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!
Monday, January 21, 2008
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)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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