Margaret Ludowyk writes: I heartily agree with Brendan McDougall — let’s abolish, or nationalise, private schools.
The most divisive and un-Australian public policy in Australia is the inequitable funding of our school system. It divides us by wealth and by religion. It is wrong and has to change. No other developed nation funds private schools like we do.
State government funding is gobbled up by building new schools to keep up with population growth while private schools build bigger and better theatres, swimming pools and bistros. Private schools have excess funds so can poach teachers from state schools. State governments have tight budgets and can’t compete with teacher salaries. We need to gradually reduce funding to private schools and immediately boost funding to state schools so that over time all parents, including all MPs, will choose their local public school. If Finland can do it so can we.
Owen Evans writes: [Brendan McDougall’s] article really is bizarre. On one page Crikey is complaining, quite sensibly in my view, about limited competition in media, public utilities and food retailing. On the other hand it wants a monopoly on education. Worse still, it wants to give this monopoly to the segment of the industry that is the weakest performer and has been for 20 years. A segment that, by the way, has no accountability for performance because it is protected by the government.
Private schools fire principals and go broke regularly. Public schools do not. As a policy this would be equivalent to the forced merger of Coles and Woolworths with the NSW government to run the shops under regulation of the Commonwealth. Good lord what a mess that would be.
Having seen NSW Education, and particularly School Infrastructure NSW, up close as a customer, I have exactly zero units of interest in forcing any student into its claws. A more interesting solution might be to abolish public education and give parents vouchers to send children where they so choose. Perhaps a more palatable outcome for the unions and bureaucrats who run public education would be to charge GST on education (this will, of course, only apply to private education as public has no fees), which may bring some people back to the public system and would provide more funding.
Abolishing private education might appeal to employees of the public sector school systems but it clearly would not appeal to anyone else.
Judy Hardy-Holden writes: Brendan McDougall I salute you. I left state teaching in Queensland 30 years ago and we were decrying the inequality of resourcing then. My heart has bled every time school funding is mentioned ever since — and as you say, it is getting worse.
This inequality goes back to my bête noire, John Howard, with his spurious crow of giving people “choice”. It turns out it gives the choice to choose elitism over equality of outcomes. You don’t achieve a healthy society with snobs at the top and yobs at the bottom.
Maybe if we chose to deliver better educational opportunities for all, and especially those who can least afford it, we would find it is easier and cheaper to build educational facilities than it is to build remand centres, detention centres, juvenile jails and educate warders for prison service.
Paul Brown writes: I retired from my state secondary college 14 years ago at age 60 due to burnout. I valued my mental health and taught in a developing country, Vietnam, where the parents and society actually value the teaching profession.
While the federal governments ignore this problem, it will make the whole system begin to break down. I saw this in 2010. I was not alone and many other teachers either retired early, moved jobs or went into the private sector. Public education really is in crisis but nobody’s listening.
