Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Delusions and destruction in Howard's education program
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Jenni Devereaux

Australian Education Union - South Australia

Committed advocates for public education in the Australia presided over by successive Howard Governments are frequently accused of propagating and perpetuating lies and myths about the Coalition’s education policies and programs.

The Realities of Funding

In just over 10 years John Howard and his first Education Minister, David Kemp, and Kemp’s successor, Brendan Nelson, have successfully carried out the most massive transfer of school funding in Australian history.

Even before the election of the first Howard Government in 1996, private schools in Australia enjoyed one of the highest levels of public funding in the world. Since that time it has increased beyond what even us scare-mongering public education zealots could have imagined - to the extent that the Federal Government now gives more public money to private schools in Australia than to all of Australia’s 37 public universities combined.

• Between 2001 and 2004, Federal Funding to private schools has increased significantly and the public school share of Commonwealth funding has declined dramatically.
• Non-government schools increased their funding advantage over government schools from about 7 – 8 per cent in 2000-01 to 12 – 17 per cent in 2004;
• Catholic school funding improved from 8 – 9 per cent below government school expenditure in 2000-01 to being on a par with government schools;
• Independent schools increased their funding advantage over government schools from 31 – 36 per cent in 2000-01 to 40 – 44 per cent.

Yet public schools have the most students from low-income families and the least from high income families. Most students in both Catholic and non-Catholic private schools come from higher income families, and fewer in both sectors from low income families. It is not true, as is sometimes asserted, that “Catholic schools have as many poor students as public schools.”

• Nearly 88% of Indigenous students attend public schools - 4.5% of students in public schools are Indigenous compared to 1.4% in private schools
• 82% of students with disabilities attend public schools - 4.1% of students in public schools have a disability compared with 2% in private schools
• 3.2% of students attending public schools live in remote areas compared to 1.2% for private schools
• On a per student basis what does this mean?
• Here are the numbers. In 1978, for every $1 paid per student in a public school the Commonwealth paid $2.50 for a student in a private school. By 2001 - $4.00; by 2005 - $5.00.

This has been achieved through a series of funding mechanisms and formulas which time prevents me from going into. Detailed research and explanations are available on the Federal AEU website: http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Debates/index2.html#FG

One such mechanism has seen private school funding directly linked to calculations of how much it costs, on average, to educate a student in a public school. The effect of this is to guarantee bigger increases to private schools as costs rise in public schools; costs associated with educating the majority of students from poorer backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students with disabilities, in remote locations, and with special needs of all kinds.

This is despite the fact that a 2002 Senate report stated that Catholic schools have an income 15.2% higher than the cost of educating public school students, and other private schools have an income 52.2% higher. And that was before the big funding deals Howard negotiated with the Catholic and so-called Independent Schools sector in 2004 in the run up to the October election.

Howard and Nelson justify their inequitable funding policies on a number of grounds. Accompanying their convenient statistics, they say that the States have constitutional responsibility for funding public education, therefore the Commonwealth is obliged to look after the private sector.

Is there any basis in fact for this claim?

The AEU disputes this and says:

The Constitution does not describe a role for the Commonwealth in the funding of schools but parliament has chosen to do so. It is a political decision not a constitutional requirement.

The original architects of the schools funding system legislation intended that Commonwealth funding go the most needy schools which meant, and still means, 70% to state schools.

Conservative governments have reversed these proportions over the years and now the best resourced private schools receive more Commonwealth funding than any state school.

The fact is that both Commonwealth and State Governments have responsibility for public education. There is no constitutional, historical or moral validity to assertions otherwise.

The Government also claims that funding increases have been driven by increased enrolments in private schools.

Again, this is not true.

In reality, funding increases have been driven by Government policy, as the enrolments of some private schools have not increased or even gone down, yet their funding has still increased.

Here’s just one example of the many I have researched. It is not atypical.

One of the most exclusive private schools in Adelaide had an enrolment of 709 in 1999 and received $681,935 in Commonwealth funding. In 2004 its enrolment was 614, a decrease of 95. If Commonwealth funding to private schools was truly enrolment driven, it would be interesting to see how much Commonwealth funding the school lost because of this significant enrolment decrease. Well, according to figures on the DEST website, it actually increased to $1,686,671 in 2004. In percentage terms a 15% enrolment decrease was accompanied by a 147% funding increase.

This wasn’t the biggest funding increase though. This school’s main rival for the title of Most Exclusive Girls School in Adelaide had an increase of 248%. And this has been replicated across the country where the wealthiest and most prestigious schools have received the biggest increases.

This is all said to be in the name of supporting parent choice. There is a rich body of research and discussion around the whole ‘choice’ agenda which is well worth investigating if you’re interested in the topic. Very briefly:

Dr Kemp said in 1999 that “the ability to support parents’ choice of a private school is, from the Government’s point of view, a major driver of reform in the government sector at the state level.

He also said that the increase in funding was “part of a bigger strategy” to produce a competitive environment which would force state Education Ministers to “push ahead with the reform process and stop being intimidated by the Unions.

On February 12 2004 the PM said “the ALP’s proposal to transfer money from so-called rich schools is the thin edge of the wedge to implement the policy of the AEU to diminish support for all independent schools and to re-establish the pre-eminence of the public system.”

By implication the PM admitted that his intention has been, and remains, the undermining of the public education system and the promotion of the private education sector.

As I said earlier, the largest increases in funding have gone to the wealthiest schools with the highest fees, and these fees continue to go up. This has not increased anyone’s “choice”. In the real world, schools choose students, not the other way. They are “exclusive” to the extent that they are free to exclude on whatever basis they choose. In the end, it is not parents who choose private schools, rather it is private schools which choose which students they will have inside their gates.

In reality, the choice of the majority - to attend well-resourced public schools – is being undermined by the Howard/Nelson line that “good parents pay for private schools for their children: the rest deserve what they get.”

New Developments in the Federal Education Agenda

Howard and Nelson’s schools agenda is entering into a new phase with the passing of their euphemistically titled Schools Assistance (Learning Together – Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004 – formerly the States Grants Primary and Secondary Education Assistance Act.

The new legislative framework mirrors a number of key sections of the Coalition’s extremely anti-public education policy, The Coalition’s Plan for Higher Standards and Values in Schools, announced during the 2004 election campaign.

What it does is tie all education funding to implementation of the Federal ‘accountability’ agenda, most of which involves an expanded range of national standardised testing and reporting measures which the States/Territories will be required to implement in order to receive Commonwealth schools funding.

A piece by Jane Caro in a recent edition of New Matilda (Ideological Playgrounds July 6) sums it up pretty well:

Much of the changes they propose are petty and trivial, indeed, most public schools already comply and always have. They fly the Australian flag, they have hung the Federal Government’s rather tacky ‘values’ poster, and almost all of them happily perform nativity plays and sing Christmas carols and wouldn’t know a piece of political correctness if it jumped up and bit them on the nose. Yet, the Feds are clever. By loudly insisting public schools comply with things they already comply with, they give the impression they don’t and so further raise community anxiety and lower the status of such schools.

Some of the proposed reforms are more important, and while school reports that change ‘consistently’, ‘mostly’ and ‘sometimes’ into A, B or C don’t make a sods worth of difference really, the publishing of information that may be used to create school league tables does. It is probably an inevitable development now, but it remains worth having a debate about. …. Will it mean that schools struggling with little money to serve families with even less money come inevitably at the bottom of such a table, and are then further abused and punished for their perceived failure, leading to the very last of their ‘good’ kids being taken away from them?

Earlier this year an American teacher unionist addressed the AEU’s Annual Federal Conference on the topic of The Role of Education Unions in Advancing Public Education. Listening to him was both scary and compelling.

Bush’s key educational reform initiative is officially called ‘No Child Left Behind.’. … This 1,100 page bill, passed a few months after 9/11, may well be the worst Education Bill ever passed by our Federal Government. There are so many things wrong with his law, so many things that are educationally inappropriate and hostile to the welfare of public education, that I can only touch on a few – harbingers of what your conservative leaders might hope to import to Australia.

The crux of the law is massive and constant standardised testing as the sole determinant of a school’s success. … Bush’s law requires that all public schools test students every year between Grades 3 and 8 in Reading and Math and once again in High Schools, and that those scores be used to determine whether schools should be placed on lists called ‘Schools In Need Of Improvement’ – or more commonly known as failing schools. The test scores are reported publicly in a disaggregated fashion on the basis of racial group, socio-economic status, limited English proficiency, gender and special education needs. If the schools in any of those categories don’t make what is called Adequate Yearly Progress, the school is placed on the failing schools list. In what most people call a statistical impossibility, by law those test scores are supposed to improve each year until the year 2014 when 100% of all students in all categories “will” score proficient on all tests. Schools that don’t reach these increasingly difficult test score targets face an escalating series of sanctions, with the final sanctions being the removal of the entire staff and the contracting out of a school to a private entity.

One intermediate sanction worth noting is that in the second year of a school being on the list, all families are sent a letter saying their child’s school hasn’t met the Adequate Yearly Progress goals and that the family has the right to send their child to another that’s not on the list, with transportation costs being covered by the original school. This has caused logistical hassles of nightmarish proportions. … It is impossible to meet the law’s mandates. Indeed, painting public schools as failures is part of the law’s purpose. Because if public schools are a failure, it is much easier to propose privatization as the answer.

With this in mind, take a look at the requirement in Section H of the new Howard/Nelson regulations that all schools be compelled to make the following information public every year, in order to “allow parents to make “informed choices” about their child’s schooling.

• Student attendance
• Staff attendance
• Staff retention
• Teacher qualifications
• Expenditure and teacher participation in professional learning
• Proportion of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students meeting national Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 benchmarks in
• reading, writing and numeracy
• Changes in ‘benchmark results’ from the previous year
• Value-added
• Average standardised assessment results for Year 9 students
• Average tertiary entrance results for Year 12 students
• Proportion of Year 9 students retained to Year 12 (or equivalent)
• Post school destinations
• Parent, student and teacher satisfaction

It’s also interesting to note that the regulations require all schools to have a “functioning flagpole” and fly the flag, as well as display the Values Education Framework poster. Minister Nelson has insisted that flying the flag and displaying the poster are an essential aspect of the Government’s commitment to ‘values education.’ In a recent speech Nelson defended his decision to depict Simpson and his donkey on the values poster on the grounds that "Simpson and his donkey represent everything that we should strive to be as a nation." Unfortunately for him he didn’t perform a thorough background check on Simpson and his values. Simpson was a republican, a socialist and a militant unionist.

In conclusion

It's hard to know where to start sometimes when we’re under constant attack from the right wing and the media who make it sound as if all they’re really motivated by a concern for the education of the most disadvantaged sections of our communities.

But we have to keep on. The privileging of the private education sector over the public sector, and the continuing attack on our public schools and teachers, seriously undermines Australia being a genuinely democratic society.

Concepts like choice and equality are being redefined “as an individual's consumer right with little regard to the quality of choices or to the community's responsibility to all its members”. This stands in opposition to the democratic goal of providing a quality secular education for all children.

Most educators know that democracy, at its heart, is about working together for the good of all children yet Howard and his Government deliberately foster individual self-interest and an ‘Escape From Public Schools At All Costs’ mentality.

The better we educate ourselves about these issues, the more we talk about the possibilities of organising society around human needs, the more connections we draw with other sectors of society as they struggle for justice, the more likely it is that we will build the capacity to revitalise our embattled schools and our unions. [Peterson]

Australian Education Union - Website

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