New Birth in Schooling
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
I sympathise with Neil Mitchell's cry from the heart for a new birth in schooling (Herald 15 Feb). I have been trying, mostly by means of letters to the Editor, to get something to move forward for the past 30 years. Every couple of years, there is a dramatic announcement from the Department of Education that things are going to change. But they have no intention of making the real changes that would actually advance equal opportunity and the quality of life of students.
Non-government schools achieve greater outcomes, even if you totally ignore that minority of non-state schools that actually spend more money per child than the state system does. Obviously then, money is not the core problem. So what would advance the quality of schooling? The answer is painfully simple and has been for a long time. Accountability.
Let parents choose schools. That means a non-government school that didn't charge fees should get the same funding as a state school. The many schools that now have captive customers would improve overnight. How would they improve? They would hire and fire teachers on performance. Schools would become self-governing (as private schools are) and would not have to operate under the yoke of the present overlarge and heavily ideological bureaucracy and teacher union leaders.
The reason we have not seen genuine schooling reform in a long time is because there are too many characters living off the $20+ billion of taxpayer money going into the state system every year. Teachers, parents and students suffer to keep these guys in their parasitical central position: they won't do anything that could risk their meal ticket, their political influence via education, or their market share.
What about families drifting out of the state system? Yes, there is a drift but it's only for those who can afford to pay the fees that make up the funding gap. Even this deterrent is not enough for the 'operators' of the state system. They're bringing in a rule that you can't start a new (independent) school if existing local schools could lose customers to the new school! How do you like that for a democratic country? In other service industries, this would be called a mafia protecting itself.
Philip O'Carroll