The lesson is clear for the government school system. Perform to parents’ expectations and the money will be available. Don’t perform and parents will vote with their feet and take their children to private schools. And under the Federal Governments enrolment benchmark adjustment scheme money will be taken from state governments and handed directly to private schools.
This was made clear by Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on schooling issued this week.
The benchmark scheme has a certain amount of raw attractiveness. However, it has several flaws. The major flaw is that it does not allow for economies of scale. Education cannot be costed on a strict per-capita basis. For a school to educate an extra child costs virtually nothing. But to educate the first child requires huge capital and labour investment. Taking money away on a per-capita basis is wrong. It has the potential to cripple the government sector. And as the government sector suffers from less money, parents are more likely to take their children away from it. The Federal Government’s scheme will become a self-fulfilling prophesy that private schools will take a larger slice of the cake. This is unless the teachers and administrators at government schools see the urgency of the situation and retain parental confidence in the government system.
The second difficulty with the benchmark scheme is that it is not predicated on any objective test on the standard of education offered. Rather is is based on parental judgment based on what parents do with their children.
That element cuts both ways. It may be that government education is actually superior by parents think private education is better and send their children to private schools irrationally. Or it may be that private schools are better but parents simply do not have the money to send their children to private schools so private schools end up not getting the government support they deserve.
A third difficulty is that parents may not be the best judge of educational outcomes. That much is obvious, for example, when parents send their children to loopy schools that teach creationism as science.
So, making funding judgments according to how parents vote with their feet is a very crude method. To take an extreme example, what if 20 per cent of parents suddenly put their children in a creation-science school. It would mean 20 per cent of Federal funds would go to such schools.
Sure, most private schools do an excellent job, but not all.
Fourthly, perception is not reality. Private schools might attract students through advertising and exaggerating and dressing up their educational credentials. They might appeal to glamour and snobbery which have nothing to do with education.
The ABS figures show a shift to non-government schools. They increased enrolments by 2.1 per cent since 1998. Non-government enrolments increased just 0.4 per cent. Under benchmarking, that would result in $32 million being cut from the government sector, according to the Opposition.
The government sector will lose economies of scale.
It is possible, however, for government schools to turn the benchmarking to advantage, provided that the ideologically blinkered federal government does not change the ground rules. The ACT’s performance shows that if you buck the trend and retain student in government schools, funding is not cut and can even be increased.
The ACT Government system must be doing something right. It will not get any funding cut under benchmarking because it has retained it base.
The ACT college system appears to effective in not only retaining but also attracting students to the government sector.
However, if the government system is to thrive it must be attractive through all age groups. It means that teacher unions must accept literacy and numeracy testing of students to prove that they do as good if not better job than private schools.
There will always be a proportion of parents who will send their children to private schools for religious, ideological and snobbery grounds. But it appears that many parents are also doing it for educational grounds, and in some states with some justification. While the teachers at government schools give grounds to parents to send their children to private schools on educational grounds we will see funding shift that way to on present arrangements. That is unfortunate, because the funding also shifts on religious, ideological and snobbery grounds.
So it is essential that government schools do not simply rail against benchmarking, but adapt to it to achieve better educational outcomes.