Open Up the School System
The Australian Thursday, September 18, 2003
With all the talk of troubles in the state teaching profession circulating just now, this is a good time to raise the issue of how to seriously improve the whole school system for teachers, parents and children.
Philip O'Carroll, with his wife Faye Berryman, founded the independent Fitzroy Community School in 1976. The school is known as a happy place for children, with high outcomes, but it spends no more than the state system on each student place. Nevertheless, because of the funding system, parents have to pay most of that cost in school fees. Here is Philip's recipe for a better school system for all.
State school teachers endure higher stress levels and take more stress leave than their colleagues in other schools. Why? Because they operate with one hand tied behind their backs. They have to deal with learning problems, behaviour problems, and unreasonable parents AND simultaneously conform to the guidelines of the Department and the Unions who together run their schools.
Teaching challenges arise in all types of schools, but non-government schools have several advantages. First of all, they are personally chosen by the parents, who therefore tend to have faith in their school. Secondly, they can run their own school their own way, and come up with tailor-made solutions that may not be permissible under the state-centralised regime.
Thirdly, they have a smaller proportion of difficult kids, because the families that are willing and able to pay have a smaller percentage of difficult kids.
Thus life is artificially made difficult for state teachers. They are paying the price for the ambitions of those who aim to deny parent choice and entrap as many families as possible within their centrally controlled system.
There is a guaranteed way to improve life for both teachers and children. Let parents freely choose the school for their child - inside or outside the state system. Make it means-tested if you like. That means, government funding for a child's school place is based on family means, not on who runs the school chosen. Many non-government schools would open that did not charge fees. (Unless the state system minders regulate to block the opening of new schools, as they have done in the past.)
Now at this point in my statement, there are many state school teachers frothing at the mouth, feeling that their life's work is being threatened. But they need no react so. This is no threat to teachers' jobs. The children are still there. They still need their teachers. For teachers, the change would simply mean that many could move into a less stressful workplace.
This would give many families a choice in schooling that they've never had before. Parents, finding they at last had an option, would take an interest in what schools offer and shop around. Schools would automatically become more focused on satisfying their families.
Faced with open competition, state schools would improve overnight by becoming self-governing. Teachers would find they had some professional authority within their own schools and would be able to take a greater pride in their work.
Better for parents. Better for children. Better for teachers. Central education bureaucracy, whose existence does not deliver better school services, would bow to a newly declared parental right - to choose who shall teach their children.
Philip O'Carroll