Yes, i agree with this article, pretty much 100%.

While i have written that many people hve sent their kids to private schools for several reasons, there is no doubt that budgetary difficulites are complicatig the opportunity of all to have access to decent public education.

I have an electic range of views on Aust's policy mix, like most, but I believe there are two areas of policy that should never be sacrificed by the State. I believe that all Australians should have the right to decent public health and education.

If i have the misfortune to live during the demise of public edcuation, and i hope it does not happen, then we indeed fail as a society.

I say this again while recognising my own contradictiton. I am planning to send my daughter (now three) to a private seconday school in the area (which I can afford).

Nevertheless, I believe that differences between public and private schools should be minimal. Every young Australian must have the opportunity for affordable education.

This article addresses THE most important issue in education at present. Its position is one that any true democrat should support.

The ghettoisation of some state schools (and some struggling private ones) is a blight on the community.

It is often overlooked that despite the clear inequalities in resources available, we nonetheless force all students (and increasingly teachers and schools) to compete in the education race through such mechanisms as NAPLAN, tertiary entrance and the like.

That this competition is conducted on such unequal terms is a scandal.

A true democracy would give all students the opportunity to obtain the best education we can provide, and this means the opportunity to attend ANY school they wish, irrespective of their family's financial clout.

The existence of expensive private schools that are filled with the cream of teachers ensures that the wealthy elite continue to run the country to suit them and their elitist, privileged progeny.

The average kid is stuck in a school with very average teachers and struggles to compete against his private school counterparts for University Entrance, scholarships, etc.

If we want a school system that advantages every child equally, then step one is to get rid of all private schools and treat every child the same regarding teacher quality and teaching resources.

Gerard Henderson’s point arises from the SES model and the Gonski report’s recommendation to refine it to the level of the individual parent. Under the SES model, schools are funded according to how well off the other people who live in the streets the students come from are. This is insane. It takes no account of school fees. It underfunds private schools so badly that about half receive compensation which gives them the funds they would have got under the previous Labor government’s education resources index model, which actually took account of the school’s own resources. Weirdly, the Coalition, the underfunder, gets away with portraying itself as the friend of private schools and Labor, the more generous funder, is portrayed as their enemy. Public education advocates reinforce this crazy belief by referring to the compensation as “overfunding”, thus driving private school parents into the arms of the Coalition and making it harder for Labor, the party that best supports public education, to win.

The Gonski review could have ended this by recommending that schools be funded on the basis of their own resources. Instead, it recommended that schools should be funded on the basis of the parents’ capacity to pay. This should have sent a red flag flying to public school advocates, but, as so many of them are still stuck in the 1950s, they did not see it. I did – straight away. Once you accept the principle that private schools should be funded on the parents’ capacity to pay, it is easy to extend the principle to public schools. If, instead, you say private schools should be funded in accordance with their own resources, you apply the same principle to public schools. Public schools are fully funded irrespective of the wealth of the parents because they don’t have any other resources. Low-fee private schools are highly funded irrespective of the wealth of the parents. High-fee private schools are lowly funded irrespective of the wealth of the parents. If you support the SES model (refined or not), you are, in principle, supporting fees for public schools.

The federal AEU has so far apparently said nothing abut the Gonski recommendation to continue and refine the Howard government’s SES model, just as it failed to make a submission in support of an explicit staffing formula as the basis of funding and thus allowed the high-performing reference schools model to be recommended, the to the detriment of its own members. Anyone alert to politics knew that the Gonski review would recommend a system like the one that has applied in Victoria for the last seven years. A smart union would have read the signals and made a submission based on that knowledge and put forward a detailed plan for school funding. The federal AEU failed dismally to do so.
In fact, while there were many informative and thoughtful submissions from public education advocates, as best I can make out, the only submission from anyone with a public education perspective to propose a detailed plan for funding was mine:
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf

http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris_Attachment_1.pdf

http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubGen/Documents/Curtis_Chris_Attachment_2.pdf

http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubEip/AtoF/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf

http://www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/ReviewofFunding/SubResearch/AtoM/Documents/Curtis_Chris.pdf

So, don’t blame Gerard Henderson, whose point is perfectly consistent with the SES model and the Gosnki proposal. Blame the federal AEU for not seeing the obvious on Day One.

Margaret does have a bit of a problem. She wants public funding of education to be fair, just not too fair.

Come on love, bite the bullet & make it really fair. Allocate funding to each child as a credit, value dependent on age, & let the parent decide which school to chose.

This would stop the continued employment of totally incompetent teachers in the public system. If the schools teachers didn't perform, the school would loose students & income. Kids waving dollar bills at the school gate will rapidly assure equity, & quality. I suppose such a system would not find favour, with the bureaucrats, as so many unnecessary bureaucratic jobs would be lost.

Margaret then has a little swipe at health costs. As a Queenslander I've enjoyed free hospital care most of my life. It was great, back in the old days.

While it would nail a broken arm back together, or pull out a crook appendix, or a set of tonsils, we could afford it too. Then came the advances & spare parts medicine. People can now destroy their liver, lungs, or heart, with their life style, then go get a new one, all on the tax payer.

Am I the only one who finds this disgusting. If we don't get a handle on medical costs soon, we won't be able to afford education, or anything else.

Sure repair accident damage, & fix the common ailments that many have, but some things should remain on the top shelf. If you haven't earned the cost, you don't get the treatment. It is either that, or pay the medicos much less.

There comes a time when personal effort is so poorly rewarded in a welfare state, that the state fails, due to lack of personal effort. Think the USSR. If we rob the worker to benefit the drone too much more, workers will cease to exist

When Henry Parkes made his statement, the tax rates, tax breaks and comparative adjusted for inflation thresholds, were very different!
So also were the treatment of private schools? It was argued that private schools should be self suffient, with little public money; given, public schooling was open and available to all!
Over very recent times, we have seen funds that should be exclusively reserved for the needy, reallocated to the greedy, as welfare for the rich.
As a young man earning above an average income, I paid up to 68 cents in the dollar; and, the Yanks paid up to 91 cents.
The highest rate today is significantly lower and around 95% of corporate Australia are now head-quartered offshore. The tax they used to pay is now replaced by the revenue surety of the cascading GST. The point being, that our richest citizens and or corporations, are no longer shouldering a fair share, but have in effect, asked our grannies and the most vulnerable to shoulder a disproportional and patently unfair share of the common tax burden.
Welfare for the rich and better off, [like negative gearing,] is simply no longer possible; given the sheer size of the structural deficit.
Means testing of all public service provision must now become standard practise, least we become just like parts of Europe, where so much of their current problems had their beginning or source in tax evasion or avoidance, which as an almost standard practise, is only ever available to the already better off.
If all incomes had been indexed for inflation from the very get go, many of our lowest income earners, or around 40% of the population, would simply pay no tax whatsoever, let alone school fees! Rhrosty.

An article that makes me want to vomit!

The communist author identifies correctly that schools serve neither the children nor their parents, but rather the state machinery, an effective brain-washing mechanism to turn our own children into obedient subjects/workers for the "public good" (eg. the good of the vain-intellectual-artistic-nogooder-bureaucrat-communist rulers) and for that purpose she hails them being compulsory.

<<We are not a bunch of individuals connected to each other only through the market>>

Indeed, we are a bunch of individuals connected to a bunch of robots that leach upon us, who have no idea what "individual" means. Indeed we are connected not by the market, but by the ropes on our necks to those we never asked to have anything to do with.

Away with the garbage of nationhood!

Poor old Gerard.

The Sydney Institute he represents has only 2 employees - he and his wife. Not exactly a vast forum of independent thinkers.

The Board of Directors and the Institute's financial sponsors represent some very conservative corporations indeed, with a definite agenda, and I evaluate everything he says with that in mind.

Also, it's interesting that only one member of the Shadow Cabinet went to a Public High School.

The government should introduce a "voucher system" where every student is awarded an identical sum for each year of their education.
If parents choose to use private schools, they can then pay the entire difference themselves.

<<The government should introduce a "voucher system" where every student is awarded an identical sum for each year of their education.
If parents choose to use private schools, they can then pay the entire difference themselves.>>

I second Rache's motion!

Australia has one of the lowest funding of public schools per capita in the OECD. This is largely because Aus has the highest proportion of privately educated pupils. Thus the funding per pupil is better than presented.

Secondly, as the independent schools get less government funding per pupil than public schools, the funding available per public school pupil is increased. As the independent schools (even those with similar funding to public schools) generally get better results, the funding of independent schools has been a tremendous success.