The Gonski report on school funding follows in the path of every other government report on schooling of the past 40 years. It identifies the problem of falling education standards. In reading, Australian students have fallen from having the second-highest standard in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to seventh in the past 10 years. In mathematics the fall has been from fifth to 13th. Gonski's solution is more money, $5 billion more, with most of it to go to poor schools.
This latest report will make no more difference than any of the reports that have gone before. Julia Gillard, who commissioned it when she was still education minister, has already indicated that a budget surplus is a higher priority than spending more on schools.
The Prime Minister could have said, but didn't, that the international research demonstrates reasonably conclusively that the relationship between education funding and student outcomes is tenuous. This is the point made by an important report from the Grattan Institute released in the lead-up to the Gonski report.
The Grattan Institute identified that average spending per student in the OECD rose 34 per cent between 2000 and 2008. In Australia it went up 44 per cent. Yet over the same period the performance of Australian students actually fell.
The Grattan Institute's finding that more money is not the answer is the same conclusion that I and Brian Caldwell, then dean of education at the University of Melbourne, reached in 2002. In Australia's Education Choices, prepared for the Menzies Research Centre, we said: ''Numerous studies have shown that beyond a certain level, increases in education spending do not necessarily provide superior education outcomes.''
Unfortunately, evidence does not determine the level of education spending in this country, industrial and political pressure does.
It's impossible to understand what's happening to education in 2012 without appreciating some history. Since the 1970s, school education policy in Australia has been essentially centred on three deeply ideological conflicts: the public versus private debate; the question of whether education should be homogenised or specialised; and the issue of whether teaching is an industry or a profession.
Just about everything that has happened in schooling in this country is the result of a state or federal Labor or Coalition government coming down on one side of these conflicts. Let's take them in turn.
In The Republic, Plato wrote that a ruling class could and should use what is taught to children to control society. The insight that education shapes the political and economic structure of a community was taken up by a teacher in Brazil named Paulo Freire. In 1968, he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, probably the most influential book on education ever written.
Inspired by Marx and Gramsci, Freire argued that the rich and powerful, ''the ruling class'', use education to maintain their power against the lower classes. The tools of the ruling class include teachers who instruct students rather than letting them be liberated to discover things for themselves; the testing and grading of students (which promotes competition rather than co-operation and which creates ''winners'' and ''losers''); and academic examinations (in which the wealthy invariably do better and gain access to further and better education).
Freire's call to arms was taken up around the world. Twenty years later in Australia it helped produce the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). As originally conceived, the VCE abolished external exams, eliminated marking (replaced by ''descriptions of attainment'') and removed distinctions between ''academic'' and ''non-academic'' subjects. For the purposes of university entry, dance carried the same weight as physics. Some proponents of the VCE took their thinking to its logical conclusion and advocated selection to university by ballot.
The VCE, albeit heavily modified, still exists and Freire is still taught in university education faculties. The federal government's new national curriculum, mandatory in every government and non-government school, is quite explicit about what it regards as the purpose of education — it should create ''a more ecologically and socially just world''.
What happened in Victoria in the 1980s was more extreme than occurred elsewhere in Australia but it neatly demonstrates the public versus private debate in practice. Should education be a vehicle for social change and the public good, however defined, or is its purpose to provide a benefit to the individual?
Then there is the question of whether parents should be allowed to exercise choice in where their children attend school and whether taxpayer dollars should subsidise a choice that entrenches privilege and ''reproduces'' social inequality (to use the term of French postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard).
Homogenised education versus specialised education goes to the issue of the structure and content of teaching. Until the 1970s many states in Australia had high schools and technical schools. High schools specialised in academic subjects and technical schools specialised trade and vocational subjects, a division basically inherited from the UK.
It was assumed that students at technical schools would leave school as soon as they had passed the minimum leaving age, while those finishing high school would attend university. In the same way that the British shut down their grammar schools to create comprehensives — a process Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in the 1980s did not encourage but did nothing to stop — in Australia, high schools and technical schools were merged into secondary colleges. The idea was to provide ''parity of esteem'' between the different kinds of subjects, and the various secondary school qualifications were merged into a single certificate. How successful this experiment has been is controversial. Supporters argue a comprehensive education gives students more choices and doesn't categorise them. Opponents argue that only specialisation can meet the specific needs of students, regardless of whether they are academically inclined. It's interesting to note that many state education authorities are reintroducing differentiated secondary qualification and allowing schools to specialise in areas such as sport, music, drama and languages.
Finally, there are the teachers — the second most important part of the education equation (the most important are the child's parents). Teaching in Australia is an industry, not a profession.
Here, as elsewhere throughout the world, teacher unions wield enormous power. They have the capacity to strike and inconvenience hundreds of thousands of voters. The Australian Education Union is a major force in the country's labour movement.
It's not surprising that successive ALP and Coalition governments have been afraid of the teacher unions. Their power has had three effects on education.
The first is the bulk of additional funding for education has gone into hiring more teachers instead of paying existing teachers more.
The second effect is that promotion and pay conditions have been determined according to the rule of industrial negotiation. A consequence of this is that in Australia the starting salary for teachers is relatively high by world standards, but salaries for experienced teachers relatively low.
The third effect of a heavily unionised workforce has been that up until the past few years there was minimal accountability and performance measurement of teachers.
The clarion call of ''we must get the best and brightest students into teaching'' is correct, but so far has proved notoriously difficult to implement.
It's no surprise the Gonski report either doesn't deal with these big issues or skirts around them. Its main purpose was to fulfil an ALP commitment to the teacher unions.
But until we understand and confront some of the conflicts just described, as a nation we will continue to spend more and more money on education and get worse and worse results.
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