Wednesday, June 24th, 2009...1:41 pm

Federal government funding of private schools.

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Sam Molloy’s soph­istry (he is debat­ing cap­tain after all) is not convincing.

“Choice”, both “prac­tical” and “moral” is the crux of his argu­ment in favour of retain­ing pub­lic fund­ing of private schools. “Prac­tical choice” in his argu­ment, is about recog­nising indi­vidual dif­fer­ences, and find­ing the best edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions to meet the needs of indi­vidual stu­dents. “Moral choice” on the other hand is about ensur­ing that par­ents choices are not sub­sid­ised by others.

All of this is pad­ding around the real point of con­ten­tion, which he freely admits in his op-ed: the bal­ance of fund­ing is not right. It is easy to argue in the abstract that choice is good and bene­fi­cial, but look at the num­bers — mil­lions are being spent on the “élite” private schools, that are well-funded, well-resourced, and hardly in need of pub­lic sup­port. It is deeply men­dacious of Mol­loy to sug­gest that spe­cial­ist schools focus­sing on the spe­cial needs of stu­dents would be tar­geted. (As a side note, is get­ting the debat­ing cap­tain of Sydney Gram­mar School down­load Tip­ping the Vel­vet


Alice in Won­der­land move

to push for pub­lic fund­ing of private edu­ca­tion really the best look?)

His asser­tion that “[i]ndependent schools… emphas­ise dif­fer­ent val­ues” is another stock phrase used to disin­genu­ously bash pub­lic schools. What it is really sug­gest­ing is that pub­lic edu­ca­tion is values-free which is untrue.

He cor­rectly recog­nises that edu­ca­tion is a pub­lic good, and that is so for a vari­ety of reas­ons. It has a mul­ti­tude of pos­it­ive extern­al­it­ies which can­not be accur­ately priced through the mar­ket. If provided, it is avail­able to all, and each dol­lar spent usu­ally bene­fits the total­ity of stu­dents, not dis­crete indi­vidu­als. But most of all, it is incred­ibly expens­ive. If edu­ca­tion were com­pletely privately provided no aver­age fam­ily could reas­on­ably afford it. The recog­ni­tion of its pub­lic bene­fits is why there is a long-standing com­mit­ment in Aus­tralia from both sides of polit­ics that edu­ca­tion should be “free, sec­u­lar and compulsory”.

Molloy’s sug­ges­tion that com­pletely strip­ping private schools of fund­ing would cre­ate a mass exodus to the pub­lic sys­tem, put­ting undue bur­den on it. This may well be true, but that would be the res­ult of a botched imple­ment­a­tion of a policy no reas­on­able per­son is sug­gest­ing. Even if the argu­ment that private schools should receive no pub­lic fund­ing wins the day, it would be imple­men­ted over an exten­ded period. Fur­ther, he doesn’t recog­nise that the vast cap­ital costs of run­ning an edu­ca­tion sys­tem come with effi­ciency bene­fits. The massive push to cre­ate smal­ler class sizes means that cur­rently the mar­ginal costs of edu­cat­ing an extra stu­dent run at a declin­ing rate. In addi­tion, pool­ing money into one sys­tem rather than two achieves greater effi­ciency outcomes.

What should come out of this inter­min­able pub­lic vs. private debate is recog­ni­tion that there is room for both sys­tems, but that the cur­rent fund­ing for­mula, at a fed­eral level is out of kil­ter with the prin­ciples of equity AND effi­ciency. By all means there should be con­tin­ued fund­ing of spe­cial needs schools, but should an under-resourced school con­tinue to be hobbled by con­tinu­ally increased fund­ing of a well-resourced one? The issue is not pub­lic vs. private but one of ensur­ing prac­tical equal­ity among all the schools we fund.

5 Comments

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5 Comments

  • Mark Ismay
    June 24th, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    “By all means there should be con­tin­ued fund­ing of spe­cial needs schools, but should an under-resourced school con­tinue to be hobbled by con­tinu­ally increased fund­ing of a well-resourced one?”

    I dis­agree and I am yet to hear a cogent argu­ment that con­vinces me. Hav­ing atten­ded one of the inde­pend­ent schools men­tioned, I openly admit poten­tial for bias yet it also gives me per­spect­ive. The socioeco­nomic tapestry that defines the soci­ety of these private schools (and make no mis­take, the fam­il­ies are just as much if not more so involved as the chil­dren) tend to divide into two groups. Firstly, you have your sub­set from wealthy back­grounds with pro­fes­sional, suc­cess­ful par­ents. Secondly, you had your sub­set from nor­mal fam­il­ies who have taken out loans or oth­er­wise made sig­ni­fic­ant sac­ri­fice to send their chil­dren to what they deem as a bet­ter edu­ca­tional envir­on­ment. The mer­its of such action are out­side the scope of this discussion.

    I fail to see how cut­ting pub­lic fund­ing holds weight in either case and feel it is some­how intel­lec­tu­ally dis­hon­est to recon­cile to two. My nat­ural approach to dis­sect­ing prob­lems is to con­cep­tu­al­ise the world in terms of sys­tems and the flows or inter­ac­tions between the vari­ous dis­crete entit­ies. The sys­tem on trial here is the impli­cit trade-off of respons­ib­il­it­ies for the vari­ous rights that our soci­ety awards us. Chil­dren are depend­ents of their guard­i­ans in law, so I feel that it is prudent to con­sider the two (a fam­ily unit) as a single entity for this dis­cus­sion. Attempts to dis­sect this fur­ther fall apart because fed­eral gov­ern­ment fund­ing is a right and chil­dren of school­ing age have not yet sat­is­fied the respons­ib­il­ity side of the asso­ci­ated equa­tion. Extra­pol­at­ing a child’s future earn­ing poten­tial is cer­tainly an approach one can take, but it is inher­ently inac­cur­ate and unquantifiable.

    Look­ing at things from the abstrac­tion of the fam­ily unit brings the two groups men­tioned above into focus. The wealthy, suc­cess­ful group of fam­il­ies gen­er­ate greater tax­a­tion rev­enue than a fam­ily group made up of those less for­tu­nate. I recog­nise that this is a basic, tired argu­ment but I am still yet to be con­vinced of pro­pos­als that see these fam­il­ies receiv­ing less fed­eral fund­ing in abso­lute mon­et­ary terms (rel­at­ive terms is another mat­ter as then we get into argu­ments sur­round­ing dimin­ish­ing returns which I am more inclined to agree with). The sac­ri­fi­cing group of fam­il­ies dif­fers not from those who send their chil­dren to pub­lic schools, and again I fail to find sub­stan­ti­ation for your asser­tion that they should receive less (in abso­lute terms) than their com­par­at­ors. Nobody is arguing that the edu­ca­tional sys­tem isn’t broken; I simply fail to see how viol­at­ing a basic tenet of the fab­ric on which our soci­ety is built can be a solu­tion. How can inequity be solved by gov­ern­ment sanc­tioned inequity?

  • Enoch Lau
    June 24th, 2009 at 11:50 pm

    I sus­pect that many of these private school kids’ par­ents aren’t Labor voters — no reason to sup­port them polit­ical either?

  • Dan
    June 28th, 2009 at 4:32 am

    I don’t under­stand? Inequity of out­comes is always solved by inequity…

  • Anonymous
    July 8th, 2009 at 10:46 pm

    Hah! I knew in your heart you hated Soto­moyer J

  • My Political Conceit « A Senex View
    August 1st, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    […] Update: Dan at Kewpid.net recently addressed a sim­ilar issue. […]

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