Parents abandoning public schools

[brendan]

http://www.theage.com.au/national/parents-abandoning-public-schools-20090129-7t2z.html

"We should be worried about this because, in the end, it's socially divisive — we're creating a class system," said Melbourne University professor of post-compulsory education and training Richard Teese.

I don't see in any way why children attending private schools is any more "socially divisive" than attending a government school.

[costargh]

Why do so called 'education experts' always seem to contend that a 'class system' is bad? All private schooling does it give choice and choice is good. It's fairly obvious that with this system, it stimulates competition and hopefully the end result should be public schooling pulling up its socks and raising its level up to the bars that private schools are maintaining.

We could very easily abolish a 'class system' by dragging down all the private schools. The onus is on the public school sector to pull its socks up.

[brendan]

Even more disturbing is The Age's editorial:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/editorial/schools-waiting-for-the-real-revolution-20090129-7swi.html?page=-1

governments must ensure that the choices parents make are not choices between best and second-best, which means maintaining an adequately funded public education system. Governments may insist that they are doing this, but the schools data released yesterday by the Bureau of Statistics, which show a continuing drift away from government schools, suggests that parents do not agree.


Firstly, how is Government supposed to ensure that the choices parents make are not choices between best and second-best? There will always be one school that is better than another school, in a parent's mind. The only way that it is even remotely possible for one school not to be better than another is if all schools were exactly identical, but not only that, but that they must be forced by Government to be exactly identical.

What it seems like here is the Age wanting to force everyone to go to the exactly the same kind of school whether they like it or not. So much for diversity. There is no way, short of going extreme North Korean totalitarian style, that a Government can ensure that kind of forced equality between schools.

Second, the contention that more government funding will improve education is flawed. There are plenty of studies, controlling for all sorts of other variables, that more funding doesn't mean better education. It has to do with how the government money is spent, and what incentives do those people face when it comes to spending that money, whether it be the politician using the money for pork-barrel projects in marginal electorates, or State schools who have little to no incentive to improve the education they provide, because they will always have a captive audience, with guaranteed revenues (from the State).

[Eriny]

I read that this morning. I find it pretty interesting, but not shocking as such. I think The Age is incorrect. This isn't so much a case of 'better and worse' because there are lots of public schools which are extremely good and many private schools which seem to be very good at cultivating the image of being 'good' but are actually fairly mediocre. It's true that 'good' public schools probably didn't see a drop in enrolments, but it is also likely that there are public schools which are well equipped to be 'good' (despite having less funding than private) schools aren't achieving the very top marks because the bright students are being sent to private schools. Additionally, there are private schools which have median scores either at, or slightly below or above state-wide averages, despite being expensive and well sought after.

The best example I know of is Eltham High and Eltham College. Both in the same kind of area. Eltham High is public, Eltham College is private. Both schools had the same median study score (31). I know this data isn't a perfect indicator of performance, but to me it is still significant that a student from Eltham High can expect to have similar study scores to their private school counterparts down the road.

The percentage of scores over 40, however, was higher at Eltham College (13% compared to 7%). But I think this tells us that on average while the top performing students at Eltham College can expect better ENTER scores, the average student at Eltham High does as well as the average Eltham College student. And, actually, you could even say that the average student at Eltham High does better than the average student at Eltham College because at the private school, the median of 31 was after 13% of the highest scores were probably gotten mostly by the high performers, whereas at the public school, more people consistently achieved above median, but not above 40. It's difficult to explain what I mean here.

I obviously can't generalise this to all secondary schools in Victoria. But I think this shows, at least, that there are exceptions to the rule that private schools are necessarily 'better'. It also means that you have to judge quality on a school-by-school basis, and you can't say that 'public schools are shit' or that 'private schools are awesome'. Neither is always true. So, while I am an advocate of better funding for public schools, I don't think that it is as always as necessary as people are led to believe. Certainly, you don't need every student paying 18k a year to provide a good school. It probably helps the marketing department though (Hailybury has an advertising budget of $1 million - personally I think such a budget is frivolous and draws away from actually educating students when really, the quality of the school ought to speak for itself).

So, I don't think it all about 'better' and 'worse', but the move away from public schools is rather part of an emerging culture where parents are very worried for their children and want their children to be 'gifted'. It's a kind of aspirational thing - this school had a good percentage of kids who got over 40, therefore my child has a better chance of getting over 40 by going here, therefore by sending them to this place I am somehow fulfilling my duties as a parent and my child will be one of the rich and happy people. As the world gets more 'professional' and university education is more common and desired, people are getting more anxious about academic performance. Even 30-40 years ago, I don't think this really was the case everywhere. While affluent people or people with genuinely smart children wanted their kids to have tertiary education, overall people didn't care as much. It wasn't seen as a necessary step towards 'success' in life. So, I think there is a trend for parents to kind of manufacture their image of their kids as bright people and kind of put pressure on them to be bright. It isn't because education is seen as a virtue in its own right, it is because education is much more of a commodity than before - rather than it being about knowledge itself, it has become necessary training towards a viable career.  And the best way to have the image fit with reality is to send them to private schools - the places where they, while they were growing up, saw to be prestigious, elite and exclusively for bright people.

This is just a theory, but I think it corresponds with reports that we've become the 'bubble-wrap' generation and that our parents are very anxious about wanting the best for us, as well as the more positive way that intellectualism is valued as a marketable skill rather than a useless kind of quality. Also it relates to the fact that more people are staying at school and going on to university and how necessary university is to most of us.