longweekend58,

I asked you to provide the figures to show that my figures were wrong. You have not done so because you cannot. My figures are right.

Instead, you decide to make false claims about what I believe about private schools. I have never argued against private schools or funding them. I refer you to the following letter from me - the title of which I did not choose – to show that you are wrong again:

“UNTIL advocates of public education such as Jane Caro ("Schooled in denial of systemic, creeping apartheid", 25/1) face up to the reasons many parents choose private schools, the public system will continue to lose students. Imagine that the government gave out free cars and people rejected them in favour of ones that they had to pay extra for. You would have to conclude that the government free cars just weren't good enough….’
(“State schools not good enough’, The Sunday Age, February 1, 2009)
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/letters/state-schools-not-good-enough-20090131-7uen.html?page=-1
If you care to do some research instead of just making stuff up, you will see that while private school education does give students an advantage in university entry, it does not give them an advantage in success once there. The success of students at private schools is not due to the private schools. It is due to the students who go there. If you took the students from a high-performing private school and put them in an average government school, that government school would become high-performing. That does not mean there is not room for improvement in government schools there certainly is.

I have not turned the thread into anything. I have corrected false claims made by other posters. I have not expressed a single word of ideological opposition to private schools. I have pointed out what the evidence says.

Chris, Your post is still full of denial of some basic facts. BTW I notice you arent defending your ridiculous claim that teacher salaries have dropped 30%! Your claim about university performance is both true and yet at the same time still denying a basic fact: more private school students get there primarily because their educational performance is superior. The public students are also there because of their performance, but far less of them - thus also underlying the claim that as rule those public schools perform relatively poorly. In fact, university performance is a litmus test for exactly what I am saying.

I love this sentence: " If you took the students from a high-performing private school and put them in an average government school, that government school would become high-performing".

What total rubbish! I can speak as one of the hundreds of thousands of parents who moved their kids from public to private and saw their academic and general progress zoom ahead. The reason people take their kids there is precisely that! The notion that academic success is solely a function of the child's ability is rather naive and patently wrong. In fact if there is a defining function of success it is the TEACHER at least as important if not more so than the intellectual gifts of the child.

But yet I return to the argument that this thread is still mainly about FUNDING of private schools which you object to. You have still failed to give me any genuine reasons as to why you do! It is clearly and undeniably an economically good decision. The outcomes are superior and for a better price? what could be better? The model needs some refinement but thats part of life and refinement of good policy. But the principle of subsidising private schools is an intrinsically good and ultimately outstandingly successful one.

Chris, could you maybe respond to the actual arguments people are making? Just for fun?

I've told you that grammar has been phased out, and classics are barely taught, and your rebuttal is "they taught it at my schools". That's not an argument, it is as robust an intellectual position as me saying that cigarettes don't kill people, because my grandfather smoked every day and lived to be 100. Grammar is not a compulsory subject in schools (go look up the Dept websites yourself), and to the extent it is taught at all it's as a small part of general English classes. I charitably assumed this is what you meant when you said grammar was still taught in schools, and asked you whether it was taught as a subject, or a sub-set of English, and you did not give me a straight answer.

As others do here, I dispute teacher pay was that high (are you calculating in inflation or something?), but even if it was, you've been told why it's too high, and why it should not be that high. Do teachers really need 100K a year to do a good job? That's ridiculous, especially given the pay structure (another point that has been ignored).

Petal, Chris, etc. If the public system is so awesome, why are parents leaving it? Why has it been bleeding students? It's disingenuous to look at outliers (a few selective schools) and conclude public education is doing awesome. If it's doing so well, why are parents leaving it?

And I laugh at anyone quoting save our schools, the refuge of 130 hippies who want to send their kids to Cook Primary, even though there are 10 other schools in area without enough kids.

Smaller classes in itself does not lead automatically to better education outcomes if the only aim is to make all classes smaller. In some schools, there could be many larger classes, that open up the opportunity for the school to provide individual or smaller classes for those who have special needs, whether they have physical, emotional or behaviour problems. I have never seen any private school, that in the interest of the children that attends their school, they intend making classes larger. For all their faults, the public system has to cater for all students, with a wide diversity of needs.

longweekend58,

If you are going to make stuff up about people, you ought to do a little background checking. I’ll leave aside the fact that nowhere on this thread – or anyone else in my life - have I expressed any ideological opposition to private schools or to funding them. I know that there are lots of people who have no moral objection to putting words people have never said into their mouths, who are incapable of reading what has actually been written and who have an overwhelming desire to put everyone else in little boxes. However, if you intend to accuse someone of an ideological opposition to private schools and of objecting to the funding of private schools, you really ought not make the accusation against a former parliamentary candidate for the very party whose long, determined campaign won public funding of private schools in the first place. Doing so is, not only dishonest, but also damaging to your credibility.

Given that subsequent to my putting in black and white for you the fact that I am not opposed to private schools you made another post saying I was, I am quite ready for you to respond to this post by saying that I was not a candidate for the DLP and/or that the DLP did not fight for and win state aid. As there is a vast amount of information on the public record to support these facts, I don’t think it necessary to dig them up for you.

My intervention in this discussion was not about private schools, which I did not even mention in my first three posts. I mentioned them in my fourth post to make two points: that the better performance of private school students is not due to anything that private schools actually do (for which I gave a link to a quotation from the OECD); that the IPA is hypocritical for saying that spending money on government school children is a waste (for which I gave a source) but remaining silent when three times that amount is spent on private school children.