Three keys to improving our schools

[brendan]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/three-keys-to-improving-our-schools/2008/04/05/1207249479267.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Jennifer Buckingham
April 7, 2008

THE Federal Government's Australia 2020 Summit is less than a month away but already school education, which falls into the "productivity" session, has attracted controversy. Given the range of interests and views of the participants, this is likely to continue.

It is possible to list dozens of specific problems that need to be resolved to improve the quality of school education. Given the short time available, these will have to be prioritised, but it is imperative that three aspects of school education are on the agenda.

First, school funding needs a massive shake-up. It must become centred on the needs of students and be allocated in a transparent way. This is particularly important for state schools. The funding system for most state schools is based more on teacher salaries than on student need. There are various types of add-on funds that are supposed to provide equity for needy students, but they are often inadequate to deal with the multiple educational and social problems some schools are burdened with.

State schools should be funded on a per-student basis, with all students entitled to a standard grant, with graduated loadings for students who cost more to educate, such as those with disabilities or from disadvantaged homes. This is known in international education policy circles as Weighted Student Funding.

Education Minister Julia Gillard has already expressed an intention to change the way the Government funds state schools so that the allocation of funds better reflects the real needs of individual schools. This sort of thinking is welcome.

Ideally, though, both government and non-government schools should be funded under a single system through co-operative funding from the state and federal governments (along with much more encouragement of private investment). If the mechanisms of school funding were open, fair and defensible, there may finally be an end to debate on the topic.

Second, there must be a focus on the nuts and bolts of getting high-quality teachers in classrooms. There has been a tendency to place too much emphasis on the number of teachers in schools, with little regard for their aptitude. Low cut-off scores for university education courses attest to this.

Teacher quality rests on two conditions: recruiting good people, and training them properly. Teaching needs to become more attractive to intelligent and energetic people who could have any job they want.

More rewarding salary schedules, a more flexible career structure, and an emphasis on acquiring high-quality candidates in the key disciplines would be crucial in re-energising the teaching profession.

The recent decision of the NSW Government to give public schools the opportunity to select teachers locally puts it among the states such as Victoria that have embraced modern employment practices that provide schools with much more latitude in managing their resources.

This is a significant positive step and recasts teachers as professionals in charge of their own careers, rather than "workers" in a union and state-controlled industry.

The second bastion of teaching is training. To be registered, all teachers have to undertake university-based teacher education courses. The problem is that there is widespread discontent with the training these courses provide.

There are 102 government reports telling us that teacher training is too variable and is largely unsatisfactory to both teachers and principals. New teachers now spend four years and thousands of dollars at university being poorly prepared for the classroom.

A proper audit and evaluation of individual teacher training programs is required to document the content and format of each course and collect data that shows the quality of teaching it produces among its graduates.

State teacher institutes accredit teacher education courses, but because graduate teachers move around the country, a national approach to the quality of outcomes is also required. Teaching Australia is well placed to take on this task.

Third, decisive efforts must be made to improve the disgraceful standard of education achieved by our indigenous students, especially in remote communities. There is a separate "indigenous issues" session at the Australia 2020 Summit, but indigenous education needs the attention of mainstream education experts as well as indigenous justice advocates.

The failure of state and territory governments to fulfil their obligations to provide a decent education to generations of indigenous children is profound.

The Federal Government needs to step in where others have failed, and all levels of government must immediately commit to begin turning the situation around within the next 12 months.

Governments are willing to spend billions of dollars subsidising child care for wealthy families. An indigenous population that is literate is not an impossible dream.

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies (cis.org.au) and will be attending the Australia 2020 Summit.

[brendan]

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=1837

Getting School Funding Right, Australian Financial Review, 25 March 2008

Of all the policy debates in Australia, school funding is perhaps the feistiest. If you have children at school, you’re an instant expert. If not, you can always talk about how things were when you went to school. So even the merest whiff of change is guaranteed to prompt a barrage of talkback calls and bagfuls of letters to the editor. Add a dash of religion and a pinch of class warfare, and you have all the ingredients for a first order political barney.

Yet as Julia Gillard’s recent entry into the debate illustrated, school funding is an area that desperately requires reform. Indeed, it may be that the best way of delivering on the promise of equality of opportunity is to get school financing right.

The last revolution in school funding occurred with the Howard Government’s 2001 shift to fund private schools based on parents’ socioeconomic status. Introduced by then education minister David Kemp, the so-called ‘SES formula’ aimed to ensure that schools with more students in poor neighbourhoods got more money.

Unfortunately, the 2001 reforms also included a guarantee to all private schools that if the SES funding formula made them worse off, then they would receive their year 2000 funding amount, adjusted for inflation in the education sector. Seven years later, this ‘grandfather’ clause applies to about half of Australia’s private schools; making a mockery of the notion that private school funding is needs-based.

Another odd feature of the current school funding scheme is that private schools do not adjust their fees to take account of differences in the ‘voucher amount’ that parents bring to a school. For example, high school students in the most advantaged suburbs last year brought their schools just $1333 in federal funding, while those in the most disadvantaged suburbs were worth a whopping $6807 apiece. Yet the typical high-end private school did not offer a $5000 discount to poor parents.

Rather than arguing over particular policies (which themselves often reflect the oddities of historical compromises), the best way of moving the school funding debate out of the ideological mire might be to see whether we can reach agreement over the basic principles that should guide the debate. Here are four core notions that I think all sides should be able to agree to.

First, the wellbeing of children is more important than anyone else. Teachers and school administrators matter, but the top priority of education policies is to help kids, not adults.

Second, we should not penalise parents for spending more on their children’s education. To the extent that education has ‘positive externalities’ (higher productivity, more social capital, better civic engagement), we should encourage it. There is a real difference between a policy that says ‘the richer you are, the less the government should give your child’ and one that says ‘the more you spend on your child’s education, the less the government should give you’. The former targets resources to those who need them most, while the latter operates like an education expenditure tax.

Third, schools should be judged on outputs, not just inputs. At present, the federal government allocates billions of dollars to private schools, but asks little in return. Taxpayers who fund these schools have a right to demand that they provide empirical data such as test scores, dropout rates, or parental satisfaction surveys.

Fourth, funding should be transparent. Parents should know precisely how much government funding they bring to their child’s school.

Acceptance of these four basic principles could lead to better reform of our education system.

Recognising that kids come first, we might agree that it is good for a child to move to a better school (though we might still argue about how to help those who remain).

Accepting that we should not penalise education spending might allow us to revamp the private school funding formula so that all schools are financed according to their needs. Middle-income parents who choose to send their children to high-fee schools should get more government assistance than rich parents who opt to send their children to low-fee schools.

Measuring outputs would help parents select the best school, and let voters find out which private schools are adding value, and which ones are skimming the cream.

And making funding transparent puts the bargaining power in the hands of low-income parents, who can march up to the principal and ask why they’re bringing the school nearly $7000 in federal funds, yet not getting a discount on their tuition.

Ultimately, getting private school funding right is essential if the system is to be applied to public schools, as Gillard has proposed. Tantalising as it is to envisage public schools in the poorest neighbourhoods bidding six-figure salaries to attract the best teachers, there’s a long way to go yet.

Andrew Leigh is an economist in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University