Category: Schools

Should public schools be privatised? Day 1

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

[Introduction]
Day 1

Hi A.L,

According to Australian Education Union election advertising, we need a federal government that will put public education first. But do we need public education at all? Would there be anyone calling for it, if we did not have it already?

People are used to the idea of state schools, so they don’t think about how uneasily government-controlled education fits with liberal democracy. If someone said that Australia’s media should be owned by the state, with journalists told by the state what they should say, with media audiences examined to make sure they had absorbed the official line, there would be predictable and justifiable outrage.

Yet public education means essentially that for Australia’s young people. The government owns most schools, employs most teachers, tells them what to teach through state-set curricula, and examines students to make sure they have it right—even kids escaping to private schools can’t avoid these last two aspects of state-run education. And unlike state-owned media, there are severe consequences for ignoring state education.

Across the political spectrum, activists want to use public education to influence young minds. In his book Dumbing Down, Kevin Donnelly documents how left-wing academics and teachers shape curricula to fit their political agenda. In government, the Liberal Party proposed a national history curriculum, which was widely seen as another front in the so-called ‘culture wars’.

Rather than fostering social unity, as some of its supporters claim, state-controlled education is a source of division and nastiness. Instead of allowing different groups to devise their own curriculum, and letting parents choose between them, we fight over a common curriculum. The public education lobby stirs class and sectarian resentment in its attempts to take funding from private schools.

And what is it, can you remind me, that makes public education worth preserving?

Regards

A.N

The literacy challenge for our part-time education minister

~ Andrew Norton ~ 60 Comments

I didn’t think Stephen Smith’s performance as Shadow Education Minister warranted his appointment as Minister, but creating a part-time Education Minister – Julia Gillard will have to combine it with being Deputy Prime Minister, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister and Minister for Social Inclusion – is bordering on bizarre. It has unfortunate echoes of the two Ministers for everything in the early days of the Whitlam government.

While the media was preoccupied yesterday with ministries and Opposition leaders (another eyebrow raising decision), the ABS issued a report showing just why we need a full-time education minister. It was their second adult literacy survey.

It shows a slight prose literacy improvement on 1996, but still nearly half of all Australians are below the level 3 skills regarded as the ‘minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy’. The same is true of document literacy. (Prose literacy is understanding narrative texts; document literacy is the ability to locate and use information in various formats, including schedules, maps, tables and charts).

On the numeracy scale, more than half of all Australians were below skill level 3, and for a problem-solving scale, only 30% were at levels 3, 4 or 5.

There is also a further clue as to why 20% of graduates don’t have jobs suitable for graduates (pdf). By interesting coincidence, about 20% of bachelor-degree holders have only level 1 or 2 prose and document literacy. They are slightly worse on the numeracy scale, and much worse on the problem-solving scale. Further information is needed on whether these graduates are migrants, and their disciplinary backgrounds.

Regardless of the situation with graduates, there is clearly much work to be done to improve literacy. But will Gillard have any time to do it?

Is the education rebate the FTB of the future?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

Labor’s education rebate, under which recipients of Family Tax Benefit A can receive

* A 50 per cent refund every year for up to $750 of education expenses for each child attending primary school (maximum $375 per child, per year)
* A 50 per cent refund every year for up to $1,500 of education expenses for each child attending secondary school (maximum $750 per child, per year)

will no doubt go down well in the electorate. I’m much less keen. It is another example of the government taxing us more than necessary and then giving the money back with strings attached, in this case a requirement that money be first spent on ‘laptops, home computers, printers, home internet connection, education software and school text books.’

Most families will spend this much and more on items on the list anyway, so the distorting effect is likely to be small in this case – it’s effectively just another cash handout for families in exchange for yet more government paperwork (Labor says it will reduce the ‘digital divide’, but this seems unlikely since families still have to find the cash to cover the full cost since they only get the rebate with their tax return, more than twelve months later if they purchase at the beginning of a financial year).

But how long before more of the FTB-linked money starts coming with strings attached, so parents spend the money as approved by Nanny – no fattening foods, no cigarettes or alcohol, no plasma TVs, no clothes made in sweatshops, no coal-generated electricity etc etc.? The current government is bad enough on these things, but Labor is full of busybodies who think they know how the rest of us should live.

Do graduates from private schools earn more?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

In The Sunday Age yesterday, there was another article about private school students struggling at university. It was based on the numerous studies (I mention a couple here) which have found that, for a given ENTER score, kids from private schools, and also selective government schools where they have been examined, average slightly lower first-year university marks than kids who have been to government schools.

Though this finding has been repeated frequently enough for it to be regarded as a valid social science generalisation, it is also widely misunderstood as saying that private school students get lower grades at university. I haven’t seen that question specifically answered in research, but given that private school students have much higher median ENTERs that is unlikely to be the case. Though private school students are not as academically prepared as government school students who get the same grades as they do, disproportionately few government school students actually get those matching grades at the end of Year 12.

There is also the problem that the studies are all of first year students. It would not be surprising if the differences narrowed in subsequent years, as private school students adjust to the more self-directed study style at university and learn that university life doesn’t offer quite the same freedom compared to school at they might have first thought.

As an ACER study I blogged on in April found, private school students have a higher rate of actually completing university, though once starting ENTER scores are taken into account there are no significant differences betweens school sectors.

One issue we don’t know much about is the differences between government and private school students after university. I have been trying to do a little research on this using the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes.
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Does the federal government spend more on private schools than universities?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Lesson of the day: don’t say things to journalists relying on memory alone. Yesterday I spoke to a reporter from The Australian, and during the conversation agreed with a claim from University of Melbourne higher education expert Simon Marginson that the federal government spends more on private schools than on universities. That was printed in this morning’s paper.

I had some time ago looked into this oft-repeated claim by the public education lobby and decided that it was defensible but a factoid (meaning 2). It was defensible because if you count only direct subsidies related to tuition then more is spent on private schools than on universities (approximately $5 billion compared to approximately $3.5 billion in 2005). But I deemed it a factoid because private school funding supports more than twice as many students. It is less than surprising that about 1.1 million school students cost more than about 450,000 university students (full-time equivalent).

But I’d forgotten that the university income number did not include research and other grants to universities, which take the spend up closer to $6 billion, or the significant contribution to university cash flow made by student loans, which add in another $2 billion.

So if we looked at total support for universities it is significantly higher than total support for private schools.

In my defence I did dismiss the value of the comparison (which wasn’t reported), and note that there had been a significant recent increase in university funding (which was reported), and the original purpose of the conversation had been to discuss something else entirely, for which I had the relevant spreadsheets open when I returned the call. But I should have said nothing or at least fact-checked myself afterwards. Someone did question my evidence today, and they were right to do so.

Do private schools save taxpayers $4.9 billion a year?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 68 Comments

As reported in today’s Australian, the Association of Independent Schools Victoria today released research showing that private schools saved taxpayers $4.9 billion in 2004-05, reflecting the lower subsidies paid on behalf of students at private schools compared to students at government schools. That’s very similar to a claim I made in a post last year.

Having done a lot of work on ‘big government’ since, I am no longer sure that this is quite the way to look at it. This is because while technically all students at private schools are entitled to more heavily subsidised places at government schools, we cannot assume that all students would switch even if private schools received no government money at all. Before state aid for private schools was introduced in the first half of the 1960s, nearly a quarter of students were in private – mostly Catholic – schools. It was trending down, and the Catholic schools were facing serious problems as the supply of brothers and nuns prepared to teach for a pittance shrank. But we cannot assume private school enrolments would have inexorably dropped without state aid. Not all private schools at the time even took the money straight away.

Nearly half a century on, in a much more affluent society, in which education is of greater significance for a child’s future, there would surely be considerable demand for private schools even without any subsidy. Some private schools recieve subsidies that are a fairly small percentage of government school subsidies in any case, and a smaller still percentage of total revenue per student.

A more accurate way of expressing the point would be that to fund private schools on the same basis as government schools would in 2004-05 have cost taxpayers another $4.9 billion, which is why I do not support a standard Friedmanesque flat voucher scheme. Sometimes there are tensions between introducing markets and keeping taxes down.

A proxy debate on the citizenship test

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

Last week the Senate referred the legislation for the citizenship test to an inquiry, with submissions to be received by 31 July. This legislation has had the soft left excited for months, and this inquiry will set off another round of criticism. Though welcoming an opportunity for people to have their say, Australian Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett issued a media release saying:

“I am concerned that the government is planning to spend over $100 million on a citizenship test that runs the risk of reducing an important unifying concept to little more than a game of Trivial Pursuit.

“Citizenship is a common bond that the government has seen fit to turn into a wedge to foster community division.

This debate has become heated partly because it combines (or appears to combine) two things which excite the left: race/ethnicity and John Howard. An article by Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell in the most recent issue of People and Place quotes many remarks along the lines of those in Senator Bartlett’s media release, some going so far as to suggest a citizenship test takes a step back in the direction of the White Australia Policy.

Sometimes a way of securing a more rational discussion of an issue is to put it to one side and discuss a proxy issue – one which raises similar considerations but lacks the same emotive political context. As it happens, we have a possible proxy issue in Australia’s recent past, the teaching of civics in schools.
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Do government school kids learn tolerance and community?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 18 Comments

In my joint paper with Jennifer Buckingham comparing people who went to government schools with people who went to non-government schools, she draw the research short straw – collecting what the public school lobby has had to say on the subject. The op-ed by Catherine Deveny in today’s Age – an evidence-free rant – is the kind of stuff she has to trawl through.

Take this passage:

The lessons kids learn in government schools — resilience, motivation, community and tolerance — hold them in much better stead than hand-holding, spoon-feeding, mollycoddling and segregation.

I’m not sure that any of the surveys I plan to use can tell me much about resilience or motivation – though clearly private school students have enough of each to do much better educationally on average than those who went to government schools – but there are questions that help us understand any differences on community and tolerance.

The 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes asked about voluntary association involvement. 22% of those who went to government schools were actively involved in a voluntary assocation, compared to 25% of those who went to Catholic schools and 31% who went to other private schools. Another question asked about, in the last 2 years, working together with others who shared the same concerns to express views or represent interests. 43% of those who had been to government schools had done so, 48% of people who went to Catholic schools, and 52% of those who went to other non-government schools. On the question of trust, 53% of those who had been to government schools thought that other people could always or usually be trusted, compared to 59% of those who went to Catholic schools and 63% of those who went to other non-government schools.
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Do private schools make people religious?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

Surely question 15 [on the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’] is just looking ahead a little – with an ever increasing proportion of the country’s children being funneled into Christian schools (as applauded by Andrew) Australia may yet become a Christian nation.

– commenter Russell today.

With my CIS colleague Jennifer Buckingham I am working on a paper which looks at differences between people who went to government and non-government schools. I have a fair bit more work to do for my part of the project, which is examining surveys that ask respondents what kind of school they attended and then seeing if I can find any interesting differences between them. But some initial results from the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes might be of interest.

One pattern that does seem reasonably consistent is those who went to non-Catholic private schools are closer to people who went to government schools than those who went to Catholic schools (suggesting the difference may be Catholic/Protestant rather than public/private; an hypothesis I will need to explore).

This starts with the basic question of whether the respondent has a religion. 69% of people who went to government schools and 71% who went to non-Catholic private schools say they have a religion, compared to 86% of those who went to a Catholic school.
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Shock, horror – young people satisfied with their lives

~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

A Newspoll survey of 18 to 24 year olds, commissioned by the Dusseldorp Skills Forum and reported in today’s Age, would have provided useful extra information for Cassandra Wilkinson’s new book Don’t Panic: Nearly everything is better than you think, a rebuttal of misery merchants like Richard Eckersley and Simon Castles (the Australian Literary Review has an extract from Wilkinson’s book).

Overall, 95% of those Newspoll surveyed regarded themselves as satisfied with their life overall, with nearly half ‘very satisfied’ – not quite in Danish life satisfaction territory, but up there with the Dutch and the Swedes. 88% are confident that things will work out ok in their working lives and careers, and 86% are confident that they will be financially secure. Of those currently in the workforce, 84% of full-timers and 78% of part-timers are satisfied with their job overall. Of those at university, 46% say it is better than they expected, while 15% say they are disappointed. About a third think that their standard of living will be better than that of their parents; most think it will be the same while 9% think that it will be not as good.
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