Life on the West Island - Goneski

In the 23 years since then West Island Prime Minister John Howard and his education minister David Kemp decided parental choice should be at the centre of Australia’s publicly subsidised education system, our schools have become increasingly segregated. Seizing on the Whitlam initiative to provide some funding to private schools, Howard turned the education sector upside down.oward

In the years since, middle-class families have flocked to what they see as “desirable” schools and left the rest in their dust. In 2021, an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study that compares education systems internationally found 41% of government schools in Australia could be classed as disadvantaged, compared with 3% of Catholic and less than 1% of independent schools.

Professor Barry McGaw, who once headed education at the OECD and is now at the Melbourne University Graduate School of Education, says our nation is significantly less equitable than the OECD average. We were a high-quality, low-equity performer but our quality is going down and our equity is not improving. What drags our results down is we don’t look after the lowest performers.

In effect, the Howard decision resulted in taxpayers lavishly funding some of the wealthiest, elitist private schools and colleges, many of which were founded by rich conservative churches. Now we have the situation where some of those schools have multiple heated indoor swimming pools and gymnasiums, curated ovals with turf pitches and grandstands, coffee shops staffed by chefs and baristas and properties worth multimillion dollars – in most cases paid for from taxes on low to middle income earners.

The debate about whether there should be state aid for church and independent schools had been one of the longest-running in the history of the West Island, raging for over a century. Howard changed all that, with an argument that the parents of children at private schools paid taxes too, and should receive their share of government funding. But he cared little about poor parish primary schools and what he was really seeking to do was to perpetuate the privilege of the rich and powerful by creating a ruling class made up of an “old boys network” who would promote each other. His cabinet exemplified this, being strongly dominated by a clique of poorly performing but rich men, many representing adjoining upper crust electorates on Sydney’s North Shore.

In a searing analysis, this week senior education journalist Maeve McGregor details the results:

For at least 20 years, the bonds of citizenship and basic fairness written into our social contract have cracked under the weight of a series of attacks disguised as benign policy changes. Though rarely cited, chief among these is the way in which successive governments have allowed the civic mission of public education to be debased not only by the onward march of neoliberalism, but the wealthy’s almost preternatural sense of entitlement.

Unspooled from notions of the public good, the common thread which runs through the arid funding landscape for public schools is these days anchored to ideas of competition and unfettered parental “choice”. Underpinning this shift in approach lies a logic which holds out the promise, or illusion, that the more the education sector can be refashioned in the mould of a marketplace, the greater the chances that excellence will triumph.

Yet as any objective autopsy of the nation’s schools shows, what’s instead manifested is one of the most segregated education systems in the western world, and one defined by impenetrable barriers of class, privilege and wealth.

It was the Howard government that smothered the nation’s conscience with the deceit that any school funding reform should never come at a cost to private schools. And courtesy of the Rudd-Gillard governments, that same pernicious “no losers” principle was permitted to survive and deprive the historic Gonski reforms of all of their revolutionary aspirations.

Instead of one overarching needs-based sector-blind model of school funding, as recommended by the Gonski review all those years ago, this toxic legacy ensured the country was left with a series of blighted needs-blind, sector-based “political settlements” specific to each state and territory government.

In the result, private and independent schools have in the time since habitually received well over 100% of their needs-based funding from federal and state governments. Public schools, by contrast, continue to average between 80-90% of their requisite funding, despite catering for the most disadvantaged children in the country.

As things stand, none of this appears set to change. One of the architects of the Gonski review, Dr Ken Boston, recently pointed out that on current trends most public schools will only reach 91% of their funding by 2029. In plain terms, this means our governments have made a conscious decision to underfund and devalue the two-in-three children who attend public schools for all of the foreseeable future and beyond.

Indeed, the full scale of such funding inequity is only really cast in sharp relief when it’s remembered it doesn’t account for the hundreds of millions in revenue private schools derive from school fees, donations, charitable tax exemptions and separate government grants. Nor does it reflect the former Morrison government’s separate $4.6 billion boost to private schools to ease their “transition” from a position of over-funding to full funding by the end of the decade.

Before we further acquiesce to those crosscurrents of inequality rippling across society, perhaps we should remember that every attack on public education is more than a national disgrace. It’s an attack on our democracy and it’s an attack on our country.

McGregor’s strong critique echoes the words of those opposed to state aid for sectarian schools over many decades. The optimism of the “needs based funding” model proposed by Gonski has sunk beneath the tidal wave of neoliberalism seeing education as a commodity regulated by the market, where the rich can buy the best schooling, leaving the poor, disadvantaged and disabled far behind. In the process, the idealism of a far go for all is Gone-ski.