The Gonski Report – Yes Or No?

Jane Caro in an author, novelist, journalist, columnist, lecturer and media commentator, and most recently the co-author of What makes a Good School? On Tuesday 16 April 2013, Jane Caro joined Kevin Donnelly, one of Australia’s leading education authors and commentators and the Director of the Melbourne based Education Standards Institute, in a discussion on the Gonski Report into Australian schools and what it will mean for both government, schools and students.

THE GONSKI REPORT – YES OR NO?

JANE CARO

 I want to talk to you about the great transformative, revolutionary, democratic ideal of secular, free, comprehensive education for all children regardless of who their parents are. One of the things that is forgotten in this debate, is that education is not primarily for parents. Education is primarily for children.

Children have no choice as to what kind of parents they are born to. The greatest leap into the dark that any of us have ever taken in our lives is to be born. We have no idea what circumstances we will be born into and what sort of parents we may be lucky enough or deeply unfortunate enough to arrive with.

The great revolutionary idea that came along, hand in hand with democracy, was public education. We’ve had private education ever since a king could hire a tutor for his son, and it was always his son. We’ve had private education ever since wealthier people decided that they would pay for their children’s education and created schools for that reason. We also had it when religious institutions decided to educate members of their community.

Public education was the revolution. And you probably cannot have a properly functioning democracy without a well supported, well functioning, strong public education system. To give people a vote, you must educate everyone so that they can exercise their vote from an informed perspective. This is the fundamental importance of public education.

The thing to remember about public education is that it is open to every child. It does not pick and choose. That doesn’t mean that there are some things in public education that personally I’m not all that crazy about – such as selective schools. Here they pick and choose within the system. I don’t like that very much. But the principle of public education is that it takes all comers.

Within any kind of education system you then have to organise it in some way. There are, of course, local differences. And, yes, no public education system has ever been completely, 100 per cent equal. But the fact that public education does not necessarily offer total equality does not mean that you throw your hands up in despair and decide you’ll make it even more unequal. That you’ll actually widen the gap between kids rather than narrow it.

We’ll never narrow the gap completely. But, surely, if we cannot use our education system to help close the gap between the children who are lucky in the lottery of birth and the children who are unlucky in the lottery of birth, what on earth are we doing with it?

Any tin pot dictatorship can create a highly educated elite. That is easy. That is no challenge. Go around the world and look at any of the countries you’d hate to think about, and you’ll find they have highly educated elites. What is really hard, what marks out a civilised society, is a highly educated general population.

We have started to lose sight of that in Australia. We are leading the Western world in losing sight of that. I would challenge you to think that if we, as Kevin seems to think, end up with a completely non-government run system so a non-public education system, would it be open to all? I don’t know quite how it would work? Can we still remain a democracy? Or are we turning ourselves into an oligarchy where we privilege some people to be the leaders and others are left to do the jobs nobody else wants to do.

The problem is that we talk about school choice as if every parent has an equal choice of school. That’s not true. What we have done in Australia, and what most choice-led processes have done, certainly in parts of America where the charter school thing is happening, is that we give some schools choice over which children they will or won’t educate. That certainly happens here.

One of the reasons many middle class parents are attracted to private schools is because they know that private schools can get rid of the trouble makers. That is a form of picking and choosing. Some parents say, “Oh, they will meet a better class of children. They’ll meet high achievers.” They are trying to isolate their child from some of the kids that they may or may not approve of.

But those kids, thank god, still need to be educated and still deserve to be educated. Gonski took that into account. I’m not going to argue here that the policy the Gillard Government may or may not come up with is going to be the perfect execution of Gonski. I doubt it very much. As Kevin has already pointed out, they’ve already reduced a lot of the money.

One of the reasons the Gillard Government has reduced that expenditure is that we know we have a lot of children who are really behind in terms of the total amount of resources that they have available to their education. And it’s no good equating like with like. Some students in Australia costs $60,000 each a year to educate, those for example in rural and remote areas, some indigenous kids, kids with really high needs. They don’t cost $14,000 a year to educate, they cost $60,000 a year to educate. Let me tell you, the vast majority of those students are in public schools.

Once upon a time we used to have an economy of scale where most students went to the public education system. In that system, most students were relatively inexpensive to educate. Your kids, my kids. They are the students that are relatively inexpensive. They live close to urban centres, they don’t have high needs, they don’t have disabilities, they don’t bring baggage that will affect their educational outcomes, often a lack of cultural capital, through the front door when they first arrive. They’re inexpensive to educate.

New research by Barbara Preston shows that public schools today are twice as likely to enrol students from the bottom quarter than they were in 1986. That bottom quarter takes in the lowest 25 per cent of incomes. Private schools are twice as likely to enrol students from high income families. Catholic schools take more from medium income families.

So we now have a three-tiered system of education, with government schools doing what many people call “the heavy lifting”. The Gonski Report recognises this. And what Gonski and his reviewers saw were that these schools were actually doing it toughest and they started to work out a way of helping those kids.

There are three reasons why the Gonski Review is a sensible thing to do and a once in a lifetime chance for us to help the children that need our help most. I don’t care about the statistics, although the stats are pretty much on my side. I just think that this is something a civilised society should just do.

The first reason is that the loadings actually follow real evidence based needs. Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne and Kevin Donnelly apparently are saying that we already have a federal government funding system based on needs. The trouble is that the SES funding system that exists at the moment only applies to students in private schools. This means it’s a bit like having a hunger alleviation program which you only offer to the well-fed.

You can’t have a needs program that doesn’t take into account the schools that educate the vast majority of students with the most difficult needs. Each state has its own needs based funding program. But, in NSW for example, that usually means the federal government has done some national partnerships work which has helped a lot of very needy schools get the money they need. And they are seeing results. The atmosphere in those schools is turning around, miraculously. But, most of the time, schools just get $100,000 over the quadrennial, and maybe a couple of extra teachers. And they’ve got to pay it back if it’s not all completely spent. None of those rules apply to non-government schools.

The loadings with Gonski follow actual need and they’re not about what school you go to. If there is a Catholic school in a rural or remote area educating indigenous kids, they will get almost 90 per cent of their funding from the government. The scheme is sector-blind. It’s led by disadvantage.

One of the reasons Western Australia is complaining about the amount that it’s getting under Gonski is that, according to Barbara Preston’s research into where high income and low income families live, Western Australia has the highest percentage of high income families. Tasmania, which is not complaining is getting more money and has the highest percentage of low income families. So Gonski is actually following the needs of the children.

That’s where we’ve got to do some hard work. The reason it’s very expensive is because Gillard foolishly said no schools would lose a dollar. So what we’re doing is  continuing to spend on kids who are already incredibly well-resourced, and doing really well at schools with lots of facilities and everything they need. And for no discernable reasons. This inflates the price of helping the kids who are way behind.

We send some children to school in buildings that are falling down, in classrooms that leak, in places where every kid who shows any sign of doing anything is poached either by the local selective school or the local private school, where parents get to the point where the school becomes so much of a sink school, so residualised, so much taking the only kids that no other school will take that everyone who can gets out of there. What happens, and we know this from research from all over the world, is that we compound that disadvantage and the results of the kids in such schools start to plummet.

We now have new evidence that, between 2003 and 2008 in the 400 schools that do the VCE in Victoria, the results of the high income schools that have high income quartile kids in them didn’t go up. But the schools that have the highest percentage of the lowest 25 per cent of students collapsed. Their share of high VCE results fell by 25 per cent. That is a disastrous decline.

Their teachers did not suddenly become terrible. But we’ve created hopeless places. I do not mean not hopeless in terms of what’s being done by the people who are there, but hopeless in terms of how the children feel about their potential. We send a message to those kids that we don’t care about them, don’t value them and we don’t care what they do. That’s shocking and shameful. So that’s the first reason

The second reason is the Gonski Review treats all Australia’s students as if they live in the same country. This is the first time we will be doing this. All other schemes have been divided on public and private lines. But Gonski is sector blind. It’s about the needs of the students and the schools that enrol them.

More importantly, it’s understandable. You can understand the Gonski Review, even I can. I can understand it and I’m an advertising writer and what would I know? But I can work it out. There are about eleven people in the country who understand the current way we fund education. I refer to it as the dark art of education funding. You can make virtually any argument you like about education funding, it’s too hard to explain why it’s wrong.

Good policy is policy that voters can understand and therefore make an informed decision on. Gonski is clear, it is rational, it is sensible. It isn’t perfect but it may just do something to help the kids who walk through the school gate already on the losing side. Anything which makes their education tougher is a bad idea. And for a civilised country, should be rejected.