I have taught in a disadvantaged (lower SES) Government school for 14 years, and in an advantaged (upper SES) Government school for 6 years. My disadvantaged school had extraordinary supplementary funding which was routinely squandered on incompetent educational practise, while my advantaged school does not have access to anything like the funding in my old school, but the money that is there is well-directed and the school achieves as well as, if not better than, our counterparts in the private school just down the road (minus the exorbitent fees they pay at that school). Money doesn't equate to good teaching. I don't now why the AEU constantly talks about improving education by throwing more money around. The incredible ammount of wasted money in the educational IT sector for example is hard to describe. Why do we have to have wall to wall state of the art IT in every area of the school? I use an 8 year old program for example that is finally debugged and very user friendly, yet our new ultra-colossal PC's can't read the old software, so now I have to find upwards of $5,000 to teach exactly the same course I was teaching 7 weeks ago. This is a good use of educational money? If funding was redirected from private schools to government schools, I fear it would be wasted on a lot of hokey-polokey, faddish philosophically dodgey pseudo-educational programs. Government schools need the checks and balances which market-driven Private schools tend to provide, though I am sure my old lecturer Dr Teese would disagree with me. I guess Richard has been at Uni while I've been in the classroom for the past 20 years, so what would I know?

I agree with almost everything which Kevin wrote about Socialist social theory, except his claim that "Australian research also proves that socioeconomic background is not the most influential determinant of educational success or failure;"

That is complete bunkum.

Generally speaking,smart people inhabit the highest echelons of society, while less intelligent people occupy the lower. Smart people are usually upwardly mobile, while people with low intelligence are downwardly mobile. There are exceptions, in the highest echelons of society, a dumb person can maintain their social status through social connections or family fortune.

If there is a high degree of upward social mobility in Australia from the lower socio economic group, it is because Australia ia attracting a high degree of intelligent immigrants from third world countries (usually Asian), who are smart and who may initialy inhabit the lowest social strata in Australia, but who consider education a gift from God, and who take advantage of it to further their social advancement.

But there are other immigrant groups who appear to be of a low intellectual development, who are notoriously disruptive in classes, a problem to teach, not prone to educational attainment, and who fill our jails and dole queues after they leave school.

Thank you phil and mike for your demolition job on Donnelly’s narrative. I find it amazing that he didn’t source his claims. It isn’t hard, Kevin, but it might reduce the scope of your arguments - because you’ll need proof.

Is it just me or does anyone else sense growing desperation from Kevin and his (dwindling) ilk as the Gonski recommendations loom? Short of both time and evidence he has recycled his whole cultural warrior language: ideologically imposed egalitarianism, Marxist critiques, elites, utopians, cultural-left. (I think he invented the last one).

Alarmed about the current debate, he tries to isolate his opponents and set up countless straw man arguments. In Kevin’s world, concern about equity is only held by teacher unionists and academics who want to recreate a socialist utopia. He makes no effort to address the essential findings of Teese’s report – or the research commissioned by Gonski.

This approach lets him off the hook: he doesn’t have to mount any reasonable case to keep the current system of schools, one which even the mainstream media is increasingly questioning. All he needs to do is dredge up half truths, but even these fall away as he is proven wrong yet again. Notice that he no longer argues that Catholic schools are the poor cousins.

But he’ll continue to get published, as he should. After all, which media outlet wants to be accused of being part of the cultural-left conspiracy?

I've always thought that schools and hospitals provide the perfect instance of the enduring unfairness of our "democracy". Children and sick people would seem quintessentially to exemplify the beautiful "idea" of equality--that all children and all sick people are inherently equal. But this is not so. These pathetic instances, the innocent and the infirm, are also fundamental to why we should never surrender to privatisation--which would institutionalise inequality "again" without a pang. Indeed the neoliberal ideology is such that it would represent such a dispensation as a virtue, as it was ever rationalised in the past.
There should be public schools and hospitals and that is all, and were that the case you can be sure that the wealthy would make certain these were world's best practice and no waiting lists! There is no rationale that can justify privileged education or healthcare except a retreat into barbarism. Yet this is the kind of inexorable "progress" that's getting the upper hand in Australia.
This sentence says it all: "Instead of throwing more money at disadvantaged schools a better option is to make such schools more effective and to create the conditions where teachers can deliver a quality education based on the premise that effort and ability can be rewarded".
Note the implication that the problem isn't funding, but laziness, which smears the whole demographic as inherently lazy or dysfunctional.
Note too the tireless demonising of the evil "academic cultural-left", imprecated no less than four times, as if it's responsible for the educational malaise that does indeed hold sway. But the malaise is not the work of the intellectual left (sorry, tautology), it's the work of populist governments trying to reconcile antithetical ideologies.
Absolutely, we need to institutionalise meritocracy, and that would close half our universities and bloat the dole queues, but that means no unfair advantage "and" no lowering the net. That's reconcilliation.
The neoliberals can spin the ball all they like, but no child deserves a superior or inferior experience of education, and yes, outcomes. Nor does our society need to perpetuate the class distinctions that are thereby popularly inferred.

Squeers,

I know that you hanker for a socialist utopia, but in Australia parents are allowed to spend discretionary money on their children's education.

The government spends on average 70% on independent schools per child than it does on public schools, which actually frees up funds for disadvantaged public schools. Removing funding for independent schools simply drags everyone down to the union dominated public school level and adds billions to the tax payers cost.

Shadow Minister,
my position really isn't that simple, as I've tried to show above. I acknowledge the failure, naive utopianism and villainies of doctrinal socialism. I don't hanker for a socialist utopia.
Our society operates in the tension between liberal and socialist capitalism, within which each compromises on its theme, and I'd hate to see either ideology in its pure form become dominant, as it currently threatens to on the side of neoliberalism. If prosperity was based on equal opportunity there might be a case for privilege based on worldly success, but it's based on fortune and corruption that will only ever accommodate a minority. If we are to remain a "society" rather than devolve into amoral economic Darwinism, we have to base our political economy on principles first, and I don't mean the survival of the fittest in rude liberal-economic terms.
Where socialist capitalism has it wrong at the moment imo is in its devotion to both economic growth and redistribution, as though they were unalloyed goods. It's the unlimited pursuit of wealth as an institution, on the one hand, and the demand for concomitantly higher living standards for all, on the other, that creates all the problems. The modern ideologies of left "and" right thus drive our disastrous progress. The capitalists resent taxes and obstruction and the socialists resent drastic inequality. In wealthy countries like Australia where compromise is most marked, we end up with a nation devoted either to egotism (right) or sloth (left).