers and shop workers; the other half were the children of managers, owners of businesses, lawyers and doctors. This suggests that a comparison is to be made between two distinct populations but the reality is a little more complex. The authors have two kinds of "difference" in mind: first, the difference between school achievement levels of children from professional and managerial families and children from families of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers; and second, the differences in school achievement levels of children from independent, Catholic, and state school systems. They produce figures to suggest that "higher status" children are nearly twice as likely to complete secondary school as "lower status" children; and that independent school children are twice as likely to complete secondary school as Catholic school children, who are in turn fifty per cent more likely than state school children to reach that level. Because they interviewed only two groups, higher-status/private-school families and lower-status/state-school families, their study was constructed in such a way as to tend to conflate the status distinction with the private-school/state-school distinction. Quite different conclusions might have been reached if they had compared lower-status/private-school families with higher-status/state-school families.
The authors reject explanations of these results that rest on differences of ability -- "It is emphatically not the case that some groups are less educable than others" (22) -- or differences of family interest. They reject the first claim without any discussion, but in passing we can note that Stand and Deliver can be seen as supporting their preference here: Escalante's students demonstrated quite unexpected abilities. They did so without any help at all from their families. How families help their children towards educational success is a main theme of Making the Difference.
In Chapter Five of the present book we interpreted Alan Jordan's analysis of incomes as showing that Australian society exhibits shades of class difference but no clear-cut class divisions. Making the Difference, like many other works in the sociology of education, interprets the educational evidence as showing that Australia is a class society. However, the general fact that children's educational performance in some way mirrors their parents' status is not obviously a cause for surprise. The home is a "learning environment" quite as much as is the school, and children spend far more of their lives at home than they do in the classroom. If most education takes place at home then naturally children will tend to follow the career paths of their parents. Parents who understand the mysteries of computer programming or automotive electronics or horticulture will tend to pass them on to their offspring. Those who do not pass on their skills are depriving their children of a crucial legacy, and schools have a role in correcting such deprivation; but there is no obvious reason to assume that working-class parents are less likely than middle-class parents to pass on their skills. It is also implausible to expect that schools would ever be able radically to counteract family influences, for the Marxian reason that the educator himself needs to be educated. Education does not stand outside society and family life; it will itself exhibit the limitations of the society and of the families from which it is derived.
Making the Difference contends that the long attempt to provide equality of opportunity for working-class students has failed. It has failed, the authors maintain, because equality of opportunity entails a school system "which divides the working class, undermines its self-confidence, [and] attaches part of its energy and talent to a process of competition". (23) The study tells a story of working-class exclusion from educational policy-making:
With the sole exception of the diffuse demand for more education, it is difficult to think of any major change in state schools postwar that has actually stemmed from demands articulated by their working class clientele. Changes have been imposed upon the working class. ... Whether liked or not, they are things that have happened to these families, rather than things that they and their friends and relations and acquaintances and people like them have caused to happen. (24)
To overcome this, a strategy of "making working-class schools organic to their class" is necessary. What does this mean? Three things, at least:
a closer connection with the knowledge and resources of working-class people, most notably parents; an opening of the school's policy-making to their influence and the kids', and (for that matter) the teachers"; [and] sufficient independence from Departmental control to allow this to happen, though close enough connection with the rest of the education system to be able to draw on resources that aren't available locally. (25)
The argument is clarified in an unexpected way. The authors contend that although their proposed future for working class schools is only sketchy, "ruling class schools" do provide a "working model ... in very good order" from which it is possible to learn.
The ruling-class schools studied in this project are organic to their class in exactly the sense we are talking about here. They help to organise it as a social force; they help to give it its sense of identity and purpose; they form an integral part of its networks; they express common purposes and an agreed (for the most part) division of labour between teachers and parents. As we have seen, they are far from being conflict-free; and as we have also seen, they are far from being the direct and immediate agents of the parents' wishes. Being organic to the class in this case means having a reasonable degree of independence, that makes possible the invention of new strategies and the management of conflicting interests". (26)
This insistence on the necessity of connectedness between working-class life and schooling arises partly from the difficulties encountered in teaching the traditional academic curriculum, but it has other roots in the body of the book. Making the Difference documents graphically the conflict between the values of working-class parents and the style and content of the schooling which their children presently receive in the state secondary schools. On this, however, the authors seem to be critical of the parents rather than of the schools. They observe that:
Eighty years into "the century of the child", none of the working-class parents we interviewed held recognizably child-centred views of education. Most of them clearly supported firm discipline, teacher-centred pedagogy, and job-oriented curricula. ... Education is still defined as the transmission of an accepted body of knowledge, in every context they know about. ... Education is also "socialisation", in the old, full sense of making the asocial infant a fully social being. This means, among other things, learning to do what you're told, hold yourself in check, accept the necessity to do things you don't want to do. It means accepting legitimate authority, deferring to those who are older and wiser than you are, keeping in your proper place. (27)
Obviously, it is crucial for the assessment of the argument to decide whether this approach to schooling is to be counted as an aspect of "making working-class schools organic to their class". There are two issues here, discipline and knowledge. The two are of course related: "the attempt to get most [working-class state school] kids to swallow academic knowledge produces insurmountable problems of motivation and control. Not only because of the abstractness of the content, but also as a consequence of the formal authority relations of its teaching". (28)
On the question of working-class attitudes to knowledge the authors remark that "What seems to us to be missing from most accounts of the matter is the widespread, non-instrumental, respect for education that is ... present among working-class families. The teachers who see working-class suburbs as cultural deserts are entirely wrong in this sense". (29) Making working-class schools "organic to their class" must incorporate this understanding if it incorporates anything at all. The authors' recommendations for achieving this are very sketchy, but that may be more a consequence of long years of neglect than a failure of the authors themselves.
Making the Difference advocates that the curriculum in working-class state schools should give the students "access to formal knowledge via learning which begins with their experience and the circumstances which shape it, but does not stop there". The authors reject the progressive educationalists' search for a more "relevant and meaningful" curriculum on the grounds that its content "is often a matter of personal preference, reflecting the kids' immediate world rather than expanding or explaining it". (30) Their own strategy is intended to overcome the present resistance to academic learning. The study says nothing about how this can be done without a mastery of the basic skills of literacy and numeracy. (Calculus is perhaps not likely to rate highly in any such redesigned curriculum.)
On the question of discipline the authors reject the parents' position. In their view, "A shift to heavier-handed discipline is a recipe for more conflict, not stabler authority, in the schools". (31) They do not underestimate the importance of the question, and they note that many parents
see kids answering back to teachers, classes in uproar, apparently unplanned curricula, no measurable learning; and they are worried. Some see it reacting back on the family and creating discipline problems there. If this is what new ideas in education mean, they could do with less of them. (32)
Elsewhere in the book there is evidence that this is a central problem in many schools (both independent and state, though much more acute in the state system), and that both teachers and some students are as worried about it as the parents. Teachers get tired of "the unending guerrilla-war aspect of classroom life" in working-class schools. As a result they adopt a "keep your distance" strategy and concentrate on surviving from day to day. The authors also observe, though without giving it much weight, that students accept and even like "discipline" if it is fair and purposeful, showing that the class is going somewhere. Students universally dislike slack teachers; they like those who feel "there is something to be got out of school". On this evidence it is difficult to see who is being served by schools which are incapable of establishing their own authority. (33)
The question of discipline needs to be taken further. Sheer authority needs to be used as sparingly as possible; its effectiveness suffers from the law of diminishing returns. What is needed more than authority or affection is a sense of purpose and a vision of what schooling aims to achieve. It is the loss of this sense of purpose which is at the bottom of the problem. This takes us back to John McLeod's observation noted in Chapter Eight that
generally when a child was in deep trouble in his or her behaviour, he or she would go out of their way to take on the strongest, most visible adults available. Sometimes they would run up against an unwilling person or crash through the defences of the nearest adult. Often they would find the response they sought and needed, regardless of the authoritarian or progressive style of the teacher. (34)
Compliant, bland, agreeable teachers present no challenge; tough, idiosyncratic, straight-talking teachers they can learn from. And similarly, a bland, unchallenging, "relevant" curriculum is equally unlikely to command respect. Without high expectations schools head into a downward spiral of aimlessness and authoritarianism. The raising of expectations both requires and justifies the imposition of limits on disruption in the classroom.
Teachers do have authority by virtue of their position but it needs to be made credible by the authority of their superior knowledge and wisdom. High expectations can only be generated by teachers who expect a lot of themselves, and who set a high value on knowledge and understanding. A profession which recognised this would not hesitate to have its members' knowledge of their subject matter tested periodically. It would reward those who demonstrate high levels of intellectual competence and the ability to pass on those skills to others. This must involve both a system of pupil assessment and the salary system. A profession concerned to show what it can achieve would be keen to design and employ fair tests of student progress. (35) It would provide recognition and rewards for teacher performance and productivity, particularly for those who (like Escalante) find ways, however unorthodox, to raise the levels and morale of the more backward pupils. A lockstep salary system, like lockstep pupil promotion, conveys to teachers and students the message that education is a routine matter in which advancement requires no special effort and has no particular purpose.
EDUCATION VOUCHERS
Thus far in this chapter three theses have been put forward. The first is that teachers who have high expectations of their students will generate high levels of performance and high self-esteem, whereas teachers who hope to generate self-esteem by lowering expectations will achieve neither results nor self-confidence. Secondly, the literature on parents and schools suggests that progress in education requires close interaction between the home and the school. Thirdly, Making the Difference has shown that what many parents want from their schools is more knowledge and a greater sense of purpose. All three bear upon the way in which educational funding is organised and allocated.
Making the Difference indicates some deeper structural reasons for the relative success of independent schools and the relative failure of working-class state schools. The authors note that "The private school is much less secure in its very existence than the state school. ... [T]he vulnerability of such schools, and the uncoerced nature of attendance there, is crucial for the way they operate and for the role they play in class relations". These schools are in the main "much more open to parents' approaches". The parents "find it easier to include the kids' schooling as an integral part of the families' collective practices". Independent schools have higher expectations of their teachers. In the state schools "There is no principal breathing down [the teachers'] necks for 100 per cent pass rates at Matriculation; who in their right mind would expect anything like that?". (36)
The reader would expect Making the Difference to advocate structural changes which will enable working-class students to enjoy similar advantages to those that make private schools "working models in very good order", but at this point the authors draw back from what appears to be the logic of their position. They will allow that "Since Departmental control does produce a bruising experience of bureaucracy for many parents, the "freedom to choose" represented by "voucher" schemes and "private enterprise" in schooling may temporarily appear attractive". But, they say,
it's not a hard calculation to recognize that for the working class this would mean a thinner spreading of already inadequate resources, a futile multiplication of efforts, and, above all, not the organization and empowering of the working class but its greater vulnerability and deeper internal division. Under any conceivable conditions, an educational market will advantage the rich, and no-one else. (37)
Considering the importance of the question for the logic of their case this is a very peremptory dismissal, and it forces the reader to do the authors' thinking for them. There are three objections being put forward here -- inadequate resources, futile multiplications, and divisiveness.
Are working class state schools at present inadequately resourced? Making the Difference does not elsewhere suggest that this is a reason why they do not succeed. Rather, it speaks of a school system which for twenty-five years "expanded at a tremendous pace". It talks about "educators who had come to rely on continuing growth almost as a natural law". It does express concern at the "running-down of a range of programs concerned to enliven and support public schooling, such as the Disadvantaged Schools Program, and the abolition of others, such as the Schools Commission's Innovations Program and the Education Research and Development Committee", but none of this is central to the theme of the book. (38) In any case it is difficult for anyone to deny the accuracy of Susan Ryan's remark quoted above about government having for a long time poured buckets of money into the education system in an indiscriminate manner. What makes Making the Difference an interesting exploration is that it does not fall back on the hackneyed plea of "more money for education".
Would a voucher system entail a "futile multiplication of efforts"? It would certainly generate a multiplicity of educational experiments, but why should this be thought of as futile? Is it not centralised bureaucratic thinking to imagine that there is only one correct answer to the problem of education? The authors themselves speak critically of the tendency towards "standardisation of curricula and tighter central control of schools". (39) Do the independent schools exhibit the "futility" being objected to? The whole tenor of the book suggests that they achieve their goals with considerable efficiency: they give their students a "sense of purpose and identity", they equip them with social and intellectual skills, they help to organise their class as a social force, and so on. Surely this is what the authors want working class schools to do? The role of government in education should be to govern the ends of education, not the means. As American educator Chester Finn has observed, "The ends of education should be universal, and should be determined by policy makers, and should be inviolable by schools, and should be achieved for all students in all schools ... The practice of regulating the processes of education and the means of education and then leaving people to their own choices about the ends is exactly backwards. We should regulate the ends, the outcomes, but leave people highly flexible with respect to the means". (40)
Would a voucher system produce "greater vulnerability and deeper internal division" in the working class? Making the Difference gives no reason for believing that it would. Much of the book indicates that working class people are fairly clear and united about what they want from an education system, and that they generally believe they are not getting it from the present system. What they want, the book shows, is more knowledge and more discipline. Only a system which takes seriously this desire can be counted as "organic to the working class". The book shows that working-class wishes are systematically thwarted by the present system, for both ideological and structural reasons. A more flexible structure would be more responsive to the actual wishes of real people.
Perhaps the underlying objection to freedom of choice is that it would result in competition rather than cooperation between working-class people? Middle-class families, it seems to be suggested, are inherently competitive, and working-class families inherently cooperative. This is a tendentious claim but let us suppose it has some general resemblance to reality. In that case, working-class schools set up under a voucher system will reflect that truth, and thus exhibit a cooperativeness which is "organic to the working class". The assumption that giving freedom of educational choice to working class families will cause them to make decisions which are class-divisive implies that their class cohesion is caused by the absence of freedom, a claim which is both paradoxical and improbable. In places Making the Difference seems to regret the demise of the old technical schools, which, it says, "for 40 years had been the educational pride of the labour movement". If, as it also insists, the replacement of these schools by "a particular form of comprehensive schooling has done great damage to working-class kids and working-class interests" then an obvious case exists for restoring that pride by returning to a system over which working-class people have a measure of control. (41)
Elsewhere it is contended that "Public education should be defended precisely because it is a public service, our only chance of asserting the common good as the highest principle of educational policy, in the face of rampant private interest". (42) This claim is somewhat confused. Education is mostly a private good -- the benefits are enjoyed by the recipient -- just as is food or exercise or housing. Teaching may in some cases be undertaken as a form of service to the poor, but if so it primarily serves the private interests of disadvantaged people, not the common good of society. There is no reason at all why teachers might not devote themselves to helping the poor within the framework of a voucher system, even in a voucher system which abolished all state schools -- which is in any case a most unlikely eventuality. Within such a system good teachers, following the Escalante example perhaps, could set up their own schools in poor areas and attract students by the quality of their performance, thus putting second-rate state schools out of business. Of course a fair-minded society would want a system framed so that the poor are given an adequate share of resources, and it would also want to prevent exploitation by "rampant private interests", but those are different points.
No Australian educational research has made a more powerful case for a voucher system than that made unintentionally by Making the Difference. But to pursue the matter further we need to examine the literature explicitly on this subject. George Fane, who in 1984 prepared a major study for the Economic Planning Advisory Council entitled Educational Policy in Australia, has argued that "the present funding policies only manage to target the schooling subsidies towards the poorer families because the government schools fail to deliver the kind of education most parents want". Fane's conclusions were based partly on 1981 statistics from the Commonwealth Schools Commission showing not only that (as is well-known) state schools spend more per child than Catholic schools but also, and surprisingly, that government schools have higher recurrent expenditure per child than the non-Catholic non-government schools.
Measured by expenditure per child the government schools are, on average, the most affluent and if they could use their resources as efficiently as the private schools they would have driven the private schools out of business long ago. ... Everyone is eligible to go to the government schools and they spend the most -- so how come the private schools can survive? The obvious answer in my opinion is that the incentives, or rather, disincentives, within the government schools have greatly reduced their ability to produce what parents want. (43)
According to Fane, "Present policy, which provides free places at government schools and smaller government contributions for children at private schools amounts to a voucher, equal to the expenditure on education per child in government schools, combined with hidden taxes on those who send their children to private schools".
More recent statistics, from the Department of Employment, Education and Training, modify Fane's premises but do not alter his basic case. (44) They show that the Catholic secondary schools are still behind the state schools but the other independents are now clearly ahead of the state. However, if we take the aggregate figures for the non-government sector, it turns out that the state secondary schools are still being subsidised by on average $1400 per pupil. The state system still outspends the private by $3720 - 3561 = $159, though not by the massive advantage apparent in the 1982 CSC figures. (In primary schools, the subsidy is about $950 per pupil and the expenditure difference is about $317 per pupil in favour of government schools.) It remains very much the case that, as Fane put it, "the present taxes on private educational spending shelter the government schools from competition with private schools". (45)
Tom Brennan has aptly likened this situation to the old practice of employers paying their workers not with cash but with credits for goods to be purchased in the employer's shops at the employer's prices. He remarks that "If we really think in a particular case -- like education, for example -- that we know what people want or need better than they do, let us say so and why. Let us not tell them that they need our help to enable them to choose what we happen to have to sell". (46) Until some clear justification for this favouritism is provided or the favouritism is abolished, educational policy will remain irrational. If, as Making the Difference indicates, most working-class parents are not getting the kind of education they want for their children, then the question of fair choice becomes a matter of social justice.
But to think clearly about education policy it is necessary to have a picture of the larger framework of government spending and taxing. The actual situation here seems to be contrary to some common assumptions. In Australia, the net effect of all government spending and taxing is progressive. (47) But it is more difficult to discover the actual impact of educational expenditure. How should the incidence of educational expenditure be determined? Any educational policy will perforce contain at least an implicit answer to this question. We can be clearer about the aims of education only if we are explicit about the question of allocation. Perhaps the most commonly accepted and intuitively plausible answer to the question is that educational expenditure should be allocated equally to each child. This leaves difficulties with expenditure on optional, higher education and with expenditure on private school pupils, for clearly at present neither of these cases conforms to a policy of equal allocation. It is also likely to come under attack from those who think the net effect of a proportional tax system and an equal allocation of educational resources is not a sufficiently progressive form of redistribution. (They may even deny that this is progressive at all, but in this they would be mistaken. The fallacy here is to assume that because only equal amounts of expenditure are being allocated to each child such expenditure does not have an equalising effect. It does, because most of the money is being taken from the better-off families.) A further line of objection is that educational expenditure should favour specially disadvantaged groups -- the disabled, the mentally handicapped, racially disadvantaged groups -- to give them an equal chance of success.
The central difficulty in public provision of services which might have been provided (at least in part) by the recipient for herself, or by her family for her, is that it is impossible to tell whether the value to the recipient of the services is equal to the per capita amount of the expenditure. In the absence of a market for the services there can be no price indicators to guide government providers. It may be that the voting mechanism does duty for the market mechanism with some degree of success as a device for rationing public expenditure, but one can only vote for an entire policy package which is unlikely to contain the policies one would prefer for every area of government activity.
The difference between funding for state and funding for independent schools amounts to a form of taxation for the purpose of redistributing income. As such it may be perfectly justifiable, but to be justifiable it must meet the standard requirements of taxation fairness. This is where it fails. It may be that in general those who choose private schools are wealthier than those who choose state schools, but as a generalisation this is only a crude approximation to reality. No tax system should be permitted this degree of inexactitude. As a form of taxation the present system fails to meet the elementary requirements of horizontal equity. It taxes heavily poorer families who send their children to independent schools, and the tax deters other such poorer families who would like to send their children to independent schools. It also fails to tax those wealthier families who send their children to state schools, though their capacity to pay such a tax is exactly the same as that of the many families who do use the private schools. The only way to eliminate such inequities is to allocate educational expenditure according to family means, and not according to family choice. About all such choices government has an obligation to remain neutral. It is not in a position to determine what is best for each or any family.
The central difficulty in all voucher schemes concerns not equity or efficiency, by which criteria vouchers are clearly preferable to the present system, but at what level to set the value of the voucher. If the voucher is to be set at the present average cost of a place in a state school -- say $3600 in 1987 dollars -- then taxes will have to be raised to pay for the increased assistance to private school pupils. If the level is set at the average cost per pupil of present state subsidies to private education -- say $2000 in 1987 dollars -- then the net effect is no different from the present system and the voucher's advantages of efficiency and equity are lost. This second option is no option at all. Any solution will need to move some way towards the first proposal. But how far? And how to do it without raising taxes?
It is certainly not inevitable that a voucher scheme would in the long run increase total educational expenditure. The efficiency gains should ensure a long-run reduction in expenditure. And those efficiency gains could make a voucher scheme self-financing. Consider a voucher set at the mid-point between the average state school subsidy and the average private school subsidy, $2800 in 1987 dollars. If there is no net movement from state to private schools then such a scheme will cost $800 times the number of private school pupils. But if an exodus from the state schools caused the number of private school pupils to double the scheme would cost nothing (leaving aside capital costs for the moment). The increase in one kind of subsidy would be balanced by the reduction in the other kind.
Whichever view we take of vouchers, a very large question remains; How can it be that in twenty years educational expenditure per child has doubled in real terms without, apparently, any demonstrable improvement in educational performance? Working out new directions and strategies in education will in part require retrospective analysis aimed at answering that question. Some sketchy suggestions have been made in this chapter, but almost everything remains to be done.
Appendix: School Expenditure, $ per Pupil, 1987
| Primary | Secondary | |
| Government schools | 2483 | 3720 |
| Catholic schools Commonwealth grants State grants Contributed services Other private inputs Total | 1045 505 102 463 2115 | 1581 807 113 921 3422 |
| Other non-government schools Commonwealth grants State grants Contributed services Other private inputs Total | 858 480 194 1262 2794 | 1151 747 46 2667 4611 |
| All non-government schools Commonwealth grants State grants Contributed services Other private inputs Total | 1031 503 109 523 2166 | 1531 800 105 1125 3561 |
Note: These figures do not include government grants for capital works, which may be slanted towards expenditure on state school buildings and grounds. They also exclude expenditure on superannuation and long service leave for state school teachers.
Source: Department of Employment, Education and Training, Schooling in
Australia: Statistical Profile No. 2, Canberra: AGPS, 1989, Tables 4.6 and 4.8.
ENDNOTES
1. Freebairn et al., Spending and Taxing: Australian Reform Options, 94. Peter Karmel ("Quality and Equality in Education", 279f) calculates that "the real volume of resources devoted to education in Australia had, over a 20-year period [from 1958 to 1978], increased almost fivefold".
2. "Quality and Equality in Education", 281f.
3. Quoted in ibid., 283.
4. Hogan, Public versus Private Schools, 13, 16.
5. See e.g. Highet, The Art of Teaching (1950), or Brogan, The Educational Revolution (1954)
6. Poverty and its Impact on Educational Life-Chances, 8f, summarised from Social Policy 15 (1984).
7. Ibid. 11f.
8. Quoted in Eastman, Family: The Vital Factor, 12.
9. Kagan, The Nature of the Child, 276. Kagan, however, regards the claim that family influences are crucial as unproven.
10. King & Young, A Systematic Sociology of Australian Education, 158.
11. Eastman, Family: The Vital Factor, 20, 48. In Part 2 Eastman documents the evidence on "creative family processes" in a way which avoids the tautological thesis that successful families produce successful children. See also Jencks et. al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. Jencks observes categorically that "school resources do not appear to influence students' educational attainments at all" (159). Other research has tended to show that educational success has little to do with teacher/pupil ratios (Hanushek, "Throwing Money at Schools" and "The Economics of Schooling: Production efficiency and government schools").
12. Toomey, Home-School Relations and Inequality in Education, 5, and Children's Reading and Parental Involvement.
13. Home-School Relations, 12.
14. Ibid. 7; Hawley et al., "Good schools: What Research Says About Improving Educational Achievement".
15. Home-School Relations, 30f.
16. ABS Cat. 4111.1, 1987, Table 1.7. These figures are based on a Sydney survey; they may not be universally valid.
17. In The Plug-In Drug, Marie Winn argues the case for most of the claims here sketched very briefly. And see also Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. The research evidence is summarised in Hodge & Tripp, Children and Television: a Semiotic Approach. They conclude that although children who do poorly in school watch more television than those who do well, there is no evidence of a direct causal relation between the two. They may be right, but if we think of television as playing a role in wider family patterns, we would expect some complex causal relationships here.
18. Amato, Children in Australian Families, 142-48, 153.
19. Ibid. 15, 99, 106, 113.
20. Ibid. 124, 31f.
21. Family: The Vital Factor, 18f.
22. Connell et al., Making the Difference, 110.
23. Ibid. 197.
24. Ibid. 139.
25. Ibid. 201f.
26. Making the Difference, 202.
27. Ibid. 60.
28. Ibid. 199.
29. Ibid. 62.
30. Ibid. 199.
31. Ibid. 61.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid. 102f.
34. Embling, Fragmented Lives, 50.
35. Pupil testing appears now to be back on the agenda. In 1991 New South Wales will test every Year 3 and Year 7 student. In other states the question is probably not "whether?" but "when?".
36. Making the Difference, 81, 54, 89f.
37. Ibid. 202.
38. Making the Difference, 25, 203.
39. Ibid. 205.
40. Chester Finn on "Education Now" interview, ABC Radio, June 1989.
41. Making the Difference, 20, 198.
42. Ibid., 207.
43. Fane, "Education and Society", 25. Fane argues his position more fully in Education Policy in Australia.
44. Department of Employment, Education and Training, Schooling in Australia: Statistical Profile No. 2. See Appendix to this chapter.
45. Fane, Education Policy in Australia, 45.
46. Brennan, "Commentary", in Henderson (ed.), The Welfare Stakes, 41.
47. See Figures 2.1 and 5.1 above.
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