A thought provoking article.

I am not sure that I fully agree with the quoted claim that ""Good schools don't grow and bad ones don't shrink". The dramatic growth in the non-government sector at secondary level seems to partly contradict this, though unmet demand for places in the top private schools and best performing government schools does illustrate constraints on the size of individual schools.

The article might usefully have touched on city/rural issues and the effects of geography in limiting choice in rural areas.

What crimps the market as an instrument of "performance" is distance, transfer costs, school capacity limits, and relatively modest differences in schools' educational performance
Dean Ashenden,
Why not mention australian mentality as the most influencing factor in australian education?
At every election every party is pushing for better education. After over 40 years of witnessing this push I have yet to see it eventuate. 40 years ago i recall several Doctors telling us if we had more funding we could solve a lot of medical problems. Well, guess what ? We've had billions poured into the health system since & look at where we are ? You still can't get to see a dentist in time, people are turned away from Hospitals, the list goes on. And all of that is the result of this great education which doesn't even teach the country's constitution.

Dean, I think you're fighting the wrong war. The vast majority of students do very well in Australian schools. They complete Year 12, many go on to tertiary study or further training and most find employment at the end of it all. There are however some schools in which large numbers of students don't succeed. It is these schools that warrant attention, attention which might mean extra funding, better teachers, perhaps direct intervention from government or Education Departments. The exact mix of measures will differ from school to school, depending on circumstances. The response is, in other words, micro rather than macro in nature.

Generally speaking, schools benefit from being free from bureaucratic control, provided that they meet certain standards. The 2006 Victorian Education Reform Act provides an outline of the sort of approach I think is appropriate. All schools, government and non-government are registered and any can be de-registered if they fail to meet the standards. It's difficult, detailed work and unfortunately, the Act has been poorly implemented but the approach is still sound, I think. It's just a lot harder to do than to talk in general terms about postcode disadvantage or autonomy or competition.

Parents should know that their children's school is up to standard. Governments have a responsibility to provide that assurance and to act if standards are not met. Gonski, the dreadful national curriculum and the rest of the current so-called 'reform agenda' miss the point.

Bill Griffiths

Dean I think you & the report are missing the most important factor in education today. That is discipline. Discipline is the main factor missing in schools that do poorly, but doesn't effect the better government schools, due to the select student body. In the private schools parents have given approval for, & demand a high level of discipline be applied.

Far too many woolly thinking academics have succeeded in removing the stick from our schools, but in most instances this has been replaced with nothing.

Far too many principals would rather hide the drug dealing going on behind the toilet block, than suspend students, feeling probably rightly, that high numbers of suspensions hurt their promotion prospects. A lack of interest at head master level permeates a whole school.

When I was headhunted to a Gold Coast company I researched the schools, finding real problems. I ended up driving 59 Km to work so my kids could go to a nearby country high.

When the head retired & was replaced by one of the hide problems
type heads, the P&C let him know damn quickly that official complaints would be more a worry to his prospects, if he let discipline slip.

The school had some lousy teachers, what else would one expect in a union controlled organization, but home & formal coaching can overcome this. If discipline is lacking, nothing can improve anything, Gonski or no Gonski.

For Bill Griffiths, aka Senior Victorian: Is that Bill Griffiths, formerly of the Victorian Ministry of Education and the Catholic Education Commission? If so, greetings.

To the substance: if "vast" and "very" were to be deleted from your second sentence it would be easier to defend. Of course only a small minority of students do very badly at school, but its still a sizeable number. Gonski estimated that about 500 000 current students will lave school without even the barest minimum of literacy and numeracy needed in the workplace and in ordinary daily life. They must be, as you suggest (and as Gonski argued) the first priority. But the only priority? Just as there is only a small minority that do very badly so is the only a small minority that does very well. Whether we should be happy with the attainments of the middle majority, and with the fact that their performance has levelled off over a decade or more in Australia when comparable groups in most other OECD systems are doing better - is a matter for judgement.

In any event I am puzzled as to why you focus on attainment levels when the argument also addressed the social, cultural and political workings of schools and school systems - and why you emphasise that government schools in Victoria are 'autonomous' when that point was already taken.