Helen Proctor

School choice: why are more parents picking private over public?

school choice, School funding, , , ,

More students than ever before are being enrolled in Australia’s private schools, according to new data on school choice from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Most states and territories have experienced a similar trend. Even before current increases Australia had among the highest proportion of kids enrolled at non government schools in the OECD.

Why are private schools growing in Australia?

The growth tends to be concentrated in what’s called the lower-fee sector although that can still be a burden – two or three children at school at $5,000 per child before tax income, so it is still quite an expense. By far the highest growth has occurred in the newer, non-elite non-government schools. This group of schools is heavily funded by governments. 

I think there is a mystique around private schools – parents feel that they’re doing the right thing by their children by sending them to private schools. I get asked a lot about values.

What does ‘values’ actually mean?

Public schools have very good values, the most important of which is their fundamental mission to welcome all children. When people talk about values in relation to private schools I get quite irritated because I think of all the reasons why you might choose one school or another, ‘values’ are not really the reason unless you are thinking about a particular religious set of values and religious beliefs. 

The majority of private schools belong to the more traditional Christian churches, the Christian denominations Catholic or Protestant. So  in terms of values, the schools that have the strongest anti-discrimination values, for example, are actually the public schools. Those are values. Anything else is a myth.

When it comes to school choice, does it benefit someone to go to a private school or public school in the long term, in terms of either earnings or job success?

The big difference is to do with other factors: social class is the big factor statistically that shapes people’s outcomes.  Success comes in all sorts of different individual experiences.

Some people from very modest backgrounds go on to the highest offices of the land. Former Prime Ministers John Howard, Julia Gillard, Scott Morrison all attended public schools. Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to a Catholic school.

The correlation between class and schooling success

And some people from extraordinarily privileged backgrounds go belly up. Statistically speaking there’s a very strong, long-term and robust correlation between family wealth, or social class or whatever measure you’re going to use, and schooling success. In a wealthy country like Australia, that’s pretty shameful. It’s much stronger than it should be. 

It’s very easy to blame the media. I think media report things that are interesting, and that have conflict, and the discussion about sending your kids to which school you send your kids is a bit of a backyard conversation, a topic among parents. People have arguments about school choice. People hold passionate views, they disagree about it. Sometimes parents disagree with each other. Sometimes grandparents disagree with their children about where the grandchildren are sent. It’s a cause of struggle and interest and so I think that’s where the media interest comes from. There are also widely publicised issues public schools face, such as teacher shortages, which may contribute to parents considering private options.

There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down. It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.

In a sense, Catholic schools have Catholic offices to lobby for them–as a day job. The private schools have various peak bodies to lobby for them.

Who lobbies for public schools?

No one has the day job of lobbying for public schools yet they still enrol the majority of Australian kids and presumably the majority of Australian parents are pretty happy with their local public school.

We are currently undoubtedly facing a crisis in the nation’s public schools. Now, that’s not all public schools. It’s very much determined by certain localities and certain sort of clusters of areas where there are problems. 

Public school people are in a real bind. If leaders of public schools say nothing, and they say everything’s fine, how are the problems ever going to get addressed? 

And yet if they talk about how much they need more resources, which they do then it has this effect of implying that the education that they’re offering is below standard and one thing we know about parents is that they are absolutely risk-averse. 

That’s their job description, parents’ job description is to be risk averse. If you’re reading in the newspapers, if you’re listening to the radio or you might even see the local public school with, you know, demountable walls or falling-down buildings, your natural instinct is to do what you can to to send your child somewhere else.

Those thousands of unstaffed classrooms across the nation have an impact on parental school choice.  How could it not? If you’re hearing that your child might not have a maths teacher, what are you going to do? 

What impacts school choice?

Of course, you’re going to make a certain set of decisions. I would say to parents, have a look at your local school and see how your local schools are going, because it may well be that you’re not in it in an area where there are those shortages. 

But yes, of course, people are going to be worried about that. And that’s not to say anything about the abiding quality of public education or the dedication and commitment of public school teachers. It’s to say that it’s shameful that a wealthy country like Australia cannot find it in its coffers to properly fund public education.

We know that public schools are the only schools that systematically enrol all children, they enrol all children in an area, they enrol all children,  no matter how savvy their parents are, no matter how wealthy their parents are, no matter what kind of connections that parents have. And so it absolutely is critical to all of us, whether we send our own kids public or private to have a really strong public sector. 

It’s a question of national importance.

Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how schools shape social life beyond the school gate. She uses historical methods to examine the making of contemporary educational systems by focussing on the changing relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’.

Possibly the last blog of the conference . . .

Curriculum review, sociology of education, teacher workload, , , , , , , , , , ,

Still happy to take contributions inspired by the AARE Conference but we will be returning to regular programming next week so please follow these guidelines. Please write to jenna@aare.edu.au

Thank you very much to everyone who contributed posts and photos over the past week.

Meghan Stacey, senior lecturer in the UNSW School of Education, writes, Symposium: What’s the “new sociology of education”, then and now? Looking back to the 1970s and ahead to today

In 1971, Michael F.D. Young published the edited collection ‘Knowledge and control: new directions for the sociology of education’. This among other signature texts of the 1970s constituted work characterised as ‘the new sociology of education’, which saw the field shift from, as symposium convenor Julie McLeod put it, ‘taking problems’ to ‘making problems’. In this shift, aspects of schooling which had previously been taken for granted, such as what and whose ‘knowledge’ constitutes the curriculum, were opened up for scrutiny. 

The symposium asked contributors to consider what this ‘new sociology of education’ did and did not notice; its legacies; and what might or should constitute a ‘new’ sociology of education for today.

The first response to this remit came from Bob Lingard, who pointed to large scale assessments, datafication and globalisation as examples of forces which have shifted studies in the sociology of education and which demand a move beyond methodological nationalism. Lingard’s talk resonated with points made by the third speaker in the session, Joel Windle, who argued for ‘rescaling’ in a ‘new’ sociology of education for today, in which thinking about knowledge and control is shifted to a global level. 

Lingard and Windle’s arguments were given a useful counterweight by the fourth speaker in the session, Eve Mayes, who brought discussion of the new sociology of education to the level of classroom-based research and practice through the example of the ‘Teachers for a Fair Go’ project, highlighting the ongoing need to question ‘what schools can be’.

Yet questions of the future, and in particular a future for the sociology of education, were seen by some speakers to be under threat. Lingard noted that while in the 1970s, sociology of education would be taught in the first, second, third and fourth years of initial teacher education, this presence has since dwindled significantly. A similar point was made by the second speaker in the session, Parlo Singh, who noted an (over?) emphasis on Bourdieuian theory in the sociology of education today, despite Pierre Bourdieu having only a relatively fleeting engagement with education (unlike, for example, his contemporary Basil Bernstein). Singh argued that the lack of sociological training in today’s initial teacher education may explain this trend.

According to Jessica Gerrard and Helen Proctor, who presented the final paper in this session, “declarations of the new” always bring with them “whispers” of the old. For Gerrard and Proctor, this raises questions about just what is sought to be ‘conserved’ in ‘conservative’ views and politics. 

Yet in the context of this symposium, where the future of the sociology of education itself appears to be in danger, perhaps an important question is what needs to be ‘conserved’ from the legacy of the developments of the 1970s. In particular, there may be a need to emphasise the central role of the sociology of education in supporting, as Mayes highlighted, the ‘fair go’ that classrooms can but often do not provide for students. As such, the sociology of education is not separate from but in fact central to initial teacher education. As the discussion that followed the papers highlighted, the sociology of education supports an understanding of teachers as navigators and negotiators of a curriculum which is not taken for granted, but instead, understood as culturally contingent and power-laden. This means we should be enhancing, rather than further marginalising and denigrating, the sociological education of the pre-service teachers we teach.

As convenor of a large, sociologically-informed undergraduate education course, I am sometimes questioned as to the ‘practicality’ of my course for students of teaching. It is too ‘theoretical’, some students (and sometimes colleagues) say. And while the theory is essential, it may be that the links between this theory and the actual work of teachers in classrooms needs to be made more explicit for the next generation of teachers. As such, and as session convenor Julie McLeod suggested as the symposium concluded, foregrounding the importance of the sociology of education in schools and initial teacher education classrooms may need to be a first priority of any ‘new’ sociology of education moving forward.

Photos below are just some of the images from the conference

Louisa Field, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, writes on Teachers’ Work and Lives

Philip Poulton

The University of Sydney

Primary Teachers as Classroom Curriculum-Makers: Emerging Findings From a Longitudinal Study Exploring Teachers’ Experiences in Curriculum-Making With a Standardised Curriculum 

“I just have to make the thing with the outcomes, in the way that others want me to make, and then I have to teach the thing in the way it says” and “I think what guides the programming is really driven by our questioning of how we do we equip these students for a world that we can’t anticipate or envision yet?” These are two examples of the very different experiences of curriculum-making for teachers in Phillip Poulton’s doctoral study. In this longitudinal study, Phillip has followed preservice teachers from their final year of initial teacher education into their first year of classroom teaching, exploring the realities of early career teachers’ reported curriculum-making experiences. This study has found that whilst these teachers reported varied curriculum-making experiences, these were not always characteristic of more knowledge-led forms of curriculum-making. Rather, these were characterised more by instances of curriculum delivery.

During this presentation, Phillip drew on two individual teachers, both alike in terms of their valuing of education and conceptions of curriculum-making. However, in their first year of teaching, these two teachers found themselves in classroom fields with very different agendas and orientations towards curriculum. One teacher reported greater agency in working with curriculum in a flexible and collaborative environment, guided rather than restricted by the syllabus. The other teacher reporting a contrasting experience, finding herself in a non-collaborative environment and ticking off ‘outcomes’ prioritised above all else. Phillip’s study provides fascinating insight into the lived experiences of early career teachers who, while all aspiring to be knowledge-led curriculum-makers, were either enabled or constrained by the conditions of their individual classroom fields. Understanding more about these experiences is particularly pertinent today, especially with current discussions centred on ‘ending the lesson lottery’ and centralising lesson planning for teachers. Phillip’s doctoral study offer impetus for us to challenge such delivery agendas placed on classrooms which often narrow teachers’ curriculum-making practices. Rather, teachers’ curriculum-making needs to be reinforced as a key tenet of teacher professionalism – practices that are dependent on teachers’ professional knowledge of their students, pedagogy, and content.

Dr Claire Golledge The University of Sydney

No Capacity, No Equity: Schools, Universities, and New Challenges for Teacher Professional Learning  

Dr Claire Golledge’s paper focussed on how teacher professional learning (PL) mandates can exacerbate inequity across schools and systems. All Australian teachers are required to meet mandatory professional learning expectations in line with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Dr Golledge’s presentation drew on her own experience as a former leader of professional learning, and from her doctoral case study research to illustrate that not all teachers are positioned equally to meet these mandatory PL requirements. To highlight this point, Dr Golledge presented two case studies of teachers in vastly different learning contexts, one in an inner city, elite, independent school and another in a regional, government school where the bulk of students come from low socio-economic backgrounds. Despite vastly different PL needs and differing capacities of these teachers to access professional learning opportunities, both of these teachers are subject to the same PL standards and requirements.  While the teacher in the independent school was supported with their PL with a healthy budget, covered classes, and access to a range of accredited PL, the teacher in the regional school faced additional challenges of funding, finding casuals to cover classes, and access to accredited professional learning within her school. Dr Golledge’s study raises a key point that we often talk about educational inequity amongst students, but what about the impact on teachers? This is something which is all too often overlooked. This presentation sparked lively conversations about the ethics and equity of for-profit professional learning providers as well as asking what role universities should play in helping to support teacher professional learning and access to research in schools.

For the love of God: how pornography and an explicit reading list turned Rona Joyner into a conservative activist.

civics and citizenship education, social studies, , ,

Photo of Rona Joyner by Russell Shakespeare https://www.russellshakespeare.com/

The contemporary international rise of rightist politics is associated with anti-bureaucratic and anti-state ‘populist’ tendencies. Often, conservatives represent themselves as speaking for ‘the silent majority’ but yet on the outside of power. Indeed, even the Australian conservative commentary Sky News TV show is called The Outsiders, a retort to the ABC political affairs show Insiders. In education, both Kevin Donnelly and Mark Latham – leading conservative campaigners on education – pitch their politics as a ‘common sense’ that is under threat and sidelined by the so-called take-over of ‘political correctness’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ in public education.

In making sense of this, we suggest there is a need for a greater understanding of the history of conservatism in Australian education, and in particular the role of women in establishing a grassroots conservatism premised on an expression of ‘the people’ against the state. 

In our recent research, which forms part of a broader Australian Research Council project on the history of participatory activism and education policy reform (with our colleague Susan Goodwin), we have sought to bring forward this history. We focus on one woman, credited for leading the successful campaign for banning two innovative new social studies curriculum packages  in Queensland in the late 1970s, Rona Joyner. Joyner called for the ban on the grounds that they transgressed fundamental Australian Christian family values. The Queensland premier of the day, the Trumpian Joh Bjeleke Petersen not only personally actioned the ban in 1978, going over the head of his education minister, but also threatened to sack any public school teachers who used the curricula in their classrooms.

This was an important moment in the history of Australia’s ‘culture wars’. The 1970s and 1980s were foundational to the emergence of a new grassroots Christian conservatism that expressed itself as a presumed ‘Christian’ majority, maligned and sidelined by an immorally secular and ‘permissive’ state. Joyner was one of a number  of conservative activists who launched themselves into the public sphere at this time and who, firstly, claimed to speak in the name of all Christians and secondly, described themselves as being the underdog, working against a dangerous collective of left-wing bureaucrats and teachers.

In the 1970s, Joyner (who was close to both Joh and his wife, Flo Bjelke Petersen) established two campaign groups – the Society to Outlaw Pornography (STOP) and the Campaign Against Regressive Education (CARE) – and the self-published newsletter Stop Press, a twenty year run of which is held by the Queensland State Library. Through Stop Press, Joyner aimed to provide like-minded conservative Christian parents with the intellectual, religious and political tools to take up the moral struggle against secular humanism, feminism, multiculturalism and homosexuality. 

Joyner passionately argued that  education bureaucrats and public school teachers were  dangerously appropriating the rights of ‘Christian’ parents. Warning readers to be vigilant with regards to the teaching of sex education in schools in the first issue of Stop Press in 1972, Joyner writes, ‘No one has the right to usurp the parents’ position in the field of education, so be watchful’. Making the case even more forcefully a decade later – despite her success with the curriculum ban – Joyner declares in 1984, ‘State control of education is anti-family and anti-God’. 

Rona Joyner was one of several international high-profile conservative women of her era including Mary Whitehouse, who advocated for increased censorship of television in Britain, and Phyllis Schlafly, who successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment in the US. A self-attribution of being on the outside of power meant that these campaigners frequently practised their conservatism as a grassroots movement. They used techniques and language associated with participatory democracy movements of the left, such as home-published newsletters and a dispersed network of community-based supporter groups. 

Vital to understanding the work and significance of ultraconservative women like Rona Joyner is their positioning as mothers. Joyner claimed that she became politicised through her alarm at the inclusion of a sexually explicit novel on her son’s first year university reading list in the 1960s. According to the logic of this anecdote, Rona Joyner’s public activism was an extension of her maternal duty beyond the immediate home and family and into the front line of a public moral fight. 

Paradoxically, women conservatives like Rona Joyner are often not taken seriously and ridiculed for their appearance or for the way they speak. This treatment plays to a head nodding progressive audience, that in turn overlooks the importance of these women in building conservative moral campaigns centred on a claim of speaking for ‘the people’ (in this case, the ‘everyday’ Christian parent). For Joyner, the power of parental authority – in distinction from the state – was the location of the family and parents in God’s laws. She writes, ‘Remember Western civilization is based on the fact that the individual derives his freedoms and his rights from God’s laws, not from the State’.

Joyner’s activism, and the banning of the social studies curricula, lays bare tensions in the relationship between parents as citizens, politicians and expert-based bureaucracies, that extend well beyond the specificities of 1970s Queensland. In our examination of twenty years of Joyner’s newsletters, we show how her campaign work exposes fault lines in the relationship between the authority of the state and individual moral authority, one such repercussion of this being the expression of political populism against state authority. Joyner was central to the shaping and production of a grassroots conservative moral political culture premised on a concern that ‘progressives’ have overtaken the key institutions of modern democracy (schools, for instance) that has been renewed and rearticulated across the late twentieth-century into the present day.

Jessica Gerrard is an associate professor at the University of Melbourne. She researches the changing formations and lived experiences of social inequalities in relation to education, activism, work and unemployment. She works across the disciplines of sociology, history and policy studies with an interest in critical methodologies and theories.

Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how schools shape social life beyond the school gate. She uses historical methods to examine the making of contemporary educational systems by focussing on the changing relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’.

Which national publication is responsible for (almost) all Australian children wearing school uniform?

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Recently unisex uniforms have taken centre stage in the annual school uniform debate in Australia. Our research has led us through just about every argument you could have over school uniforms, but venture out into any suburb or town and you can see that the debate over whether we should have them or not in Australia has been well and truly decided.

We believe one media outlet in particular played a pivotal role in Australia’s acceptance of uniforms in schools. Our research uncovered how the Australian Women’s Weekly took on the role of ‘selling’ school uniforms to Australians, particularly mothers.

In her 1979 article ‘Change Without Innovation’, Elaine Thompson claimed, ‘The Australian Women’s Weekly generates a picture of the world, of women, of society, which is projected week after week to a huge part of the Australian population’. This magazine is not just a useful historical source of illustrative content—one of any number of publications that we could have chosen to study—but has its own substantial historical significance as a social and cultural agent. The Australian Women’s Weekly, for many decades during the twentieth century the bestselling periodical in the country, served as a formidable authority, trading particularly in the routine and the domestic.

From its beginnings in the early 1930s, the Weekly featured content on school wear. An interest in what children and young people wore to school can be seen as part of the magazine’s ongoing engagement with its putative readership: married women who were mothers, and who bore the main responsibility for the smooth running of their households.

There were back-to-school advertisements for ‘regulation’ garments and sewing patterns for the ‘correct styles’ for students. Even though the majority of schoolchildren in Australia at this time were not required to wear a prescribed outfit to school, the magazine’s message was that proper school dress was a matter of conformity—of uniformity.

Opinions on school uniforms began to appear in the readers’ letters section within a few years of the magazine’s debut. The Weekly would come to frame opinions on school dress in debate terms of ‘for and against’. When a Queensland mother, for example, posed a question to the magazine in 1963 about whether or not she was right to send her daughter to school in a ‘spotted muumuu’ despite the teacher’s objections, many readers responded, some expressing solidarity with the mother, and others voicing their disapproval of her.

The Weekly created a space for debate on uniforms, but alongside it a space for the selling of uniforms, not only directly in advertisements, but also indirectly in articles that consolidated the message that proper school dress was tantamount to a school uniform. In 1944, for example, the magazine highlighted the ‘Sloppy Sue’ craze in the US (involving high school girls wearing jeans, men’s clothing, and other oversized garments). The piece had a subsection entitled ‘Neatness is Preferred Here’ in which a headmistress noted that at her school ‘the wearing of uniforms had precluded any development of such a cult as the ‘Sloppy Sue’”. A 1958 piece on the famous Sara Quads starting a new school after their move to Sydney showed them dressed in their new matching collared shirts, blazers and hats (never mind the fact that their new public school in Punchbowl did not require these items). ‘Keeping the Uniforms in Order’, a 1969 back-to-school article, was written by a mother offering advice ‘to those who are facing the problems of school wardrobes for the first time’. Nowhere did it acknowledge that school wardrobes might consist of something other than regulation attire.

By the 1970s, full-colour photographs of happy, uniformed children became a staple of the magazine’s coverage of schooling. In a series of back-to-school covers that began in 1974, not only did each child wear a uniform, each one wore predominantly blue regulation-style outfits. These covers presented images of children dressed correspondingly, all of a piece, both within each cover and across the series from year to year.

It was the 1977 cover in this back-to-school series that was arguably the apotheosis of the Weekly’s representations of the child dressed for school. Editor-in-chief Ita Buttrose wrote in the issue’s editorial, “I hope you’ll forgive a mother’s pride but that’s my son, Ben, on the cover this week, and I think he looks absolutely fantastic. He’s with his cousin, Rebecca—my niece—so the aunt in me feels pretty good too.”

We do not have systematic data about how the magazine’s readers interpreted, acted on, objected to, or even scoffed at the Weekly’s images and stories about school dress. However we believe the magazine manufactured, moderated, and in the end resolved a national ‘debate’ on the subject of school uniforms in their gendered forms, positioning mothers as having to provide and care for them.

The Weekly made uniformed schooling desirable, connected it to the sartorial history of exclusive or selective schooling, and sold it as obtainable and maintainable. As Ita Buttrose’s expression of motherly pride suggested, dressing one’s child in a ‘regulation’ outfit was a way of enacting the values of the Australian Women’s Weekly, and thereby entering its collective world.

 

LISTEN to Heather Weaver and Helen Proctor discuss their research with Wendy Harmer on ABC radio:

 

Heather Weaver

Helen Proctor

Heather Weaver is a Research Associate and Helen Proctor is an ARC Future Fellow in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. Their research on uniforms will be published in 2018 in History of Education Quarterly under the title, “The Question of the Spotted Muumuu: How the Australian Women’s Weekly Manufactured a Vision of the Normative School Mother and Child”.

 

The authors would like to thank the people responsible for the excellent “Trove” database at the Australian National Library for their assistance with this project.