Two Developments in Education Policy

You’d think that the education system would be safe from neo-liberalism with wall to wall ALP governments, right?  It doesn’t seem that way, though.  Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd have decided that the much vaunted “Education Revolution” is going to consist of making funding to the states conditional on publishing information about schools’ performance and sacking principals who “don’t deliver”.

What good does it do anyone to publish information regarding state schools? State school enrolment is based on the catchment of the school and it’s not like a family are going to move to another area of town so their kids can get a “better” education from a “better” state school. Publishing information like this is going to lead us down the road to results based funding rather than needs based funding. Parent groups, principals of “good” schools and principals of poorly performing schools will all be clamouring for extra money and whinging about how good other schools have it rather than focussing on the problem of funding in general. Under John Howard, federal funding for private education rose faster than federal funding for public education. While I can understand the argument about private schools taking the pressure off the public system, we shouldn’t condemn those who can’t afford private schools to a second class education system without the requisite funding.

I remember reading about a former Prime Minister (either Whitlam or Fraser) proposing a few years ago that we needed to move towards a needs based system of funding. It shouldn’t so much matter how well the school is doing compared to other schools but whether there are enough resources to teach children and engage in regular school activities such as sport (Qld now requires 30 minutes a day), maintaining a decent library and allowing the teachers the freedom to teach the curriculum properly rather than having them teach to standardised literacy and numeracy tests. A needs based education system would analyse the infrastructure a school currently has, whether private or public, how big the classes were, etc. and apportion funding based on the needs of the school.  The one size fits all model needs junking, but not in favour of something which will increase the inequities in the current system.

Another recent development is the Victorian government’s plan to introduce vouchers for the TAFE and training college system. I can get behind the idea of private sector involvement in vocational training, particularly in vocations where much of the employment is in the private sector. What I can’t get behind is the idea of voucher based education. This is yet another example of neo-liberalism gone mad where the idea is that the public sector is yet another competitor in a multi-player market based education system.

Looking to the home of neo-liberal education policy and funding, America (who gave the world “No Child Left Behind” which left many children behind), we see that putting too much faith in markets leads to blindness of the concept of market failures. Market failures are bad enough when dealing with things like wasteful usage of resources and externalising costs (global warming being the biggest market failure of all) when they distort the prices of products and services such as cars, food and electricity. These are all commodities, though, which can be bought and sold. I would like to think that education is different. Education has its own intrinsic value and is totally vital to the survival of society (moreso than cars and electricity, for knowledge and education is crucial to manufacturing and electricity transmission/generation) yet we are being asked to think of it as something on which we can put a price.

A fairly comprehensive and freely available education is something which we in Australia tend to take for granted; not every nation has universal primary school let alone high school. If we are not careful, the state education system which has been built by the hard work of teachers, education policy-makers and the education unions will be sacrificed before our eyes on the alter of neo-liberal market fundamentalism in the name of “reform”.