Schools – funding
John Howard’s comments on public/private schooling were designed to muddy the waters, and they have. I’m going to separate my thoughts into four areas for clarity: funding, values, discipline and sundry. Here is the first instalment.
Funding
If people want to spend money on their child’s education, that’s a good thing. I suspect that one reason parents choose private schools is that they feel like they’re doing something for their child’s education. They might not be able to help with the physics homework, but at least they can pay for a decent school. To the extent that it demonstrates a commitment to the kid’s future, this is a very good thing. It should be encouraged.
There has been a tendency in the blogosphere to see the debate about school funding in black-and-white terms: you either support government funding for the wealthiest schools, or you think private schools are evil and should be abolished. The truth is, hardly anybody supports either of the two extremes. The real debate is not even about how much government money goes to private schools — it’s about which private schools.
Christopher Sheil argues that a more reasonable (and historical) schools division is between the state and Catholic schools on the one hand, and the ultra-wealthy elite private schools on the other. (These days, there are many non-Catholic low-fee private schools that should be included in the former camp.) The reason that this division makes more sense is that the most important consideration here is parental choice. I don’t mean the false, rhetorical choice that the Liberals preach while pumping cash into Australia’s wealthiest schools, I mean real choice for “middle Australia”. The government can best protect choice by subsidising state and low-cost private schools.
If a parent is currently paying $15,000 per year for their child’s private education, their range of school choices includes every school in Australia. If the Government removed its funding from such a school, the school might think twice before ordering new pillars for its grand entrance statement, but that won’t alter its standards. Alternatively, it might raise its fees to $16,000 or $17,000. Most of its students would stay where they were, and a very few would move to another private school in another leafy suburb.
On the other hand, if we took that elite school’s government contribution and gave it to a low-fee school, the school might be able to buy air conditioning for its classrooms, or new bunsen burners in the chemistry labs — or it might reduce its fees by a couple of hundred bucks. Either way, the result would be more realistic choice for Australian families.
The Coalition is right to complain that recent dicussion about school funding has been misleading by considering federal funding in isolation — but its version doesn’t tell the whole truth either:
A spokesman for Education Minister Brendan Nelson said state governments had the main constitutional responsibility to fund and manage state schools, and the commonwealth was a supplementary funder.
But the federal government was the majority funder of independent schools.
He’s ignoring the defining feature of private schools: fees. Private citizens have the main responsibility to fund private schools — the commonwealth’s real role is as a supplementary funder of both sectors.
The fact that the Coalition ignores a school’s fees and other resources is the most disgraceful element of their funding model. The average government (state and federal) funding for a public school is $10,000 per student. Some private schools charge more than that in fees alone — not to mention building fund contributions, donations from old chums and the like. Surely the Commonwealth’s cash would be better spent elsewhere?
In a nutshell, I think our schools should be funded according to their needs, taking all income sources into account. That would be the most effective way to increase parental choice.
Note: An important exception to this general rule is government support for scholarships. If a school provides scholarships, they should receive funding equal to the amount the government would have contributed had they attended their local state school.
Update: Having bookmarked it earlier in the week, I have just read John Hirst’s excellent contribution to the school funding debate. He describes a system I would wholeheartedly support:
All schools receive government support and no schools are totally supported by the government. Parents raise funds and pay levies to so-called government schools and the amount they contribute may be as much as the fees charged by a local Catholic school.
[...]
To encourage a diverse social composition in schools, the Government will favour low-fee schools over high-fee schools.
The local Catholic and the new Christian and community schools that charge low fees contain the same range of social class as in a government school. Schools charging low fees would receive from the government for each student 95 per cent of what the government spends in support of each student in its own schools. (In New Zealand it is 100 per cent.) This would give them more government support than they are currently receiving.
[...]
Schools charging middle-order fees would receive government support, but less than the low-fee schools. These places are not out of reach of the children of ordinary working people who can, with some effort, meet the cost of their fees.
High-fee schools would receive no government support. When fees are $15,000, a third of average yearly earnings, they are creating a school that is an exclusive club, not a mirror of the wider society.
The money saved here would be redirected to government and low-fee schools. The high-fee schools could regain some government support on one condition: if they used scholarships to recruit the children of working people and welfare recipients and demonstrated that they were teaching a wide range of students.
I suspect that if a party were to run on this platform, they would win widespread support from the community. And that appears to be exactly what Labor is planning.
If we wanted to simplify the whole school funding issue, we could give no money whatsoever to private schools. Instead we could simply take a standardised figure of how much we think we should be funding private schools per student, and allow parents to claim that figure as a tax rebate. This figure could equal, say, half of what we fund public students per head, or it could make up the whole amount.
I can think of several positives for such an idea:
a) supporting the users of a service rather than providers is more likely to directly benefit their own welfare and minimising the rent-seeking effect that “industry” welfare can allow
b) supporting the users rather than providers may play force greater competition among providers
c) it’s simpler and doesn’t involve handwringing over which institutions are attracting the richer students and which are attracting the poorer students
d) it will probably not be markedly regressive as simply giving money to private institutions – a flat rebate is neither progressive or regressive, except of course for the possibility that low-income consumers may not take advantage of the opportunity. The same can be said for “free” higher education
e) it will most likely raise school fees (as the first homeowner’s grant would certainly have raised property prices somewhat) but not by enough to wipe out the grant.
f) parents will be attracted to move out of public education, to low-cost/low-fee Catholic and independent schools, particularly as they may expect a surplus from their rebate over and above their fees. Nothing wrong with a tax cut every now and then.
While John Hirst’s idea has merit, the idea I presented above has many good parts to it as well. Typically, it is a CIS idea that has been floated before.
One thing that seems to be missed in this debate is the kids behaviour. I suspect that the reason many parents send their kids to private schools is because they hope that they will mix with better behaved kids.
I went to a private school in a country town the 70s. There were no teenage pregnancies, there were a few cases of alcohol usage, smoking in the toilets however was not unusual.
My mother taught at a rough Tech school. Teacher cars were vandalised. Teachers were threatened, There were many teenage pregancies, Two brothers expelled from the Catholic school ended up there, and bullied the other kids, until one was stabbed in a knife fight, by another student who went on to commit armed robbery and went to Pentridge.
It might be values that is the problem here, but its not the schools values, its the community’s values. The community tolerates disruptive behaviour in state schools because state schools are the bottom of the heap where the trash gets sent. Education is compulsory, and therefore state schools end up as the rubbish heap for the dregs. The community does not allow teachers to lay a finger on disruptive students, and their parents, who care not a jot about their kids education, and are supported by the system when their reprobate children are brought to brook.
In this climate, the teachers cannot teach properly, they have low morale, and they have low pay dead end jobs, and it affects the education of all of the rest of the children.
The system is completely stuffed, and until there is some serious streaming in State Schools, with better pay for teachers and learning environments for students, with reprobates bundled of the system, then the State school system will forever be dragged backward.
What do you do with the reprobates? Buggered if I know but it drags the whole country down as it is.
Rex
Rex, I will come to the issue of behaviour soon.
Steve, I like the way you dismiss Hirst’s scheme as an old CIS plan, but then propose a voucher system. Although in your voucher system, you get the money even if you don’t spend the money on education — which is just a tax cut, and a regressive one at that.
Robert, I protest. I should have written the following phrase with greater clarity.
“While John Hirst’s idea has merit, the idea I presented above has many good parts to it as well. Typically, it is a CIS idea that has been floated before.”
If I wasn’t clear enough, I was refering to the tax-rebate idea as an old CIS idea, not that of John Hirst. It was my way of saying “this is not an original idea”. Apologies to John Hirst if that wasn’t made clear.
I attend a public high school. Our funding is worked out by the federal government by the wealth of the areas around us. The area is now reasonably wealthy, but all of the students who attend are from adjacent poorer areas. Because of this we have a budget of $350,000 per year that has to include sub-teachers, repairs to computers,buildings and equipment for almost 900 students and 90 staff.
The nearbye private school (the Illawarra Grammar School) if built on much cheaper land, and so under the government model deserves far more funding, even though it charges $10,000 a year ($15,000 for year 11&12) TIGS has enough money to spend $1,000,000 on landscaping in 2000 and several million on underground staff parking during 2003-04.
My school has holes in the ceiling, unpainted bricks along its corridors and can’t afford enough cleaning staff to do every classroom.
The current funding system is flawed and unfair. The federal governent’s policy allows the NSW state government to get away with it’s own poor funding of public schools by blaiming the federal government, which deflects blame by claiming that the state governments are responsible.