Category: Schools

School type and uni completion

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Several studies have come to the conclusion that, for a given ENTER score, university students who went to private schools do not do as well in first year as their peers who went to government schools. Various theories have been advanced to explain this, including the coaching of private schools leading to ENTER scores that over-state the student’s underlying ability, poor adjustment from the spoon-feeding that apparently goes on at some private schools to the more self-directed learning at university, and private school students taking advantage of the absence of constant school and parental supervision to enjoy themselves after several years of hard work.

Unfortunately these studies tend to focus on first year, rather than what happens in subsequent years. A new study out today by Gary Marks of the Australian Council for Educational Research doesn’t examine marks at university, but does look at completion of university courses by 2004 of students who were in Year 9 in 1995.

Without adjusting for any background variables, the study finds that university students who went to Catholic schools were the most likely to complete a course with a completion rate of 87.7%. Independent school students were next on 81.4%, and government school students just below that on 78.5%. But ‘overall, after controlling for background characteristics and ENTER scores, school sector had no impact on expected completion rates.’ So whatever problems some private school students have in first year, they do not translate into lower completion rates in the end.
Continue reading “School type and uni completion” →

Are private school parents discriminated against?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

less policy discrimination against private schools than in the past means that school choice is more affordable than it once was

My analysis last week.

…I do admire the particular locution you’ve used – “less policy discrimination” is a fine argument-begging way of saying “more subsidisation”.

Derrida Derider’s response.

I was wondering whether anyone would pick up on the way I put that point. On the federal government’s school funding policy, students at private schools get subsidies at somewhere between 13.7% and 70% of the government school rate, depending on the (presumed) socio-economic status of parents. So parents choosing private schools are financially treated less favourably than parents choosing government schools. Why is this not discrimination?

Often governments give more to people who have less, as they do with private schools. This is generally not seen as discriminatory, but rather making up for the disadvantage experienced by one group. But on this logic, well-off families who send their kids to government schools should receive less as well. According to the ABS, 8% of kids at government schools are from high-income households, while 16% of kids at independent schools are from low-income households. So the ‘to each according to need’ is not being consistently applied in school policy, and is only applied at all for private schools.

Most private schools are at least nominally religious, and as I noted in my post last week, attitudes towards religion are the only major difference between the school aspirations of parents of children at government and private schools. So those who want their children to receive a religious education are treated less favourably than those who want their kids to have a secular education. If you read the history of public education in Australia this aspect was much more open in the 19th century than today – Protestants, particularly, wanted to diminish the strength of the Catholic Church.
Continue reading “Are private school parents discriminated against?” →

Why do parents send their kids to private schools?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Yesterday’s release of the annual ABS school statistics, showing another gain in market share by private schools, prompted Harry Clarke to comment:

As argued in an earlier post these trends could reflect a move to quality or a move by aspirational parents to give their kids a ‘leg up’.

No doubt this is part of it, but the research on why parents choose private schools gives reason to heavily qualify this kind of analysis. The most obvious point to make about private schools is the vast majority are associated with a religion, and unsurprisingly parents who think religion is important are more likely than those who do not to choose a private school. A 1990s analysis from the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that ’emphasis on religion’ was one of the few attributes in which private school parents differed significantly from government school parents in the characteristics of the school they regarded as important. Religion was the main reason my parents sent me to a private school (it didn’t end up making me religious, but that’s something for another post).

Another big issue is discipline. In a 2004 ACNielsen/SMH survey ‘better discipline’ was the single-most cited reason (31%) for moving to a private school, with ‘better education’ second on 25%. In the AIFS survey though all parents rated ‘level of discipline’ as important, they differed on their satisfaction with the school on that count, with government-school parents rating their satisfaction as 6.77 on a nine point scale, with Catholic-school parents on 7.84 and independent-school parents on 8.07. Parents were also more satisfied with the ‘control of violence, drugs and alcohol’ at private than government schools.

Because the public-private school debate tends to focus on the extremes – a few dozen top private schools on one side catering to the wealthiest and most ambitious families, and schools catering to the most under-privileged on the other – it tends to miss the more routine school choices made by most parents, who have concerns going well beyond academic excellence and the numbers of students going on to the top universities.

It’s hard to know whether there is much of a ‘trend’ in parents’ underlying preference for private education. Given all the negative publicity surrounding government schools – ironically often added to by the public school lobby which, having chosen politics over markets, must use media publicity for school problems to pressure politicians into giving them more money – it would not be surprising if more parents did want to make the shift. But it is also the case that growing affluence and less policy discrimination against private schools than in the past means that school choice is more affordable than it once was, which would drive up private school enrolments even without any change in opinion on government schools.

Why are private schools getting so many kids into uni?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 45 Comments

Today’s Age report showing that private schools dominate entry to Melbourne and Monash universities set off another round of excuse-making from the defenders of public education.

Richard Teese, a leftist education academic at Melbourne University, told The Age that:

Students in public schools came from much wider social backgrounds and the economic cost of further study was a major disincentive.

‘Wider’ here is presumably a euphemism for ‘lower’, which is true on average, but the Cardak and Ryan research showed that for a given ENTER score high and lower SES groups proceed to university at the same rate. It seems it is the marks, not the money.

This requires further rationalisations to explain why students at private schools get better marks:

independent schools were better resourced and more focused on university education

They generally are more focused on university education, and on average spend more per student – $11,208 per student in government schools and $13,049 in independent schools. But money alone can’t explain it – the Catholic schools spend significantly less per student, $8,817 but still, as The Age article notes, send a disproportionate number on to university.

Another Melbourne University academic, Richard James, said that

the middle class had lost confidence in government schools and moved its children to private schools, largely due to funding cuts and closures under the Kennett government. (emphasis added)

Continue reading “Why are private schools getting so many kids into uni?” →

The tensions in Labor’s education agenda

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

When Kevin Rudd walked into an overflowing lecture theatre at Melbourne University today the crowd broke into spontaneous applause. The true believers are desperate for Labor to win. The basic theme of Rudd’s speech was that Australia can do better on education, which the Labor leader argues is crucial to improving Australia’s productivity performance (the audience may not have been so impressed with the focus on economics; many academics like to think they are above mere money-making).

The speech itself was just rhetoric, but the ALP has also released a more substantial discussion paper (pdf). The first half discusses the long-term foundations of prosperity and the importance of productivity, and the second half focuses on human capital.

The tensions between the two halves are what Labor needs to overcome if it is going to be credible on education. They note that one way of increasing productivity is improving the way firms and industries are organised:

That requires the right market incentives for resources to flow to the more efficient areas of the economy, and for businesses to organise themselves in the most productive way … this means businesses working in competitive product markets …

And that another way is to:

improve the quality of production inputs themselves. This in particular means raising the quality of human capital by investing in the workforce…

But if we are to improve our human capital it is not just a matter of increasing inputs, as the second section with all its comparisons with other OECD countries implies, but improving the productivity (broadly defined) of the education industry.

Australia has been increasing its spending on non-tertiary spending. The OECD Education at a Glance publication shows that on non-tertiary education Australia has increased its spending by more than the international average since the mid-1990s. Though productivity is very hard to measure in education, I doubt many people believe there have been significant improvements in school level educational outcomes in that time – certainly not the increasing number of parents shifting their kids to private schools.

Just throwing more money at schools isn’t going to work without sound curricula and good teaching, and in those areas we run straight into the heavily-entrenched centralised education bureaucracies running the public school system and the teacher unions that have obstructed many previous attempts at reform. Without even direct constitutional control over schools, federal Labor will struggle to make the necessary reforms, even if it supports them in principle (which at this stage is far from clear).
Continue reading “The tensions in Labor’s education agenda” →

What do Australians think about education?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 37 Comments

Labor MP Lindsay Tanner has excited letter writers to the The Australian with his views on Australians and education. In a speech (pdf) to the Sydney Institute, and reported by The Australian yesterday, Tanner claimed that:

AUSTRALIANS are typically anti-intellectual, indifferent to learning and steeped in mediocrity and ignorance…

These accusations don’t accord with what Australians tell pollsters. Newspoll, for example, runs an occasional survey asking ‘overall, as a society, would you personally agree or disagree that Australians today are…?’ and then listing a dozen possible attributes. In the last of these surveys, late in 2005, 57% of respondents thought that ‘intellectually minded’ was a reasonable description of their fellow Australians. Perhaps by ‘intellectually minded’ they mean reading something other than the sport in the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph – since it certainly can’t mean having acquired a university degree or reading one of the magazines aimed at intellectuals, none of which sell more than a few thousand copies per issue. But it does suggest that ‘anti-inellectual’ might be a bit strong as cultural analysis.

When Roy Morgan Research last polled us on our most important issues, in 2004, education was the second most important issue after health, with 56% of the population rating it as one of their top three most important issues for the federal government to be doing something about. To this we can add the revealed preference of the nearly one-third of parents who are sufficiently concerned about education to put their kids into a private school, and other research suggesting a third or more of parents with children at government schools would send their kids to a private school if money was no object.

I think Tanner is right that there are problems with educational aspiration among young people, particularly from welfare and working class homes. But the main debate isn’t about whether or not education in general is A Good Thing. It is about how we should go about the task of education – hence all the controversies about curriculum, teaching methods, and financing.

A curriculum market

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Julie Bishop’s speech on national curriculum is certainly attracting criticism, not just from Labor states protecting their power but also from former elite private school principal Judith Wheeldon, in today’s Weekend Australian .

The problem with this debate is that it is between two alternatives that are nearly as bad as each other: national centralised curriculum and state-based centralised curriculum. Each means (or would mean) that most parents have no effective choice and that the bureaucracies that create curriculum have weak incentives to be responsive to parents. Bishop complains that state curriculum setting has fallen into the hands of ‘ideologues’, but how much easier would that be if they only had to capture one bureaucracy rather than six, and disgruntled parents had to run a national rather than just a state campaign to protest?

The debate we should be having is not State versus Commonwealth curriculum, but centralised curriculum versus competitive curricula. Competitive curricula would bring us diversity as well as competition, reflecting the variety of student needs, aptitudes, and interests. We have the start of this in the International Baccalaureate program, already taught in a number of schools. It is too demanding for some students, but excellent for those planning to continue to university. This kind of innovation should be the model for the future.

Competitive curricula could get around the sole argument for national curriculum that has any merit, the difficulties faced by students moving interstate. Since there are clear economies of scale in creating curriculum materials, I expect that curriculum creators would sell their programs around the country, so families that move between states would be able to enrol their kids in a school teaching the same basic material as the school they left.

A market in curricula would fundamentally change the incentives facing curriculum creators. Parents could withdraw their kids from schools that offered dubious curriculum (because their children were semi-literate and numerate, because they were studying Big Brother instead of Shakespeare etc) without moving interstate. This would give schools an incentive to change curriculum providers, who would need to improve or go out of business.

There are three curriculum options – markets, federal, national. Julie Bishop is advocating the worst of the three, and the state governments the second worst. The best, alas, is not even on the table.

The stalemated school choice debate

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

The compilers of the IPA Review 13 biggest mistakes list think that it is impossible to even trial a genuine parental choice system, where the money follows the pupil. Leaving aside the dispute over whether federal private school funding contributed to this situation, they may well be right to be pessimistic.

We can say two reasonably clear things about public opinion on schools.

The first is that private schools are generally seen as ‘better’ in various ways. With nearly a third of students already at private schools, obviously there is considerable revealed preference to that effect. Thousands of dollars paid every year are more convincing than any answer to an opinion pollster, but the polls back up those actions and add more. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes has twice, in 2003 and 2005, asked its respondents to agree or disagree with the proposition that ‘private schools offer better education than public schools’. On each occasion, about half have agreed and a quarter disagreed.

Back in 1994, a Saulwick poll asked if its resondents had children, and money was no object, would they send their child to a private school? 58% said yes. Among respondents with children actually at a government school, 45% said they would choose a private school, suggesting a large minority would like a voucher that they could use at a school of their choosing. Ten years later, in 2004, an ACNielsen poll for the SMH (some information here, but the page is dysfunctioning) found that 34% of government school parents would not choose a government school if the cost of the alternatives was the same. Again, we could infer a constituency for vouchers here. Put together the parents who have already taken their kids to private schools and the parents who would like to and there is probably a small majority for proper school choice.

But the second thing we know about public opinion on schools casts doubt on that conclusion. This is that ALP/Australian Education Union campaigns on school funding have had an impact. When asked to agree or disagree with the proposition that ‘public schools receive less than their fair share of the education budget’, 3 polls in 2003, 2004 and 2005 came up with almost exactly the same result of nearly two-thirds agreement. Perhaps this just means that they think government schools should get more without private schools getting less. But in a 2004 Saulwick poll, 40% rejected the idea that paying taxes entitled parents to any financial assistance for sending their kids to a private school (though this was 11 percentage points down on 2001). So there is considerable scepticism about increasing funding for private schools.

The seems to be a stalemate here. There is too much support for the existing private schools for the left to achieve its goal of an entirely state-controlled system. But there also seems to be too much opposition to further funding of private schools to give all parents choice. Private school enrolments are likely to continue growing, aided by federal government policy and greater affluence meaning more parents can satisfy their underlying preferences. But unless their kids are bright enough to get scholarships, many poorer parents will just have to take their chances with the state system.

Was federal private school funding a mistake?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

In last weekend’s Sunday Age Chris Berg joined the dots between some of the IPA Review‘s suggestions for our 13 biggest mistakes. One of the 13 he didn’t mention in his article was federal aid for school science blocks, including at private schools, introduced by the Menzies government in 1963. Perhaps he did not mention it because it is hard to argue that it was a mistake.

While it is true, as the IPA Review points out, that school funding is now a mish-mash of bureaucratic programs from two levels of government, this ‘mistake’ faces the same problem as the claim that publishing On Liberty was a mistake: it relies on a complex, and not very convincing, counter-factual.

Essentially, we are being asked to believe that if this policy initiative had never occurred we might have at least trialled a system in which parents had ‘real financial choice’ about which school their child attended. But the more likely scenario is that we would have ended up like the US, where about 10% of students attend private schools, or Britain, with about 5% in private schools – much less practical choice for parents than exists in Australia today.

Without the series of policy changes that began with the Menzies state aid decision in 1963, private school enrolments would probably have gone backwards from the 24% they were at then, as the Catholic Church no longer had enough nuns and brothers to teach in Catholic schools (the largest part of the non-government sector) or the money to employ enough laypeople to take their places. And because parents would have had to pay both full fees and taxation to maintain government schools, most of the remaining private schools would have been for the very rich only or struggled to provide adequate facilities.

Instead, at least partial transferability of funding from public to private schools has generated considerable growth in private enrolments, with nearly a third of students now at private schools, a proportion that increases every year. Expanding the private system has meant that the Australian school system has had better results than it would otherwise have had. And if we do the sums on the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services, private schools save taxpayers about $4.7 billion a year (the difference between the average per student funding in the two systems, times the number of students in the private sector).

If, as the IPA Review does with On Liberty, we are also to consider the tangential consequences, federal funding of private schools looks better still. For a start, it helped Menzies win the 1963 election, sparing us Arthur Calwell as Prime Minister (though Calwell may have saved us from a mistake not on the IPA list, the Vietnam War). It also helped ease tensions between Catholics and Protestants, as Catholics resented the lack of aid, which they rightly put down at least partly to anti-Catholic prejudice. Admittedly, those tensions have been displaced into the on-going ideological disputes about public versus private education, but this left-right faultline would exist in any case and only seriously preoccupies a small number of people.

As I said, none of this is to deny that there are problems in the existing arrangements, or that a better system can be imagined. But given the realistic actual alternatives, partial private school funding has been a big success.