David, as I tried to discuss with you before, but was rebuffed with one of your glib assertions, the problem is that the quality of teachers is far from uniform across the field.

That means that in order to achieve parity in quality of education across all schools, either we have to randomly distribute teachers to all schools, including remote and otherwise unattractive ones, or we have to come up with some way of raising the quality of the least capable to close to parity with the best ones. At the same time we have to come up with some funding model that achieves complete equity of access to educational resources, also including to those locations where such access is expensive to facilitate.

Which do you advocate and how do you propose your preferred model would be implemented?

We have a public teaching workforce which is highly collectivised and resistant to attempts to create any form of ranking based on educational outcomes. NAPLAN is a bastardised hodgepodge that is subverted routinely by schools that are given advance information on exactly what the narrow scope of assessment will be and then drill students on that for weeks on end instead of giving a properly broad education and allowing a genuinely meaningful empirical data set to emerge. That's without even considering the silliness of polluting the data with a limited and carefully selected set of social measures, which provide a ready-made excuse for under-performing teachers.

More deeply, the field is saturated, especially at the senior and policy level by second-wave feminists who reflexively treat any effort at reform of their profession, including raising training standards, as an attempt to reduce opportunities for women and they will have none of it. Their adherence to ideology is a lifelong passion, while teaching is just a job.

How do you suggest any of that might be changed to produce your utopian dream of all schools being equally wonderful palaces of learning? How do you suggest we reverse a generational attitudinal malaise toward education that exists within some socio-economic groups?

David,

The two points that I made previously that you have not challenged are:

1 Removing subsidies to the independent sector would result in students moving back to the public sector, which would require more public money just to maintain the present standards. (or in the case where there is no additional government spend the public schools get less)

2 Independent schools with similar funding to public schools on average achieve better academic results.

The only possible conclusion is that removing the subsidies would result in:

a) For high fee schools, the fees increasing and the schools moving further out of reach for middle income parents,

b) For low fee independent schools, most having to close, with the students moving to now over crowded public schools

c) For public school students, larger classes, more crowded schools, and less money available for pupils.

Other than meeting your socialist "moral" imperative of making everyone equally miserable, what would this achieve?

Dear Shadow Minister,

I guess that ends it. Wanting to see adequate public schools makes me a socialist. When you advocate a system of privilege it comes down to that sort of name calling. Other countries have public school systems with better outcomes than Australia. There is no reason that Australia could not equal them except for the fact that the polity is unwilling to put adequate resources in the public school system and will continue to do so as long the system of privilege continues. The article was spot on.

I was struck by the authors' comment that

"the point is, that if you are born into a middle-class family, with well-educated parents, you have already won the educational lottery. The idea that you would then claim the same resources as the disadvantaged students mentioned above is not just socially divisive, but immoral."

Yes, indeed, but when Andrew Bolt applied a version of this to Indigenous academics, he was fined and labelled a right-wing racist.

The authors are right, of course. But by the same criteria, wasn't Andrew Bolt ?

Just wondering.

Joe

David, you're not actually doing anything more than name-calling. I expected better, for some reason.

'Parents vote with the feet because they are encouraged to do so to escape a deprived public school system'

Actually david f a school that is godless is actually depraved not deprived. You almost hot it right.