I agree with most of what you said.

I didn't agree when you suggested its an attractive idea to get parents to pay for education in state schools, and I also did not agree when you stated that wealthier parents have already advantaged their kids by reading to them.

I believe that the government should give all funding to public schools, but not give 1 cent to private schools.
The government should provide a baseline standard to all Australians in the areas of Health and Education.
No money for private hospitals and no money for private schools.

If you want a standard above a baseline standard that is given to all Australians, then you should pay for it yourself.

Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to provide funding to areas that may not apply to them. - Not every parent who works sends their kids to private schools. Why should the rich get an extra advantage over and above average citizens?

I also reject the idea the poor income parents don't read to their kids.

Yes, “Gonski was an attempt to look at the state of education and channel funding to where it was most needed”, but it did not work because it endorsed the Howard government’s socio-economic status funding model, the model that funds schools according to how well off the students’ neighbours are, extended that SES model to all the schools currently protected from it and applied that SES model to disadvantage loadings as well as mainstream students, thus adding to social stratification in our school system.

No, “We don't need squabbles about State versus Federal, Catholic versus Protestant and so on”, but we will continue to have them while the public education lobby continues its 50-year failed campaign against non-government schools, during which period the proportion of students in them has increased by 50 per cent.

Yes, “What we need is a determined effort to help the rest” and “that means never forgetting the importance of the comprehensive State school”, but it also means understanding the relationship between the enrolment pattern in the comprehensive sate school and the various private schools. Concentration of disadvantage matters. If we keep the SES funding model, we concentrate poor students in one school and well-off students in another. We need to lift the SES level of government schools and lower the SES level of non-government schools. The only way to do this is to have a funding model that supports socially integrated schools; i.e., one that gives more support to low-fee schools.

That model is the Victorian Financial Assistance Model, the one brought to public attention by the ridiculous claims of a Catholic conspiracy by The Age*. That model should replace the Gonski one.

*“Gonski ideal betrayed”, 4/3/201; “Labor faces backlash over Gonski ”, 8/3/2015; “Has Labor changed?”, 10/3/2015; “Victorian school funding model 'laughable' on Gonski fairness test”, 13/3/2015; “Merlino accused of betrayal over school funding legislation”, 13/3/2015; “Premier just can't walk on by on education”, 15/3/2015; “Labor's big mistake on school funding”, 17/3/2015; “Church claims hollow”, 18/3/2015; “Put state schools first”, 19/3/2015, “Schools deal blind-sides experts”, 3/5/2015

http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/victorian-school-funding-model-laughable-on-gonski-fairness-test-20150312-141ev1.html

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/state-labors-big-mistake-on-school-funding-20150315-142q07.html

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/private-schools-and-their-bankrupt-propaganda-20150506-ggv133.html

State schooling should be abolished. It is precisely the talented and disadvantaged who suffer the most in its sausage-factory approach: bored out of their minds. But don't think it's much better for the middle-range students. State schooling is a guarantee of mediocrity, and turning out docile drones to be dependent on the State. It intrinsically teaches that might is right, and that people are just herds of chattels belonging to the State: hence the author's use of "we" when he means the State.

All the arguments for state schooling are self-contradictory.

A good example is Armchair Critic's:
"Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to provide funding to areas that may not apply to them."

Another example is the socialists' idea that the purpose of education is to fight some kind of class war, to even out the differences between social groups. They're telling you straight up that their primary concern is not education. How can these herd-mentality bureaucratic central-planning approaches ever hope to be better at improving opportunities for talented and disadvantaged individuals? The very idea is ridiculous, and yet these are the clowns in charge of the education system

If West's list of dysfunctional families is the basis for change, forget it. Natural dysfunction is not something that can be healed by government intervention, or making the rich pay for it just because some idealogue thinks that they can afford to send their kids to a private schools. Many of the rich are rich because they don't waste money, and their kids are smart enough to survive and thrive in public schools. They are smarter because of they homelife and encouraging parents. The few talented kids who could do with help come from poor (financially, that is, not in spirit and eagerness to do well by their children) families, not the dysfunctional ones. On the odd chance that their was a bright on amongst the latter group, the rest of the family would drag him down.

Some of our better off say they pay tax too, so their kids should receive a so called free education.

Fine if you're actually paying a fair share of tax and not squirreling it away in a tax shelter, which super has become, and where the top tax payer can use the anomalies built into it to reduce their own tax down from 48 cents to just 15 cents in the dollar!?

Yet still expect other tax payers to carry the can for them, when it comes to universal health care, road funding or education etc?

If it aint broke don't fix it, however, this funding model is well and truly busted!

Tax avoiders, who like life line bin raiders, shouldn't effectively pray on the less well off?

Parents should be responsible for their kids education, and to make that so, all we need do is raise the tax threshold to say, $75,000.00 P.A.

Then pay every parent a education endowment, which should be treated as taxable income, like almost every other benefit or pension already is.

Which would force a few of the better off into a tax bracket or a higher tax bracket; as would halving the 33 cent subsidy!

Therefore, make this direct funding model both fair and equitable, and redirect our education dollar to the responsible parents, rather than this or that state government, who as is par for the course, extract considerable admin fees before a cent of federal funding is directed to education?

The endowment could come as a bankbook that would need some school stamps in it to confirm good student attendance and endeavor, to release funds to the parents!?

If they want to keep their kids at home as carers/unpaid labor? Their kids will be the one who ultimately pay for it, not the eternally on the hook taxpayer?

Given a direct funding model as portrayed, force states to give long overdue autonomy to schools or school districts?

And given increasingly scarce funding, we need layer upon layer of unneeded admin, as badly as the proverbial hole in the head!
Rhrosty.

Rhcrosty,

Wouldn't they be still paying the 48% while they are still working and their kids are at school? It is my understanding that the 15% only applies when they draw on the super after retirement. And statistics still show that most tax cheating is done by low to middle income earners.