To reiterate, "There should be public schools and hospitals and that is all". This isn't about economics and I'm against people being maintained in slovenly lifestyles as much as I'm against unconscionable privilege. It's about "principle", the principle that the innocent and the infirm, rich or poor, should be subject to the same social provisions. Whether liberals like it or not they are part of a society, and don't forget that the myriad commodities and innovations and services they enjoy, including in health and education, are driven by the whole consumer base and wouldn't be there if the ideology of individualism dominated as it once did.
Education and health facilities should come under the aegis of Humanist principle and not economic rationalism. But we are more and more slipping back into free market viciousness, unprincipled and ultimately destined for neo-aristocracies and feudalism.
Children also need protection from their often tyrannical parents, who indoctrinate them at home and in private faith schools and ideological elitism.
Education is, or should be a domain of human rights and equality in any civilised State--but the neoliberals don't believe in civilsation.
Most parents choose private schools and hospitals for naive reasons, or to feel superior, I suspect, but it's the thin end of the wedge.

Squeers,

Education is a right in Australia. The government ensures that everyone gets access to a decent education, your proposal that people should be banned from using their own money to improve their childrens' education reeks of Orwellian government control.

The base reality is that those that educate their kids privately save the state a fortune that can be used on public schools.

SM,
a premise of the article here is that there's no qualitative difference between public and private education, yet you're saying parents should not be "banned from using their own money to improve their childrens' education", so there is an advantage to private education, qualitatively and/or in terms of advantage?
If there's no measurable advantage in going private, then why do we need private schools at all? If there is an advantage it's unethical. Wealthy parents could put their resources into improving the public sector (same with hospitals). Why do we have to have educational apartheid, based on means rather than colour (though of course many wealthy parents see it as a good investment merely in that it protects their kids from the riff raff, or secularism, or "mass" culture, or sundry reasons that boil down to bigotry and double standards.
If the wealthy classes want to improve their kids' education (more likely brainwash them, though there are noble exceptions), let them homeschool or hire a tutor (I was hired in taht capacity once, and only once, to tutor a spoiled and under-achieving kid who was nevertheless headed for Oxford in his father's footsteps).
In any even, I'm not saying anyone should be banned from trying to help their kids, I try to help mine, just that they should do so within an educational dispensation based on equality and human rights rather than apartheid.
Private and privileged schools are indefensible, and in any event in the modern era just another expression of the market and credulous consumers.

"those that educate their kids privately save the state a fortune".

Fib!

There is a massive subsidy granted to tax funded private schooling that is not added to the equation you propose SM.

After that subsidy comes the cost to the community of a largely failed education system based on an old industrial model Taylor would have been proud of, that barely even whispers the word 'education' at our children but does blare 'schooling' at them on volume level 11.

Donnelly is known as a rightwing neoliberal free marketeer. There lies his real interest, it is not actually education he is concerned about. That is merely a convenient vehicle for him to drive to cloak his ideology in 'thoughfulness'.

I am with Squeers here. I was half listening to The Drum the other night, when Reith was blathering on about him hoping that privately funded patients would sign into private hospitals to save the state hospitals costs.

He must have an excess of cash, because if you are seriously ill, and foolishly sign in to a private hospital, then before your body is bled of blood, your wallet will be bled of cash and credit.

Health insurance is not any sort of insurance at all.

Neither is 'private education' any sort of fair egalitarian notion either.

It is amusing that Donnely uses Latham's foolish 'ladder of opportunity' phrase, because, of course, a ladder is a fine analogy here.

Only one person at a time can safely climb a ladder, it has to be set at a specific angle to work, and it needs others holding it from slipping while the favoured one climbs ever upwards.

Ladders of Opportunity suit the wealthy, and exclude others from the sharing the rungs, reducing them to waiting at the foot of the climb, to hold the wealthy upright in their stratospheric clamber.

That said, state schools as currently configured and run are a sham and a shameful offering and must not be allowed to continue as they are.

Let's start by examining the leadership, or failure of leadership, from principals, unions and parent bodies.

mike-serve-the-people,

The fact that some schools get more than they would be allocated under the SES model does no more than demonstrate the flaws in the SES model. The SES model funds schools, not on the basis of the school’s resources, but on the basis of the wealth of the other people who live in the streets that the school’s students come from. A poor student from a wealthy area reduces the school’s funding, while a wealthy student from a poor area increases it. The SES model penalises low-fee schools for having low fees; therefore, they not funded under the SES model, but under the previous Labor model of the education resources index. You would think that Labor supporters, and I’m not saying you’re one, would want their own model back and use the current so-called “overfunding” to demonstrate the failures of the SES model instead of accepting the SES model as good and then using it to complain about so-called “over-funding”.

In any case, both the SES model and the AGSRC formula are dead. There is no doubt that the Gonski Review will have recommended a system based on the costs of educating particular students. Whether or not it has accepted my model remains to be seen. Links to my submissions are at:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13201&page=0

The most remarkable feature of the whole saga is the total failure of the federal AEU to realise both the golden opportunity and the dark threat presented by the review. The opportunity was to devise a funding formula based on an explicit staffing ratio and thus put all schools on a sustainable footing with a long-term settlement of teacher workload and class size issues. The threat was that the e-comic fashionalists would get their way by divorcing education funding from inputs, something the Allen Consulting Group did in its report to the review. The federal AEU failed to take the opportunity and to resist the threat.

Squeers,

"a premise of the article here is that there's no qualitative difference between public and private education" No it isn't. It is well known that the independents schools get better results. The point the author was making was that funding wasn't the prime determinant.

Human rights implies minimum rights to all, not equality. And equality generally means equality of access. I have the right to buy a porsche, not the right to own one.

TBC,

The cost to the state per independent student is far less than public students. That is independently resolved. There are huge amounts left out of the public side of the equation as well, such as the inherent property value of the schools.

The cost to the tax payer per independent student is less than a public school student, that is acknowledged even by the labor government.