Question: After seeing the information on your school or your children’s school, do you now have a higher or lower opinion of the school?

For clear majorities of both government (68%) and private (58%) parents, My School made no difference to their opinion. Almost identical proportions (16%/17%) said that they had a lower opinion as a result. However more private school parents (22%) than government school parents (15%) said that they had a higher opinion as a result of My School.

Of course a lower opinion doesn’t necessarily mean that parents will move their kids, but this survey suggests that My School will put some pressure on a modestly-sized minority of schools.

My argument that private school policy has deep roots in Australian political and educational history, long predating ‘neoliberalism’, is supported by a new history of the state aid debate, Graeme Starr’s Variety and Choice: Good Schools for All Australians, published by the Menzies Research Centre.

Despite Starr’s title, his book suggests that neither variety nor choice were very important arguments in the revival of state aid to non-government schools in the 1960s. Rather two other arguments dominated the state aid debate, justice and need.

The justice argument arose because despite the absence of state aid from the 1870s onwards, the Catholics and some Protestants had maintained their own school systems. In the early 1960s they had half a million students. Particularly the Catholics were aggrieved that they paid taxes to support education, but received nothing in return. They felt that they had a right to support, and that to grant it would deliver justice.

The need argument was also important. Many Catholic schools were seriously under-resourced compared to government schools. Their problems were exacerbated as the Catholic population expanded in the post-war decades, but fewer people were joining the religious orders that had historically provided much of the teaching workforce in Catholic schools.

State aid wasn’t originally primarily about promoting choice or variety; it was a consequence of choices that had already been made and variety that already existed. Indeed, in the initial years of state aid government schools gained market share.

Though choice rhetoric started to appear in Liberal Party statements in the 1970s, the fact that the Australian debate on schools funding started from the position of a large private sector has given it a different flavour to the American debate. There the debate primarily has been about providing school choice where previously there was none, but here justice and need arguments have dominated.

Starr’s book documents the struggle between the ideas of justice and need. Justice implies that all parents are entitled to some financial support for education, wherever they send their kids to school. Need implies that only schools with low levels of resources should receive government financial support.

Labor has traditionally supported need only; hence their various ‘hit lists’ of wealthy schools they believe should be defunded (though as Starr shows, even adopting need was a 1960s ALP compromise – many Labor activists and MPs opposed any state aid). The Liberals have supported a mix of need and justice, with all schools to receive some support but different levels depending on first the school’s resources and then later a parental socioeconomic measure.

The incorporation of need into Liberal schools policy means that they have never supported the full choice model: identical resourcing of schools, regardless of ownership status. They have, however, fostered greater choice, especially by abolishing Labor’s restrictions on new private schools.

A weakness of Starr’s book – though it is a useful and readable summary of the history of political party policies and the views of major interest groups – is that there is little discussion of the competing claims made about public vs private education. While Campbell and his co-authors overplay the actual influence of ‘neoliberalism’, Starr has too little on the distinctive claims of ‘neoliberalism’ not just to provide parental choice but to improve schools through competition. I can recall only one mention of this in his book. The literature on school performance is not discussed. In this respect, the title is again misleading – it is not about what makes ‘good schools’.

This has perhaps kept the book out of some major controversies. But it means that Variety and Choice only partly covers contemporary debates about variety and choice.

Professor Campbell said he agreed with commentators such as the academic Michael Pusey who have argued that the rise of neo-liberalism has contributed to undermining confidence in public institutions.

The middle classes now felt a need to insure themselves against failing government health and education systems.

From a SMH article on the My School website.

Within academia – with occasional spillovers into the Lodge – ‘neoliberalism’ has become an all-purpose trend explainer, some generally accepted broad change that is used to explain other changes. The evidence for all-purpose trend explainers is rarely better than circumstantial. Whenever I see an all-purpose trend explainer I turn my bull**** detector up several notches.

In this case, which is more likely: that people make greater use of private services because they have been influenced by an academic philosophy most people had never heard of until Kevin Rudd’s Monthly essay controversy, or that they make greater use of private services because government services are less appropriate or of lower quality than affluent people want? It takes ideological blindness to think that the former possibility is more likely than the latter.

A Labor source said the reforms to boost the taxpayer-funded contribution were needed because political parties around the country ”are broke”.

”It’s being put in high-minded terms, but Labor federally is $8 million in debt, and Rudd refuses to fund-raise. State branches are also in a parlous state.”

Indeed. I fear that academic supporters of electoral law reform are being taken for a ride, providing ‘high-minded’ justifications for electoral law reforms that are, as they almost always are, grubby exercises in partisan self-interest.
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Also in the Sunday Age, Chris Berg emphasises that big government is the root cause of the political donations issue.

In this week’s Campus Review I argue (try here if the CR link does not work) that we could be headed for an unfair equity policy.

Part of the problem is that though the government is seeking to replace the current postcode-based measure of SES, probably with individual measures such as parental education, it is still talking about classifying the lowest 25% as ‘low SES’. What I show in the CR article, principally using NAPLAN results, is that lowest 25% is a highly arbitrary cut-off point. People above and below it have very similar (and not especially good) levels of academic performance.

This wouldn’t necessarily matter much, except for the fact that under the government’s policies individual benefits will attach to a low SES classification. ‘Low SES’ students will be favoured in admissions, may receive incentives in financial aid or tuition discounts, and will be funded for additional assistance after they enrol. This means issues of fairness to individuals arise. People with similar needs should be treated in similar ways, regardless of which side of an arbitary class definition they fall on.

What I suggest in the article is that there needs to be a complete break between the funding formula and service delivery:

Funding policy needs easy-to-collect indicators that will deliver resources to universities according to the likely levels of educational disadvantage across their entire student body. Service delivery can be far more complex and nuanced, with frontline university staff making individual assessments of which students need assistance and how much help they need.

Indeed, a direct SES indicator may not be needed for funding policy. The available research suggests that low SES is not in itself a negative factor for academic performance. Its effects are indirect through weaker prior academic performance. From that perspective, why use a proxy for educational disadvantage (SES) when you can use the real thing (school results and other admissions requirements)?

I’m not convinced that the courts would have upheld any attempted blogger prosecutions as within the law. In what appears to be the relevant provision of the SA electoral legislation (s.116), the case would turn on the defintion of an internet ‘journal’. In the legislation, “journal means a newspaper, magazine or other periodical.” Is a blog a journal in that sense?

As with the similar kerfuffle over Stephen Conroy’s proposed internet filter, much of the criticism does not go far enough. In each case, the relevant ministers are trying to extend to the internet regulation that has long applied to other media. Is there something special about the internet that means different rules should apply?

Perhaps the internet is indeed different. From a practical perspective, the laws assume there are strong gatekeepers such as editors, when in reality much of the internet is self-published or has no moderation. And with comments threads, anyone who feels they have been misrepresented can quickly respond, in a way that they cannot with other media.

But these attempts at internet ‘censorship’ raise bigger questions about whether the rules applying to other forms of communication should apply at all. For once Crikey today is saying what I have been saying - that much electoral regulation has far less to do with the integrity of elections and government than it does with the major players rigging the system in their favour. If only Crikey and other media outlets would realise that donations reform is cartel behaviour, and not a way of improving political integrity.

In my particular concern of political expenditure laws, as in previous years the papers were struggling to find any news other than how much money the unions spent, and this year so far as I can see only the SMH even bothered with that.

Of the $6.5 million in political expenditure declared in 2008-09 (down dramatically from the 2007-08 election year spending of $50.6 million) 94.6% was spent by unions, 3.6% by GetUp!, 1.5% by environmental groups, and the remaining $11,170 by the Aged Care Association (SA).

As I argued in my CIS paper on political expenditure laws, it is not clear what this aspect of the disclosure system is intended to achieve. The donations provisions are intended to uncover influence on political parties that would otherwise be secret. But with the exception of money spent on opinion polls, the political expenditure laws cover spending that is by legal definition already public, to do with the public expression of political views.

The main purpose of these laws was in my view an attempt by the Coalition to make donors to left-wing groups ‘accountable’. Though the ostensible purpose of donations disclosure is to reduce the chance of improper treatment of political donors, their actual function is to facilitate it.

This year the only individual I could find named in donor disclosure statements was ‘Mr/Ms Jo Skrynski’, who I presume is Joseph Skrzynski. He gave $137,500 to GetUp!

I think we can no assume that in the unlikely event the Coalition is in power any time soon they will not re-appoint Mr Skrzynski as Chair of SBS.

Indeed, annual per person family payments (Family Tax Benefit, childcare, Baby Bonus/parental leave) are at $980 a year for 2009-10 only $10 higher than forecast for this financial year in 2007. FTB is slightly down (the means test on FTB B?) but childcare is up by 75%.

Rather optimistically, family payments are forecast to have slightly decreased by the end of this decade to $960 a year. I find this difficult to believe. For a start, there are already active plans to increase FTB handouts via overcompensation for the ETS. While the Coalition may be able to stall this for a while, their overall weak political position means that Senate obstruction has a use-by date.

And though parental leave/Baby Bonus increases are built into the estimates of future spending, these are likely to be very much on the conservative side. The long-term campaign for the state to partly take over the family’s traditional child support role is far from over, and we can expect to see more of the costs of rearing children shifted to the childless.

Like its predecessors, this intergenerational report promotes the need for spending control but is remarkably quiet on family payments, even though FTB is the third most expensive social policy item in the budget after the aged pension and schools. This is odd, because of all the social policy payments this is the most obviously discretionary. Much of it goes to families that are not poor and have no special needs.

I was sceptical, predicting a moderation in the trend to private schools rather than a reversal of the trend. In my view, religious diversity, discipline issues, growing affluence, and increased long-term importance of education will all, other things being equal, continue to favour private schools for the foreseeable future. Cyclical events like recessions may temporarily affect the affluence factor, but will not change the basic trend.

The preliminary 2009 schools data, released today, supports my scepticism about a trend back to government schools. Despite a small economic downturn, Catholic schools grew at more than twice the rate of government schools, and independent schools grew at around 5 times the rate of government schools.

Overall, private schools gained .24% of market share. Consistent with my prediction of a moderation rather than a reversal this is below the long-term trend. The annual average private school market share gain was .39% during the Howard years.

The report meets Grattan’s claims to be ‘objective, evidence-driven and non-aligned’. It is well-researched, uses data, and presents ideas that could easily be adopted by either major political party. While the media played up its differences with the about-to-be-launched My School website, it’s hard to imagine that Julia Gillard would have any fundamental objection to the ideas presented. And that was pretty much how she handled it today:

From what I’ve seen of the reports of the Grattan Institute work, they are saying that this is a good start but they are wanting to see more. Of course we are going to keep building on this website year by year as we get more results from national testing, more results on Year 12 retention, more results on vocational education and training pathways and attendance at school.

[Update 28/1: Barry McGaw, chair of the Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, confirms that value-added measures are on the agenda when the data becomes available.]

Grattan has done well in targeting different markets for the paper. For those who might be put off by the report’s including things like ’similar to residuals in a standard regression model, these scores sum to zero which means that a school with a value added score of zero …’ there is a YouTube summary.

I have to put my editor’s hat on to make my only real criticism of the first Grattan paper. It contains too many examples of the stage-3 error of footnote numbers inside the punctuation for this to be just a proofreading lapse. The main cause of this error is the influence of the author-date system of referencing, which does go inside the punctuation. While the author-date system is widely used, in my view it should be banished from all work intended for a general audience. It disrupts the argument’s flow with clunkily-expressed information of little interest to most readers.