As from today, all new materials will be posted by the Progressive Educator, South Australia, team at their website: http://www.progressiveeducators.com.au/index.php .
We hope the new format will be easier to access and navigate.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
Stop the demands of the private school lobby!
A little over a week ago, Association of Independent Schools of South Australia Executive Director Gary Le Duff was given a spectacular front page ride into the arms of readers of the Murdoch daily monopoly, the aptly named Advertiser (see, appropriately, far right).
Le Duff was demanding that the private school and Catholic Education sectors get an even bigger handout from the state Government – on top of the $100 million they already get now, and in addition to the huge handouts from the federal Government.
For the record, non-government schools…..err, can’t really call them that these days – independent schools……….no, that doesn’t fit either……ummm…publicly- subsidized- but- closed- to- the- public- schools, get funding from the state Government under the following categories (these figures are for a so-called low-fee religious school in a country town):
Per capita primary 88,449.74
Per capita secondary 68,140.12
Needs entitlement 58,095.23
Interest subsidy 9,948.64
Index of rurality 10,720.55
School card primary 75,663.03
School card secondary 58,700.44
Special needs 15,332.75
Aboriginality 1,338.79
Fee remissions[1] 16,341.23
Total 402,730.52
This same school received the bulk of its taxpayer funding from the federal Government, as follows:
Federal funding
Est. general recurrent primary 786,654.00
Est. general recurrent secondary 569,472.80
Total 1,356,126.80
Grand total 1,758,857.30
(NB - these figures do not include other grants or assistance, such as the Premier’s Reading Challenge, the federal chaplaincy project, and the funding approved for capital works in 2005. The latter amount of $206,192.00 was for the construction of four general learning areas, a music/drama room, and a music tutorial area.)
The fee remissions are slightly higher than in some comparable Category C schools: XX Christian School, with 196.5 FTEs claimed $1,556.31 (or $7.92 per student), and metro YY College with 607 FTEs claimed $24,589.66 (or $40.51 per student). This one, by contrast, claimed $16,341.23 (or $65.90 per student).
It is on top of these combined state-federal funds that Le Duff preposterously proposes that the state Government now pick upall or part of the tab for private school capital works projects.
Le Duff is obviously worried that the fallout from the sub-prime crisis in the US, together with Kevin07’s crusade against inflation (fought through the agency of interest rate rises) will drive some of the working and middle class parents who have scrimped and saved to put their children into private schools, to return to the public education sector.
The Le Duff bluff also comes as private school fees rose by around 7 per cent on last year’s levels, and as a promised tax rebate on private school fees disappeared along with its sponsor, the reactionary and anti-public sector Howard Liberal Government.
Le Duff can sense a swing back to the public school system and is worried that the reckless plans for expansion that have characterized schools in the private sector might not be able to be paid for, or would need to be paid for through additional steep rises in fees.
And to further contextualize the issue, a report commissioned by the Howard Government into the so-called “socio-economic status” (SES) funding model that it has used to increase funding to the private sector shows that at the federal level, private schools have been overpaid more than $2 billion from a funding formula already rigged in favour of the wealthiest and most exclusive schools.
The outgoing Howard Government kept the report secret, but shamefully and to no-one’s great surprise, so did the incoming Rudd education “revolutionaries”!
They refused FOI applications to release the report, which has now been leaked to the media.
This Government foolishly went to the polls late last year with the promise that it would maintain Howard’s funding of the privates, and that “no school would get less than it does now”.
The main findings of the report were:
Cost of maintaining the existing SES system would be $26.5 billion over the next four-year cycle.
-Grants to half the private schools in the country are not assessed according to the SES formula.
-Over the last 4 years $2 billion in payments to schools which had their funding maintained at higher levels than they would get if the federal funding formula was strictly applied.
-60 per cent of mainstream Catholic schools and 25 per cent of independent schools are funded above what would be their SES entitlement
-At least half will continue to receive $2.7 billion in overpayments over the next four years.
-Some will be overpaid by as much as $23 million each in the next funding cycle
-Inequity lies in the guarantee from the inception of the SES formula in2001 that no school will receive less money than it did the previous year.
-Transitional arrangements made for Catholic schools to preserve their funding entitlements at 2000 levels, even if they qualified for less, when they joined the SES funding system in 2001havecontinued at artificially inflated levels for eight years, despite their transitional nature.
-Rejection of private school lobby's argument that the extra funding helps keep a lid on the fees parents pay. Points out that fees have continued to rise significantly.
-42 per cent of Funding Maintained schools (87) increased their fees by more than 40 per cent during the period 2000 to 2004 compared to 24 per cent of SES-funded schools (164).
-Number of Funding Maintained schools with annual fees below $2500 fell by 24 per cent (48) compared to a fall of 10 per cent (67) for SES-funded schools."
-Private schools identified as receiving an already too-generous share of government funding are exploiting a loophole to claim even more money from taxpayers - by calling new schools ‘campuses’ of an over-generously funded ‘parent’ school rather than new schools
Given the above, and Le Duff would have been a poor spokesperson for the private school lobby had he not known of the above, at least in broad outline, it makes even more reprehensible his demands for “more…more…more…” from the state Government.
Indeed the whole issue of the inequitable SES funding model, and of the rorting it has allowed, requires nothing less than a new version of the Whitlam-era Schools Commission, that is, a national enquiry into the scandalous running down of public education and the corrupt promotion of a tax-payer funded private alternative.
Such a commission should have the power to make Rudd’s superficial “Education Revolution” a genuinely transformative sweep of the whole field of public and private schooling, one that ensures that a free, secular and compulsory system of the highest quality is available to all, that schools catering to the particular needs of minority ethnic or religious communities are funded by the government, and regulated and registered for curriculum and learning accountability, but that parents who seek to place their offspring in exclusive elite schools for reasons of simple snobbery do so entirely at their own cost.
We don’t set up alternative systems of roads for the exclusive use of the drivers of luxury imported cars, and should the same ever come into existence, we would be outraged if a single cent of public money was expended on them.
The same principle should be brought to education.
Le Duff was demanding that the private school and Catholic Education sectors get an even bigger handout from the state Government – on top of the $100 million they already get now, and in addition to the huge handouts from the federal Government.
For the record, non-government schools…..err, can’t really call them that these days – independent schools……….no, that doesn’t fit either……ummm…publicly- subsidized- but- closed- to- the- public- schools, get funding from the state Government under the following categories (these figures are for a so-called low-fee religious school in a country town):
Per capita primary 88,449.74
Per capita secondary 68,140.12
Needs entitlement 58,095.23
Interest subsidy 9,948.64
Index of rurality 10,720.55
School card primary 75,663.03
School card secondary 58,700.44
Special needs 15,332.75
Aboriginality 1,338.79
Fee remissions[1] 16,341.23
Total 402,730.52
This same school received the bulk of its taxpayer funding from the federal Government, as follows:
Federal funding
Est. general recurrent primary 786,654.00
Est. general recurrent secondary 569,472.80
Total 1,356,126.80
Grand total 1,758,857.30
(NB - these figures do not include other grants or assistance, such as the Premier’s Reading Challenge, the federal chaplaincy project, and the funding approved for capital works in 2005. The latter amount of $206,192.00 was for the construction of four general learning areas, a music/drama room, and a music tutorial area.)
The fee remissions are slightly higher than in some comparable Category C schools: XX Christian School, with 196.5 FTEs claimed $1,556.31 (or $7.92 per student), and metro YY College with 607 FTEs claimed $24,589.66 (or $40.51 per student). This one, by contrast, claimed $16,341.23 (or $65.90 per student).
It is on top of these combined state-federal funds that Le Duff preposterously proposes that the state Government now pick upall or part of the tab for private school capital works projects.
Le Duff is obviously worried that the fallout from the sub-prime crisis in the US, together with Kevin07’s crusade against inflation (fought through the agency of interest rate rises) will drive some of the working and middle class parents who have scrimped and saved to put their children into private schools, to return to the public education sector.
The Le Duff bluff also comes as private school fees rose by around 7 per cent on last year’s levels, and as a promised tax rebate on private school fees disappeared along with its sponsor, the reactionary and anti-public sector Howard Liberal Government.
Le Duff can sense a swing back to the public school system and is worried that the reckless plans for expansion that have characterized schools in the private sector might not be able to be paid for, or would need to be paid for through additional steep rises in fees.
And to further contextualize the issue, a report commissioned by the Howard Government into the so-called “socio-economic status” (SES) funding model that it has used to increase funding to the private sector shows that at the federal level, private schools have been overpaid more than $2 billion from a funding formula already rigged in favour of the wealthiest and most exclusive schools.
The outgoing Howard Government kept the report secret, but shamefully and to no-one’s great surprise, so did the incoming Rudd education “revolutionaries”!
They refused FOI applications to release the report, which has now been leaked to the media.
This Government foolishly went to the polls late last year with the promise that it would maintain Howard’s funding of the privates, and that “no school would get less than it does now”.
The main findings of the report were:
Cost of maintaining the existing SES system would be $26.5 billion over the next four-year cycle.
-Grants to half the private schools in the country are not assessed according to the SES formula.
-Over the last 4 years $2 billion in payments to schools which had their funding maintained at higher levels than they would get if the federal funding formula was strictly applied.
-60 per cent of mainstream Catholic schools and 25 per cent of independent schools are funded above what would be their SES entitlement
-At least half will continue to receive $2.7 billion in overpayments over the next four years.
-Some will be overpaid by as much as $23 million each in the next funding cycle
-Inequity lies in the guarantee from the inception of the SES formula in2001 that no school will receive less money than it did the previous year.
-Transitional arrangements made for Catholic schools to preserve their funding entitlements at 2000 levels, even if they qualified for less, when they joined the SES funding system in 2001havecontinued at artificially inflated levels for eight years, despite their transitional nature.
-Rejection of private school lobby's argument that the extra funding helps keep a lid on the fees parents pay. Points out that fees have continued to rise significantly.
-42 per cent of Funding Maintained schools (87) increased their fees by more than 40 per cent during the period 2000 to 2004 compared to 24 per cent of SES-funded schools (164).
-Number of Funding Maintained schools with annual fees below $2500 fell by 24 per cent (48) compared to a fall of 10 per cent (67) for SES-funded schools."
-Private schools identified as receiving an already too-generous share of government funding are exploiting a loophole to claim even more money from taxpayers - by calling new schools ‘campuses’ of an over-generously funded ‘parent’ school rather than new schools
Given the above, and Le Duff would have been a poor spokesperson for the private school lobby had he not known of the above, at least in broad outline, it makes even more reprehensible his demands for “more…more…more…” from the state Government.
Indeed the whole issue of the inequitable SES funding model, and of the rorting it has allowed, requires nothing less than a new version of the Whitlam-era Schools Commission, that is, a national enquiry into the scandalous running down of public education and the corrupt promotion of a tax-payer funded private alternative.
Such a commission should have the power to make Rudd’s superficial “Education Revolution” a genuinely transformative sweep of the whole field of public and private schooling, one that ensures that a free, secular and compulsory system of the highest quality is available to all, that schools catering to the particular needs of minority ethnic or religious communities are funded by the government, and regulated and registered for curriculum and learning accountability, but that parents who seek to place their offspring in exclusive elite schools for reasons of simple snobbery do so entirely at their own cost.
We don’t set up alternative systems of roads for the exclusive use of the drivers of luxury imported cars, and should the same ever come into existence, we would be outraged if a single cent of public money was expended on them.
The same principle should be brought to education.
[1] This is designed to help schools to offset some of the loss of income arising from remissions given for economic hardship and as sibling concessions in a school year. In addition, income loss arising from written off unpaid fees/bad debts associated with the difficult economic circumstances of some families may also be claimed. School Card students are removed from this criterion, so the remissions only apply to non-School Card holders.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Stand and Deliver! Publicly Funded Private Schools to Share Facilities
Public Schools around the country should immediately begin to make contact with their local private schools and begin to make an assessment of the private school facilities that must be made available to public school students.
Ten years of the Howard Coalition Government and its outrageously private school biased funding formula has clearly generated an embarrassment of riches for private schools. Well, at least it seems the newly elected Rudd Labor Government and Minister Julia Gillard are embarrassed and are attempting redress the gluttonous private schools’ plunder.
Announced on Sunday 20 January, the Federal Government's $62.5 million Local Schools Working Together Program aims to encourage the creation of first-class shared facilities between government and non-government schools.
Undoubtedly the first class facilities already exist in private schools and the funds allocated by the Federal Government could be well spent in the transport of public school students to access the private school facilities.
The powerful private school lobby group South Australian Association of Independent Schools Executive Director Gary LeDuff stated in the Sunday Mail that "In principle I support the idea, but we would need to work through the complexities of the source of funds. In the independent schools sector, on average 85 per cent of funds for capital works comes from the parents. No state government funding is available for capital works.”
“How do you then share that sort of facility when the rest of the community may not be contributing a fair amount of the costs?"
While LeDuff omits that the funding formula established by the former Federal Government and maintained by the Rudd Government has been siphoning more public funding into private schools than they know what to do with, he goes onto hint at a backlash from private schools required to engage in the programme.
As for fairness, “the rest of the community” – the two thirds of Australian families who send their children to public schools have already contributed a “fair amount of the cost” through taxes paid to federal and state governments. The “rest of the community” have also paid the cost because students in public schools have gone without while private school facilities have flourished. Hard to put a dollar value on that!
This Rudd Labor Government initiative is useful in the short term to begin to address the inequities of funding but the Government is fully aware of the growing tide of public antagonism toward a funding formula that is exacerbating a growing cultural and educational divide between the haves and have nots.
The Rudd Government should immediately invest a small fraction of the budget surplus - a sum of $2.9 billion annually – into public schools across the nation to ensure all schools meet the MCEETYA determined National Resource Standard. Then it should develop an equitable and fair mechanism for the allocation of funds to public and private schools.
Now that would be a fiscally responsible, interest rate neutral, nation building education revolution.
In the meanwhile call your local private school and carry out your own audit. Oh and tell the kids to pack their bathers!
Ten years of the Howard Coalition Government and its outrageously private school biased funding formula has clearly generated an embarrassment of riches for private schools. Well, at least it seems the newly elected Rudd Labor Government and Minister Julia Gillard are embarrassed and are attempting redress the gluttonous private schools’ plunder.
Announced on Sunday 20 January, the Federal Government's $62.5 million Local Schools Working Together Program aims to encourage the creation of first-class shared facilities between government and non-government schools.
Undoubtedly the first class facilities already exist in private schools and the funds allocated by the Federal Government could be well spent in the transport of public school students to access the private school facilities.
The powerful private school lobby group South Australian Association of Independent Schools Executive Director Gary LeDuff stated in the Sunday Mail that "In principle I support the idea, but we would need to work through the complexities of the source of funds. In the independent schools sector, on average 85 per cent of funds for capital works comes from the parents. No state government funding is available for capital works.”
“How do you then share that sort of facility when the rest of the community may not be contributing a fair amount of the costs?"
While LeDuff omits that the funding formula established by the former Federal Government and maintained by the Rudd Government has been siphoning more public funding into private schools than they know what to do with, he goes onto hint at a backlash from private schools required to engage in the programme.
As for fairness, “the rest of the community” – the two thirds of Australian families who send their children to public schools have already contributed a “fair amount of the cost” through taxes paid to federal and state governments. The “rest of the community” have also paid the cost because students in public schools have gone without while private school facilities have flourished. Hard to put a dollar value on that!
This Rudd Labor Government initiative is useful in the short term to begin to address the inequities of funding but the Government is fully aware of the growing tide of public antagonism toward a funding formula that is exacerbating a growing cultural and educational divide between the haves and have nots.
The Rudd Government should immediately invest a small fraction of the budget surplus - a sum of $2.9 billion annually – into public schools across the nation to ensure all schools meet the MCEETYA determined National Resource Standard. Then it should develop an equitable and fair mechanism for the allocation of funds to public and private schools.
Now that would be a fiscally responsible, interest rate neutral, nation building education revolution.
In the meanwhile call your local private school and carry out your own audit. Oh and tell the kids to pack their bathers!
Thursday, January 17, 2008
On Pearson's "Teach for Australia"
The newsletter of the Noel Person Fan Club (aka the Australian), front pages a proposal for a scheme designed by Pearson to attract teachers to schools in Aboriginal communities.
Pearson proposes something called Teach for Australia, to be modeled on similar schemes in the US and Britain.
Under the scheme, existing teachers will be given tax-free incentives to spend four years in Aboriginal communities where they will mentor “associate teachers”. The latter are university graduates who are selected because they are outstanding academically and have leadership skills - but not teaching qualifications.
Both Teaching for America and Teaching First in Britain are flawed models.
They take predominantly white and bright yuppies (see British Teach First appointees - right) and place them in schools that are poor, black, Hispanic - generally hard to staff.
With no qualifications to teach, and relying on raw idealistic enthusiasm alone, they are expected to teach for two years - and complete basic teacher certification and/or business management courses.
Why the business management courses?
Because the funding for the two schemes comes largely from the private sector - both corporate financiers and private foundations.
Those who do not get burnt out in the whiteboard jungle (and the burn out rate is as high as 30%), are then fast-tracked into employment with the corporate sponsors.
The Teach First website explains: “Teach First supporters consistently identify communication skills as being the greatest weakness of the graduates they hire. As a result of a rigorous recruitment process and their time in the classroom, Teach First participants demonstrate strong communication skills, as well as planning, organisation and creativity. In addition, they have all excelled academically. The results show that they are making an (sic!) significant impact in England schools. What could they achieve in your business?”
Or as Wessex Scene Online puts it: “Teach First hopes to demonstrate to applicants how the skills they gain while teaching will enhance their careers in the long-term, as well as offering fast-track recruitment from the sponsors of the project.”
As they now operate (Teach for America has been going for 17 years), selection for the scheme is both a matter of selection (academic achievement) and self-selection (desire to be fast-tracked into employment with Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Deloitte etc). The altruism of empathy with the poor and the marginalised has been replaced with a commitment to self and the profit margin. Just what we want in remote Aboriginal schools!
But can’t these “teachers” improve things during their two-year stint in the ghetto?
The Australian repeats claims of “evidence from the Britain and the US…that the associate teachers produced comparable results or slightly better in reading and maths.”
But the study that produced evidence for this was flawed since many teachers in hard to staff schools are not credentialed (registered in our terms) anyway. Matched against properly credentialed professional teachers, they were shown not to do as well.
And then there is the specifically Australian problem of cross-cultural understandings. The Little Children Are Sacred Report was quite clear that non-Aboriginal teachers should have thorough induction in Aboriginal cultural studies and should develop cultural sensitivities in respect of Aboriginal children that they teach.
Indeed, many of the children in Aboriginal communities use English as a second language and require education that is bilingual and bicultural.
Just parachuting a future stockbroker into a remote Aboriginal school armed with an Accelerated Literacy (ie English literacy for urban residents) program is doing these students a grave disservice.
The merit of Pearson’s proposal is that it indicates quite clearly a level of financial remuneration that is appropriate for teachers making a commitment to work in remote communities for a specified period of time.
Indeed, that level of remuneration should be sufficient to ensure that teachers would be willing to learn about, and develop a basic fluency in, an Aboriginal language specific to a community into which they would be placed, and that they would be prepared to seek accreditation in Aboriginal cultural awareness as well.
Such properly qualified and accredited, experienced teachers – and not “associates” of the Teach First, or Teach for America, type – can be properly regarded as part of the answer.
The answer however, will remain fundamentally incomplete so long as Aboriginal people themselves are denied opportunities to achieve teacher qualifications and are kept (“kept” because of issues of structural inequality and remoteness) at the bottom rung of the education employment ladder as clerical staff and community workers.
As it stands, Pearson's importing of the Teach for America and British Teach First models is a recipe for the privatisation of social responsibility for poverty and disadvantage - a bit like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Pearson proposes something called Teach for Australia, to be modeled on similar schemes in the US and Britain.
Under the scheme, existing teachers will be given tax-free incentives to spend four years in Aboriginal communities where they will mentor “associate teachers”. The latter are university graduates who are selected because they are outstanding academically and have leadership skills - but not teaching qualifications.
Both Teaching for America and Teaching First in Britain are flawed models.
They take predominantly white and bright yuppies (see British Teach First appointees - right) and place them in schools that are poor, black, Hispanic - generally hard to staff.
With no qualifications to teach, and relying on raw idealistic enthusiasm alone, they are expected to teach for two years - and complete basic teacher certification and/or business management courses.
Why the business management courses?
Because the funding for the two schemes comes largely from the private sector - both corporate financiers and private foundations.
Those who do not get burnt out in the whiteboard jungle (and the burn out rate is as high as 30%), are then fast-tracked into employment with the corporate sponsors.
The Teach First website explains: “Teach First supporters consistently identify communication skills as being the greatest weakness of the graduates they hire. As a result of a rigorous recruitment process and their time in the classroom, Teach First participants demonstrate strong communication skills, as well as planning, organisation and creativity. In addition, they have all excelled academically. The results show that they are making an (sic!) significant impact in England schools. What could they achieve in your business?”
Or as Wessex Scene Online puts it: “Teach First hopes to demonstrate to applicants how the skills they gain while teaching will enhance their careers in the long-term, as well as offering fast-track recruitment from the sponsors of the project.”
As they now operate (Teach for America has been going for 17 years), selection for the scheme is both a matter of selection (academic achievement) and self-selection (desire to be fast-tracked into employment with Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Deloitte etc). The altruism of empathy with the poor and the marginalised has been replaced with a commitment to self and the profit margin. Just what we want in remote Aboriginal schools!
But can’t these “teachers” improve things during their two-year stint in the ghetto?
The Australian repeats claims of “evidence from the Britain and the US…that the associate teachers produced comparable results or slightly better in reading and maths.”
But the study that produced evidence for this was flawed since many teachers in hard to staff schools are not credentialed (registered in our terms) anyway. Matched against properly credentialed professional teachers, they were shown not to do as well.
And then there is the specifically Australian problem of cross-cultural understandings. The Little Children Are Sacred Report was quite clear that non-Aboriginal teachers should have thorough induction in Aboriginal cultural studies and should develop cultural sensitivities in respect of Aboriginal children that they teach.
Indeed, many of the children in Aboriginal communities use English as a second language and require education that is bilingual and bicultural.
Just parachuting a future stockbroker into a remote Aboriginal school armed with an Accelerated Literacy (ie English literacy for urban residents) program is doing these students a grave disservice.
The merit of Pearson’s proposal is that it indicates quite clearly a level of financial remuneration that is appropriate for teachers making a commitment to work in remote communities for a specified period of time.
Indeed, that level of remuneration should be sufficient to ensure that teachers would be willing to learn about, and develop a basic fluency in, an Aboriginal language specific to a community into which they would be placed, and that they would be prepared to seek accreditation in Aboriginal cultural awareness as well.
Such properly qualified and accredited, experienced teachers – and not “associates” of the Teach First, or Teach for America, type – can be properly regarded as part of the answer.
The answer however, will remain fundamentally incomplete so long as Aboriginal people themselves are denied opportunities to achieve teacher qualifications and are kept (“kept” because of issues of structural inequality and remoteness) at the bottom rung of the education employment ladder as clerical staff and community workers.
As it stands, Pearson's importing of the Teach for America and British Teach First models is a recipe for the privatisation of social responsibility for poverty and disadvantage - a bit like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
School funding stopped being cricket long ago
We reprint today two articles from the Sydney Morning Herald on the scandalous over-funding of private schools, a situation that the new Federal Labor Government has pledged to maintain for at least another four years.
Author: Gerard Noonan
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald (11,Wed 09 Jan 2008)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australians like to consider themselves as belonging to one of the more egalitarian countries. Perhaps that's why this week's challenge to the sense of fairness on the cricket paddock has caused such ructions. What, Australians being boorish, pushy and sneaky? Come off the grass.
It's not only in the pampered professional cricketing circus arena where Australia simply doesn't get it. A far more fundamental, but important, example of how Australia has got it wrong - really wrong - has to do with the education of the nation's children and the way some get just about everything while many others get very little.
In October 2005, when he was a humble (of sorts) frontbencher in the Labor Opposition, Kevin Rudd gave a speech of unusual clarity, erudition and prescience to an eclectic audience at the University of NSW on the role of morals in the life of a politician. They had no reason then to believe they were listening to a bloke who would be leading the country in a little over two years. Certainly not one who has it in his sway to shape and remake a society, however conservative he might appear.
What Rudd said was interesting not simply because few leading Australian pollies dare stray into the potential graveyard of moral philosophy. He made a passionate case that the real role of religion (in his case a blend of liberal Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism) in secular politics was to challenge inequality wherever it emerged. This was especially so for the creation ofpublic policy that affected the less powerful in society.
As the Herald education editor, Anna Patty, has revealed today, Australia's educational funding model is under renewed scrutiny, and justifiably so. It is so flawed that even a hand-picked committee of federal government bureaucrats has produced a report that says that the system stinks. It recognises that the so-called Socio-Economic Status (SES) system of calculating a school's federal funding eligibility delivers up billions of dollars in a most unfair and discriminatory way.
The report, produced behind closed doors over the past 18 months, with only selected political hangers-on and lobbyists from the independent school sector getting a look-in, is not public. The Herald has been trying to obtain it, including through freedom of information laws for months, to no avail. Until now, that is. While Patty has only had a glimpse of this secret report's entire findings - access gained through the back door - its conclusions are stark.
At its simplest, the report recognises what every serious policy expert of good will and common sense in the education sector has known for nearly a decade. An education funding formula that rewards six out of every 10 private schools with far more than the formula says they should be paid is deeply flawed. These statistics include the vast Catholic network in which 20 per cent of all Australian children are educated. These are not just peanuts in overpayments. They are multimillion-dollar overpayments to schools, even by the lax standards of the SES formula, which the previous government had to adjust twice to accommodate the embarrassing largesse.
Rudd and his Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, must know this. The more honest senior players from the Catholic, Anglican and other private school groups acknowledge privately that it is unfair, even to grumpy curmudgeons like me. But to win the recent election Labor stamped out any possibility of a re-run of a feared "politics of envy" challenge by the Coalition, which had artfully used such a ploy in destroying the entirely reasonable, if culturally unacceptable, challenge to the status quo in 2004 by the former Labor leader Mark Latham.
Rudd and Gillard insisted they would keep the previous government's funding formula in place for the next four-year period, even though they had argued against it when it was imposed in 1999. That means that the system will, if Rudd's social conscience does not kick in, remain in place until at least 2012.
Few in this country seem to realise just how far out of whack Australia's school funding system is among the developed world.
The OECD places Australia in a category of its own in the way public funding is directed towards private school interests, which can then charge fees. Many industrialised countries provide funding through taxation to private and religious schools that meet national curriculum standards - some even provide 100 per cent of all costs - but the funding is cut off or severely curtailed if fees are charged by a school.
The policies are aimed at providing choice of educational type without distorting how much is directed from the public purse to well-endowed schools.
Here is one instance where those in power with a professed strong sense of social justice need to re-examine an election commitment - probably given in good faith - which has a big distorting impact on the development and legitimate aspirations of the nation's youth.
Author: Gerard Noonan
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald (11,Wed 09 Jan 2008)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australians like to consider themselves as belonging to one of the more egalitarian countries. Perhaps that's why this week's challenge to the sense of fairness on the cricket paddock has caused such ructions. What, Australians being boorish, pushy and sneaky? Come off the grass.
It's not only in the pampered professional cricketing circus arena where Australia simply doesn't get it. A far more fundamental, but important, example of how Australia has got it wrong - really wrong - has to do with the education of the nation's children and the way some get just about everything while many others get very little.
In October 2005, when he was a humble (of sorts) frontbencher in the Labor Opposition, Kevin Rudd gave a speech of unusual clarity, erudition and prescience to an eclectic audience at the University of NSW on the role of morals in the life of a politician. They had no reason then to believe they were listening to a bloke who would be leading the country in a little over two years. Certainly not one who has it in his sway to shape and remake a society, however conservative he might appear.
What Rudd said was interesting not simply because few leading Australian pollies dare stray into the potential graveyard of moral philosophy. He made a passionate case that the real role of religion (in his case a blend of liberal Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism) in secular politics was to challenge inequality wherever it emerged. This was especially so for the creation ofpublic policy that affected the less powerful in society.
As the Herald education editor, Anna Patty, has revealed today, Australia's educational funding model is under renewed scrutiny, and justifiably so. It is so flawed that even a hand-picked committee of federal government bureaucrats has produced a report that says that the system stinks. It recognises that the so-called Socio-Economic Status (SES) system of calculating a school's federal funding eligibility delivers up billions of dollars in a most unfair and discriminatory way.
The report, produced behind closed doors over the past 18 months, with only selected political hangers-on and lobbyists from the independent school sector getting a look-in, is not public. The Herald has been trying to obtain it, including through freedom of information laws for months, to no avail. Until now, that is. While Patty has only had a glimpse of this secret report's entire findings - access gained through the back door - its conclusions are stark.
At its simplest, the report recognises what every serious policy expert of good will and common sense in the education sector has known for nearly a decade. An education funding formula that rewards six out of every 10 private schools with far more than the formula says they should be paid is deeply flawed. These statistics include the vast Catholic network in which 20 per cent of all Australian children are educated. These are not just peanuts in overpayments. They are multimillion-dollar overpayments to schools, even by the lax standards of the SES formula, which the previous government had to adjust twice to accommodate the embarrassing largesse.
Rudd and his Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, must know this. The more honest senior players from the Catholic, Anglican and other private school groups acknowledge privately that it is unfair, even to grumpy curmudgeons like me. But to win the recent election Labor stamped out any possibility of a re-run of a feared "politics of envy" challenge by the Coalition, which had artfully used such a ploy in destroying the entirely reasonable, if culturally unacceptable, challenge to the status quo in 2004 by the former Labor leader Mark Latham.
Rudd and Gillard insisted they would keep the previous government's funding formula in place for the next four-year period, even though they had argued against it when it was imposed in 1999. That means that the system will, if Rudd's social conscience does not kick in, remain in place until at least 2012.
Few in this country seem to realise just how far out of whack Australia's school funding system is among the developed world.
The OECD places Australia in a category of its own in the way public funding is directed towards private school interests, which can then charge fees. Many industrialised countries provide funding through taxation to private and religious schools that meet national curriculum standards - some even provide 100 per cent of all costs - but the funding is cut off or severely curtailed if fees are charged by a school.
The policies are aimed at providing choice of educational type without distorting how much is directed from the public purse to well-endowed schools.
Here is one instance where those in power with a professed strong sense of social justice need to re-examine an election commitment - probably given in good faith - which has a big distorting impact on the development and legitimate aspirations of the nation's youth.
School funding flaws hidden
Author: Anna Patty Education Editor
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald (1,Wed 09 Jan 2008)
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A SECRET federal report into funding for private schools has found that many are receiving more than their fair share of taxpayers' money.
The Herald understands the federal Education Department's review of private school funding has identified entrenched inequity in the Commonwealth system. The report, which was completed last year but kept under wraps by the Howard government before the November election, recommends transitional arrangements to wean some schools off inflated levels of funding.
The Rudd Government - which made an election promise to maintain the existing system that delivers more than $6 billion in subsidies to private schools each year - is now faced with the department's own criticism of the funding system, which measures each school's entitlement according to the wealth of families who attend.
The report found that many schools are being overpaid as part of the Howard government's "no losers" policy which ensured no school would receive less money than it had in the past.
That was despite a review in 2004 that found the socio-economic status (SES) of some schools had improved, entitling them to less money.
About 60 per cent of independent and Catholic schools have had their funding maintained at artificially inflated levels and are exceptions to the rule of the funding formula.
The Australian Anglican Schools Network said new schools were not able to access the same levels of funding as older schools that have had their funding frozen at historic levels.
The network's president, Peta Smith, has said a review of inequities in the Commonwealth funding model was long overdue because some schools had government funding maintained at levels that new schools in the same area could not access.
In her confidential submission to the Commonwealth inquiry into the SES funding scheme, she said the system of funding schools at artificial levels was unsustainable.
"Funding maintenance is not sustainable in the long term as it ignores the logic of needs-based funding being assessed on the SES score that is at the core of the SES model," the submission, obtained under freedom of information laws, says.
However, Ms Smith said there were some schools that needed to have their funding maintained.
Christian Schools Australia has been arguing for a greater share of funding for its low-fee schools and hopes to strike a similar deal to that achieved by the Catholic school system, which will receive $12 billion in funding in the present four-year funding agreement, which runs to the end of this year.
The Greens NSW MP John Kaye said the department's review was bad news for the Rudd Government.
"In order to take the heat off the education issue in last year's federal election, they committed Labor to the SES funding model without worrying about its deep flaws," Dr Kaye said. "Now they will have to work their way out of trouble, probably by burying the report and papering over the massive cracks in private school subsidies."
Dr Kaye said it was outrageous the federal government review was conducted behind closed doors and that the final report had been buried.
"More than $6.2 billion is distributed each year to private schools under current arrangements and this is tipped to rise to more than $7.5 billion by the end of the next funding period," he said.
"With such large sums of money and such massive impacts on public education, the Government has an obligation to publish the results of the review."
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald (1,Wed 09 Jan 2008)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A SECRET federal report into funding for private schools has found that many are receiving more than their fair share of taxpayers' money.
The Herald understands the federal Education Department's review of private school funding has identified entrenched inequity in the Commonwealth system. The report, which was completed last year but kept under wraps by the Howard government before the November election, recommends transitional arrangements to wean some schools off inflated levels of funding.
The Rudd Government - which made an election promise to maintain the existing system that delivers more than $6 billion in subsidies to private schools each year - is now faced with the department's own criticism of the funding system, which measures each school's entitlement according to the wealth of families who attend.
The report found that many schools are being overpaid as part of the Howard government's "no losers" policy which ensured no school would receive less money than it had in the past.
That was despite a review in 2004 that found the socio-economic status (SES) of some schools had improved, entitling them to less money.
About 60 per cent of independent and Catholic schools have had their funding maintained at artificially inflated levels and are exceptions to the rule of the funding formula.
The Australian Anglican Schools Network said new schools were not able to access the same levels of funding as older schools that have had their funding frozen at historic levels.
The network's president, Peta Smith, has said a review of inequities in the Commonwealth funding model was long overdue because some schools had government funding maintained at levels that new schools in the same area could not access.
In her confidential submission to the Commonwealth inquiry into the SES funding scheme, she said the system of funding schools at artificial levels was unsustainable.
"Funding maintenance is not sustainable in the long term as it ignores the logic of needs-based funding being assessed on the SES score that is at the core of the SES model," the submission, obtained under freedom of information laws, says.
However, Ms Smith said there were some schools that needed to have their funding maintained.
Christian Schools Australia has been arguing for a greater share of funding for its low-fee schools and hopes to strike a similar deal to that achieved by the Catholic school system, which will receive $12 billion in funding in the present four-year funding agreement, which runs to the end of this year.
The Greens NSW MP John Kaye said the department's review was bad news for the Rudd Government.
"In order to take the heat off the education issue in last year's federal election, they committed Labor to the SES funding model without worrying about its deep flaws," Dr Kaye said. "Now they will have to work their way out of trouble, probably by burying the report and papering over the massive cracks in private school subsidies."
Dr Kaye said it was outrageous the federal government review was conducted behind closed doors and that the final report had been buried.
"More than $6.2 billion is distributed each year to private schools under current arrangements and this is tipped to rise to more than $7.5 billion by the end of the next funding period," he said.
"With such large sums of money and such massive impacts on public education, the Government has an obligation to publish the results of the review."
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