In Paris last Wednesday, the OECD's 2001 survey comparing education expenditure across nearly 40 countries, Education at a glance, was released.
In Sydney the following day, the Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, launched a report from Monash University claiming that Australia was failing as a Knowledge Nation and that not enough was being spent on schools and universities. Many of the Monash report's conclusions were based on last year's OECD's survey.
It's perhaps not surprising that Beazley did not refer to the OECD's more recent survey, because its major findings contradict the argument that our education spending is low by international standards.
Given that the majority of OECD members are Western European countries locked into high rates of unemployment and low rates of productivity, it might be questionable why we should seek to compare ourselves with them in the first place. But given that it's impossible to say when "enough is enough" in terms of spending, some sorts of comparisons are inevitable.
The survey shows that on many indicators Australia is spending more on education than the OECD average. More importantly, it unambiguously says that levels of spending "cannot automatically be equated" with the quality of educational outcomes. Given the prevailing belief that the only thing necessary to create a Knowledge Nation is increased public expenditure, the OECD's survey is welcome.
According to the most recent available data (1998) OECD countries spend an amount equal to 3.5 per cent of their gross domestic product on school education. Our expenditure under that heading is 3.8 per cent. And our spending on tertiary education is at exactly the OECD average.
Australia's total education expenditure of about $30 billion is 5.5 per cent of GDP while the OECD total is 5.7 per cent. The reason for this difference can be attributed almost entirely to Canberra's less-than-average spending on pre-school education.
What emerges from the survey is not a picture of a country lagging behind the world's best, but of a country doing much better than many commentators would have us believe.
For example, Australia has one of the highest rates of science graduates in the youth labour force in the OECD, comparable with Finland and Ireland, and nearly double the rate of the US.
The need to reverse the brain-drain and pay academics on a scale comparable with their US counterparts is often given as a reason why spending on universities should be raised. In fact, Australia spends relatively more than the US on tertiary education if only government expenditure is taken into account. But overall, the US spends the equivalent of 2.3 per cent of its GDP on universities while Australia spends 1.6 per cent. The difference between the countries is that in the US private contributions (mostly tuition fees) account for more than half of all university funding, while Australia doesn't come close to approaching this figure.
Critics who fear that university deregulation will create a US-style system that disadvantages poorer students should read the OECD survey. As it says: "Many countries in which students and their families spend more on tertiary education show some of the highest tertiary participation and completion rates, " and it says that the charging of fees does not necessarily create economic barriers.
The case of Hungary illustrates that simple expenditure measures reveal little about learning achievement. In 1995, its science results were ranked at the OECD average according to an international test of 13-year-olds. In 1999, in the corresponding test, Hungary was the top-ranked nation.
Between those two surveys Australian students moved from slightly below to slightly above the average. But between 1995 and 1998 Hungary decreased its spending on school education by 9 per cent, while Australia increased its spending by 18 per cent.
There are many factors that contribute to learning outcomes. Unfortunately, what passes for debate about education policy in this country has been concentrated entirely on only one of those factors government spending.
A major German review, released at the end of last year, in analysing those science test results concluded that the stronger the competition between schools in a system and the greater their autonomy, the better the student results. And a study released earlier this year of catholic schools serving children from low-income families in Los Angeles showed that according to test scores and drop-out rates those schools performed better than local government schools.
Decades of research demonstrates that matters such as the degree of parent choice and the way schools are organised are just as significant in determining student outcomes as the size of a country's education budget.
A debate on the shape of Australia's schools and universities must embrace questions about diversity and choice, the role of testing and assessment, and more generally the accountability of the system. Any discussion of a Knowledge Nation that concentrates on whether we're one or two decimal points away from an OECD average misses the point.
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