Doesn't fit?
Well, yes.
But because it's more of a vote winning inspirational aspiration, than fully funded legislative action.
However, every element of that aspiration could be met out of current revenue streams, if the Federal govt became the sole funding source of public health and education; and indeed, withheld the GST, to pay for it all!
That would enable vastly increased local autonomy, but particularly, if a streamlining direct funding mechanism, was employed, to bypass the states, and their, I believe, ridiculously expensive, "management fees" and over-bloated, overpaid, underutilised, empire building, centralising, collating, endlessly duplicating, self serving road blocks, in the path of essential, long overdue reform, bureaucracy!?
Rhrosty.

The author makes significant claims about the success of very selective and high pressure education systems in Australia, the private and the RC church systems.

I tend to favor the Scandinavian education systems where the government provided systems predominate, systems which, because they are supported by the more competent parents, and staffed by well paid and carefully selected teachers, achieve world leading results. In the western world Finland and other northern European countries achieve not only educational success but also very high levels of general well being in the community.

The following site shows the results of careful comparisons of these measures of societal outcomes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/blow-americas-exploding-pipe-dream.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

It is a great pity that many people in this country favor those schools that have other aims, aims other than the best education system for all Australian children, and who expect all the general public to contribute to that other aim; the religious indoctrination and exclusive unification of their own particular tribe of children.

Kevin Donnelly's final 'sentence', "Schools that are already achieving world's best results and that are in danger of losing funding and the freedom to mange themselves because of an Education Bill that embraces a statist model and a cultural-left view of equity that unfairly discriminates in favour of government schools" is all subject and no predicate. So we don't know what he was meaning to assert about "Schools that are already achieving world's best results".

Perhaps deleting "and that" would render his words comprehensible just as changing "government schools" into "disadvantaged students" would make even clearer his determination to keep education funds flowing first and foremost to those who least need them.

It is not necessarily the reality “that the current socioeconomic status model expires at the end of 2013” as the Gonski report recommends keeping the SES model in place.

The Howard and Gonksi SES models both support funding schools on the basis of the socio-economic status of the people who live near the students, the difference being that the latter would use a smaller area. Both ignore the school’s own income and are thus very bad for low-fee private schools. Both give more money to high-fee private schools that take well-off students from poor areas than to low-fee private schools that take poor children from well-off areas.

The SES model is so irrational that about half of the private schools in the country have to get compensation to be as well off as they were under the previous Labor government’s model, which, despite Coalition propaganda to the contrary, was more generous to low-fee schools.

There are no schools “in danger of losing funding” because the government has guaranteed that no school will lose funding per student and has guaranteed that this amount will be indexed.

The issue, which the mainstream press seems unwilling to report or perhaps cannot understand, is that the continuation of the SES model as recommended by the Gonksi panel would mean the continuation of compensation, the so-called “overfunding”.

The private school sector was conned by the Howard government 12 years ago. They ought to be smart enough by now to know that any system requiring long-term compensation will be misrepresented. The government has to come up with a system based on school income, as Labor had in the 1990s. Perhaps that is the reason for the delay – the government and the private school authorities are working out a better system than the one proposed by the Gonski panel.

More details are at http://community.tes.co.uk/forums/t/576719.aspx.

Rhrosty,

Rants against the bureaucracy have become commonplace. I checked the figures for Victorian education a few years ago. The Victorian government employed about 40,000 teachers, about 10,000 student support officers (integration aides, library aides, laboratory aides, the people at schools’ front desks) and about 2,000 people in the central and regional offices. Some of the latter were visiting teachers and others providing direct services to students. In other words, the bureaucracy was les than 4 per cent of the total. More than 90 per cent of the funding goes directly to schools, and no one sensible would argue that there is no need for any central bureaucracy.

It is also a fact that Victorian schools gained curriculum autonomy from the late 1960s on, though it was reduced by the 1992-99 Coalition government. They have had elected school councils since 1975. They have had local appointment of principals since the 1980s, of senior staff since 1992 and of all staff since the mid-90s. School councils have had budgetary control of a basically voucher funding system since Labor introduced it in 2005.

The myths about how schools work are so widespread that it would be a full-time job just to correct them.

GlenC,

The Gonski recommendations would also keep education funds “flowing to those who least need them”

Loreto Primary School in Nedlands, WA, has an SES score of 130, meaning that it would get the lowest funding possible under the Gonski proposals. Its parent contributions are $6,752 per student.

Geelong Grammar School has an SES score of 117, lower than Loreto’s, so it would get more than the minimum under the Gonski proposals. Its parent contributions are $16,839 per student, two and half times Loreto’s, yet it would get more under Gonski than Loreto would.

Let’s be crystal clear: the Gonski proposal is to give Geelong Grammar more money than Loreto Primary even though Geelong Grammar has two and a half times the income per student that Loreto does. This is but one example and shows why those pushing for the implementation of the Gonski report as is have obviously done not one skerrick of actual research or thinking on the matter.

I haven’t even got started on the idiotic method proposed for determining the amount of the school resource standard, itself a result of the appallingly bad job the federal AEU did in it submission to the review. But I deal with all that in the link I have above, so people can read it there.