school choice

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

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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’.

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Teachers also are affected by the ‘school choice’ policies dividing Australia

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What is it like to be a teacher? Often when we hear talk about teachers, whether in popular culture, policy or research, it’s as though the experience of ‘being a teacher’ is always pretty much the same. And often the attitude is you’re either a good one, like Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter series or a bad one like Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull.

In policy, teachers are lumped together in ill-defined discourses around, for example, ‘classroom readiness’and ‘teacher quality’. In research, a good example might be our understanding of the early career teacher, who is notoriously subject to stress and burnout.

But is being a teacher, or an early career teacher for that matter, really such a homogenized kind of experience? 

My PhD research suggests that no, it isn’t. In particular, I argue that teaching is affected by the market-oriented approach to schooling taken in NSW, in which students and parents – operating with different kinds of social, cultural and economic resources – can choose to attend different kinds of schools. This system has long been known to have detrimental effects on equity outcomes in relation to student achievement, as students with greater levels of advantage move into more ‘desirable’ schools, which can lead to concentrations of varied and particular need within local, often comprehensive school contexts (a process known as residualisation).

But these school choice effects also have particular consequences for teachers.

I designed my PhD research to include as wide a range of schools as would be possible in an in-depth qualitative project. This meant I ended up exploring cases of early career teachers’ work in nine different schools, including high-fee independent schools, lower-fee Catholic schools, and public schools that enrolled student bodies with varying levels of average advantage (as measured by the Index of Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, available on the federal government’s My Schoolwebsite). 

I found some interesting things. 

Importantly a commonality was that all nine teachers in my study indicated having had relatively successful, and often fairly advantaged experiences as students themselves. However, given the wide range of school contexts these teachers were now working across, some teachers seemed to mesh well with their schools, while others found them particularly difficult and different to what they had known. It made me wonder whether this is the case for the teacher workforce at large; that perhaps on the whole we are people who have experienced advantage and success in the system as we know it. Indeed to some extent we must have, to have made it into teacher education courses. 

Teacher experiences in school with lower ICSEA

Teachers in my study who were working in schools with lower ICSEA values, which enrolled students experiencing significant educational disadvantage, described particular socio-cultural, creative and relational requirements in their work. These teachers described the experiences of students who were marginalized within wider society due to social and cultural differences, facing multiple and sustained challenges both within and beyond the school.

Teachers in these schools described their students as being on the “receiving end” of discrimination and seeming to see school as “not our thing”. These teachers identified a need for greater creativity in lesson planning, as well as more resilience regarding their abilities in planning for and working with their students.

As one teacher commented: “the better the school is, the better the teachers think they are” (the concept of ‘better’ schools here being a short-hand for student advantage, translated into results and rankings). 

Teacher experiences in school with average ICSEA

Indeed, for teachers working in schools with more average ICSEA values the picture looked a little different. Although these teachers were kept busy with various extra-curricular demands, they were also regularly rewarded with explicit and overt student and parent appreciation from cohorts who were described as feeling reasonably comfortable, and sometimes quite actively allied with, the systems and structures of formalized schooling.

One case teacher in a public school with an above average ICSEA described how one of the things she liked most about her job was “when the students say thank you”, something which occurred frequently and which made “a huge difference”. While this is not to say that students in schools with lower ICSEA never say ‘thank you’, in schools with average ICSEA, students more commonly seemed to bring pre-existing feelings of inclusion within schooling spaces that potentially reduced some pressures around creativity and resilience for their teachers.  

Teacher experiences in school with highest ICSEA

Finally, for teachers working in the schools with the highest ICSEA values, a similarly aligned relational dynamic between students and teachers was evident. Like in the average-ICSEA schools, teachers here described teaching “compliant” students.

Those in private sector schools, particularly, also described an abundance of material and human resources, such as “adults who don’t teach” – referring to administrative, specialist and other support staff. There was little awareness that there aren’t many “adults who don’t teach” in other kinds of school settings. Interestingly, however, the increased human and other resources evident in these private sector schools did not always seem to translate into reduced teacher workload. Instead, in all cases, the school-level management of staff emerged as significant in creating positive employment contexts.

The teachers in this study came from more privileged backgrounds. If teachers do tend to come from relatively privileged and successful backgrounds, not all of their students will. While some research has looked at this issue particularly in relation to contexts of ‘disadvantage’ (see here and here for some examples), this study has been one of the first to question what this might mean within the context of the large and complex NSW system as a whole. 

I believe that specificities of context, exacerbated by a market-based policy approach which has driven greater levels of differentiation between schools, have particular consequences for teachers, both in the nature and scale of work that is required of them.

Dr Meghan Stacey is a lecturer in the sociology of education and education policy in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. Taking a particular interest in teachers, her research considers how teachers’ work is framed by policy, as well as the effects of such policy for those who work with, within and against it. Meghan completed her PhD with the University of Sydney in 2018.Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey

You can read more about my work in my recently published article summarising some of these findings, and in my forthcoming book due out later this year (The Business of Teaching: Becoming a Teacher in a Market of Schools, Palgrave Macmillan). 

The ‘right’ to government subsidised choice of schools is another wasteful snout-in-the-trough entitlement

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Parents who choose a private school for their child have a ‘right’ to expect governments to help with the costs because they are taxpayers; so the argument goes in Australia. Certainly chief executive of Independent Schools Victoria, Michelle Green, makes such an argument.

But where does this so-called ‘right’ come from? Neither Michelle Green nor anyone else making a similar claim has an adequate answer.

We pay our taxes so that our governments can provide public services such as public hospitals, public transport, the armed forces, the ABC and so on. These are services that private industry cannot or should not provide. Just because someone chooses not to use public transport does not entitle them to claim a public subsidy for their car costs! Emergency medical treatment at casualty is free at public hospitals but costs $500 at a private hospital. We pay our taxes for public security provided by the police. If we want additional private security for any reason we pay that ourselves and don’t expect a subsidy from our neighbours.

There is a choice. But choice is only available for those who have the wherewithal to make that choice.

We have heard about the end of the age of entitlement. However, when a person on the basic wage of $35,000 a year pays his or her taxes, that person should not expect their taxes to help someone who is on a salary of $150,000 or more per annum to exercise school choice. Any notion of choice in this case is bogus.

The reason for the strong enrolments in private schools in the growth corridor suburbs in major cities in Australia, mentioned by Green as evidence of people exercising their ‘choice’, is due in part to the lack of public infrastructure and planning. At the same time, government funding for capital expenditure by private school systems and independent schools has become incredibly generous, another reason new schools are proliferating.

Governments inspired by ‘providing choice’ will always find it easier and more ideologically satisfying to get private systems to build those extra new schools, than to go to the trouble of providing the schools themselves.

Green mentions so-called “low-fee” private schools. However these can be up to 85% publicly funded. As to her claim about the wonderful multicultural make up of private schools, she does not give us details. Some children who were born overseas, or whose parents speak languages other than English at home, come from very socially or educationally advantaged families. There are clear divisions of such advantage across different ethnic backgrounds. I point out the Gonski Review found that 80% of all disadvantaged children are in the public system.

More than 40% of Australian secondary children now attend private schools, either so-called independent or faith-based systemic schools. Australia has one of the most privatised school systems in the OECD since Chile withdrew all public funding to private schools in 2014.

Prior to the late 1960’s private schools in Australia received little government funding. When such funding was introduced, it was to help bridge gaps for very poor Catholic schools, the sentiment was egalitarian not entitlement. What has grown since then is unique in the world, and not in a good way.

While most OECD countries have private schools, very few of them receive public funding as it occurs here. Take England for example, the home of the elite private school, and the exclusive private schools in the USA: not one cent of taxpayer’s money goes into their budgets.

The purpose of an excellent, appropriately funded public education system is to help ameliorate the inevitable inequalities that result from the lottery of birth. No better mechanism for creating a well-educated general population has so far been discovered.

The importance of choice for parents has been promoted at the expense of equity for students. The choice model promoted by federal and state governments has contributed to the decline in enrolments in public schools nationally.

Stephen Dinham of University of Melbourne and the president of the Australian College of Educators wrote:

It is hard not to conclude that what we are seeing is a deliberate strategy to dismantle public education, partly for ideological and partly for financial reasons. If these developments continue then the inevitable outcomes will be greater inequity and continuing decline in educational performance that will provide the proponents of change with further “evidence” to support their position and for even more far-reaching change.

Funding for private schools in Victoria, for example, increased by 18.5% per student, or eight times that of public schools between 2009-2014. The Australian average increase for private schools was $1,181 per student compared to only $247 for public schools.

However the savings to governments for shifting the responsibility of schooling to private institutions and systems is illusionary.

The most comprehensive review of school funding  since Gonski by Lindsay Connors and Jim McMorrow argued that state and federal governments would have saved $2 billion annually over the past four decades had they educated private school students in the public school system.

Increased public investment in non-government schools between 1973 and 2012 has increased the overall costs to governments rather than producing overall savings.

Recent trends in school recurrent funding analysed  by Bernie Shepherd and Chris Bonnor  strongly suggest that over forty per cent of students in Catholic schools in 2016 will average as much, if not more, public funding than students in similar government schools. By 2018 an additional forty per cent will most likely join them. Half the students in Independent schools are on track to get as much, if not more, than government school students by the end of the decade.

This finding emerges as one of the most significant to date from analysis of My School data. School funding in recent years has done little for student achievement and nothing for equity, including the $3 billion over-investment in better-off students, without any measurable gain in their achievement.

On current trajectories State and Federal governments, within four years, will be funding the vast majority of private school students at levels higher than students in similar government schools.

Concerns about funding equity should now be joined by concerns about effectiveness and efficiency in how we provide and fund schools.

Each private school pupil now receives, on average, a non-means-tested public subsidy of over $8000 per year and yes I believe this is indeed at the of expense of the less privileged public school student.

The focus of our investment in education should urgently be in public education systems not in providing ‘choice’ for some families.

And so much for all the talk about the end of the age of entitlement.

 

David-Zyngier copyDavid Zyngier works in the Faculty of Education at Monash University as a Senior Lecturer in the areas of Curriculum and Pedagogy. He was previously a teacher and school principal. His research focuses on teacher pedagogies that engage all students but in particular how can these improve outcomes for students from communities of disadvantage focusing on issues of social justice and social inclusion. He works within a critical and post-structural orientation to pedagogy that is distinguishable by its commitment to social justice (with interests in who benefits and who does not by particular social arrangements) and its dialectic critical method investigating how school education can improve student outcomes for all but in particular for at risk students.