Chris,

Without going around in circles, The grattan report does claim that the real government spend on schooling has increased by 44% over the period 2000 t0 2009. However, I have tried to hunt down the figures that you quote to compare.

Up to now I have provisionally accepted your figures, given that they still show a substatial increase in school funding. However, I have the choice of accepting the figures from a fully referenced report, or from an unsupported blog.

My point that I made earlier still stands, which is that as real school funding has increased per student, results have dropped. The question of why funding should be increased if there are no other major reforms is still to be answered.

Shadow,

I know it is too much to expect you to keep coming back to see if I have got around to responding, but I am just unable to appear more often at the moment.

The Gonksi report fixes the following two problems.

The curent system is politically untenable because it leaves the federal government open to the propaganda attack that it provides more support to private schools than to public schools, something which the Howard government suffered from up to 2007. The Gonski model fixes the political problem by having the states and the feds contribute the same percentage as each other to each sector – public and private. Instead of the feds being something like 70 per cent private and 30 per cent public and the states being 90 per cent public and 10 per cent private, both tiers would be something like 70 per cent public and 30 per cent private. Even the Liberals, facing an election victory soon, ought to see a political advantage for themselves in removing this propaganda point.

The average government school recurrent costs formula is illogical because it includes the cost of base funding that any school must have, which it is inefficient to duplicate by having two schools in the same locality when one will do, and the extra costs of students with special needs (e.g., ESL, disability, low family income) even if they are not enrolled in the school being funded. The Gonski model fixes the AGSRC problem by separating the funding of the mainstream student from the extra funding for students with additional needs.

The Gonksi report does not fix everything, but the government does not have to implement every recommendation as is. It can change them.

The socio-economic status model is absurd because it pays schools on the basis of the wealth of the other people who live in the street where their students come from. It is like being charged a fee for a hospital stay based on how well off your neighbors are. It is so bad for private schools that half of them are not funded under it, but under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments’ Education Resources Index. Note that this means that the Labor Party, not the Coalition, is more generous to private schools. Of course, the public education lobby is so dumb that it calls this compensation “overfunding”, scaring private school parents and driving them into the arms of the Coalition, even though the Coalition model is worse for private schools than Labor’s old ERI model, making a Coalition government more likely and thus making public education more likely to be worse off.

This is the one problem that the Gonksi model fails to solve. There is a very slim hope that the private education authorities will realise that they were conned by the Hoard government into accepting the SES model (i.e., by opening the way for the public education lobby to label the compensation “overfunding”) and that they won’t be conned again but that they will insist on a return to a better version of the ERI model of the 1990s. The public education lobby ought to support this because if the SES model survives under the new label of “parent’s capacity to pay”, the education system will become more socially stratified and the pressure will increase for public schools to charge means-tested fees.

Shadow,

My figures are not unsupported. I gave a link to a full account with references and links in my first post on this thread. I provide tables, calculations, reasoning and links to sources there. I can’t repeat it all here because I can’t format it for this site and there is a word limit here.

I agree that real funding per student has increased. I agree that some standards have dropped by some measures. I argue that if we had not incurred the increase we did, standards would have dropped even more.

I also agree that spending more money is not guaranteed to get good results, and I have put forward suggestions of other changes I think are needed. However, the Gonksi report is about the structure of spending as well as the amounts, and the structure it proposes is more rational than the one we have now, though it is not as rational as my submission to the Gonski review.

Sadly, the only submission to the review to put forward a specific set of figures and scheme (of the 100s that I have read) was mine. The AEU, the IEU and all sorts of other bodies failed to take advantage of the Gonski opportunity, which is why I am spending so much time on the issue, trying to get at least one vital change made to what gets implemented, while those direct affected apparently cannot see what was obvious to me the day the recommendations were released.

Chris,

I have gone through your links and saw one polemic against private schools, and postings by you on a blog. I don't see the source of your figures.

Your comment "I agree that real funding per student has increased. I agree that some standards have dropped by some measures." means that you must acknowledge that other factors have a greater effect than funding, your further comment "I argue that if we had not incurred the increase we did, standards would have dropped even more." reinforces it more.

Logic dictates that without the Gonski billions, simply rectifying the non fundings issues that have damaged education in the last decade would significantly improve the teaching outcomes.

Given the parlous state of the federal budget, and the unwillingness of the states to contribute any more, indicates that a solution, more inventive than Labor's standard one of throwing money at it, is required.