Also published on 3 June 2000 by Canberra Times as "Adding Reform to the Three Rs"
Why are Australian parents voting with their children's feet and fleeing to private schooling of all persuasions? Since the Howard Government removed the restrictions on creating new private schools, the increase in the number of private schools students has been more than twice as much as the increase in government school enrolments, giving private schools an enrolment growth rate more than five times that of government schools.
That this is so represents a tragedy of several dimensions. I speak with some feeling, being a child of public education trained as a teacher, the nephew of a teacher in the public school system, the son of a father who trained for the same and the grandson of a founder-member of the NSW Teacher's Federation. My teacher Aunt epitomises this long-term trend, sending both her children to private schools to complete their secondary education.
It is not as if government does not spend enough money. Back in 1972/73, Australian governments spent about $600 per Australian on education services, now they spend about $1100, not including the almost $5bn spent on [capital investment and on] income support for students (inclusion of which would raise expenditure to over $1300 per Australian). Private spending has gone up much more, however. In 1972/73, households spent about $90 per Australian on education services, now they spent almost $440 per Australian. (All figures are adjusted for inflation). Household spending on education services has increased from about 15% of total spending to 30%.
People are voting with their children's feet and their wallets. Why this is so is a mixture of increased prosperity -- as people become more prosperous, they spend more on education -- as well as cultural and institutional factors.
There was a time when the public school system attracted as teachers people of serious intellect and cultural aspiration who were barred by mere accident of birth from university. Alas, the cream of the working class has long since been replaced by the also-rans of the middle class (and please do not write in to say you are an honourable exception, as an Adelaide Review reader I am sure you are).
The rot is, apparently, nowhere near as bad in France and Germany as it is in the Anglomorph countries. But in the former, concepts of cultural achievement, aspiration and preservation are in much healthier state than they are in the Anglo countries, where the sustained assault on any concept of possessing a Western culture worth preserving has had the predictable effects of a student body directed overwhelmingly to material achievement -- cultural achievement being largely denied them -- and governments with crassly utilitarian concepts of education, particularly higher education. What other language of justification for expenditure is left to them? Especially given the "social justice" propagandising that has mostly replaced cultural achievement rests largely on a rejection of the mainstream values most parents believe in.
With the collapse of a strong sense of providing access to a rich and invigorating culture, the inherent institutional failings of public education have come to the fore.
Who is the body responsible for setting the rules under which the education industry operates? The State government, particularly the Minister for Education. Who is the body responsible for ensuring those rules are enforced? The same. Who is the biggest producer of education? The same.
Having the same person be rule-maker, rule-enforcer and most important player represents a colossal conflict of interest. We certainly would not run the AFL like that -- imagine having the Collingwood Club board set the AFL's rules and the Collingwood coach being the chief umpire. So why do we run our schools that way?
This conflict of interest is fatal both to proper accountability and to achieving quality education. After all, is any Minister of Education or Ministry of Education going to get up and tell the public they are doing a bad job? And are they likely to seriously set up and maintain systems that would provide information leading to that conclusion?
The conflict of interest is even greater if teacher unions and teachers are major participants in candidate preselection in a governing political party, as is the case with the ALP in Australia and the Democratic Party in the US.
A perfect example is provided by the "normalising" of tertiary-entrance (TER) scores, so that they form a nice neat bell-curve distribution. This has two major effects. First, it makes it impossible to use published TER scores to compare the performance of the public school system from year to year. Second, because students' scores are adjusted for the ranking of their school, it penalises good students from low-rated schools (whose scores get "normalised" downwards) and rewards poor students from high-rated schools (whose scores get "normalised" upwards). This process can become incredibly perverse -- for example, because non-English speaking background is a sign of "disadvantage", adjusting down the scores of students from migrant backgrounds because above-average success shows they have been "overmarked".
Normalising is allegedly done to allow easy ranking of students. This is nonsense: the raw scores would do just as well. Indeed, the raw scores are the only information from each individual student the entire process uses. Normalising is bureaucratic make-work which shields the system from effective accountability about its year-to-year performance. It is also an unjust system because its penalises bright students from schools which are typically in low-income areas and rewards students typically from high-income suburbs. But since the watchdog of the public interest is also the producer being protected, this unjust frustration of accountability marches on.
While, because of this conflict of interest, there is little systematic evidence about the year-to-year performance of the school system, get a group of people who teach in higher education together and it is not hard to turn the conversation to the quality of the students coming through. The news is pretty depressing: stories of declining knowledge and literacy, universities setting up disguised remedial English classes, the pattern of decline being so obvious that one can see it year by year.
The standard cry is more money is needed. This, unfortunately, is nonsense. It would be nice if education was a simple "black box" affair where one shoved money and intentions in one end and appropriate results poured out the other. The black box theory is certainly one education bureaucrats and teaching unions are very fond of, as it means that the answer to every problem is more money, more teachers and smaller classes.
But education is not a simple black box. There is a great deal of evidence that education outcomes are, at best, only weakly connected to expenditure.
The United States has provided the definitive proof that the solution is not money. In Kansas City, over a 12 year period from 1985 to 1997, US Federal District Judge Clark took charge of the school district of 36,000 students, mandating the spending of almost $US2 billion. A lot was bought with the money -- 15 new schools, student-teacher ratios of 12 or 13 to 1 (the lowest in the US) and opulent facilities. The one thing which was not bought with all that money was improved educational outcomes. The students' test scores did not improve, the black-white gap did not diminish and the schools became less, not more, racially integrated. International comparison of student skills also show no clear connection between expenditure and achievement.
If the black box theory is wrong, then we have to look at the performance of education bureaucrats and teachers, at their accountability and the incentives they face -- something highly uncongenial for them.
At which point we are back to the besetting problem of public ownership -- having the person setting and enforcing the rules also being a major player. Governments just can't help themselves, they give themselves free kicks.
The resistance to publishing test results by schools, to testing students for literacy and numeracy are further instances of how having the main producer set the rules creates a conflict of interest which fundamentally undermines accountability and any real pressure to perform.
Dissatisfaction with the public school system has been longstanding and has lead to wave after wave of "reforms" such that reform fatigue is now a real issue. Yet none of the reforms has seriously tackled this conflict of interest. (Apart from the Federal governments' freeing up of the ability to set up new private schools, which has seen a boom in private schooling despite it being more expensive for parents). So the dissatisfaction continues, leading to endless reshuffling while schools and students remain trapped within the institutionalised conflict of interest. Australian children do not deserve the public education most of them now get.
The first thing which needs to be done is to separate regulation of education from schooling provision. The ideal way to do that is to turn public schools into individual corporations owned by the parents and completely separate from the Education Department and the Minister.
This is the direction education reform is heading in the US. Over 500 "charter schools" -- autonomously run schools -- have been created in the last few years. About 10% are run as for-profit operations, with the number growing. Given that only about half all public school employees in the US are teachers (2.4 million out of 4.5 million), that public schools operate with five times more noninstructional personnel per student than parochial schools and that noninstructional and support activities consume 42 per cent of public education spending in the US, it is not surprising that there turns out to be considerable scope for improved efficiency. Such figures are typical results of the "producer capture" that comes from government ownership with the consequent lack of an effective owner combined with the producer-as-regulator conflict of interest.
Soviet-style, centralised command-and-control methods of production have been thoroughly discredited. Our school system should be liberated from them as well.
Instead of funding schools, funding should be directed to students and paid by Treasury Departments. Education Departments should be corporatised and be required to offer their services on the open market to schools, who can choose to purchase them or not. There should be a points system -- on a scale of, say, five to ten -- based purely on indicators of educational disadvantage. The more "points", the higher the funding that student attracts.
There should be compulsory testing of literacy and numeracy, with the average results by school being published -- both the basic average and compared to the disadvantage profile of the school, with bonuses being paid if results are significantly better than the disadvantage profile would predict. Tertiary entrance should be by an examination run by an independent body with a system which allows results to be compared from year to year.
Schools would become far more accountable, the body setting and enforcing the rules would no longer have a crippling conflict of interest, funding would be directed to where need was greatest, and schools would be given powerful incentives to do better.
Teacher unions -- who have turned defending mediocrity and failure into an art form -- and education bureaucrats would scream. As would all those who value public education mainly as a way to propagandise at children. But primary and secondary education would no longer be an expensive scandal and our children would get the educations they deserve.
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