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.
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