It intrigues me that the same old people pushing the same old myths get published again and again in the same old forums.

Labor did not “made much about introducing laptops into schools”. It promised and implemented on time a promise to provide access to computers, not laptops, for all year 9-12 students over a four-year period.

The Gonksi review did not “recommend” an increase of $5billion in education spending. It recommended a new method for spending money and “estimated” that it would cost $5billion.

Education spending did not increase by “40 percent over a decade” in any real sense. The National Reports on Schooling in Australia show that government spending per student in Australia was $8,115 in 1999-2000 ($11,731 in 2012 dollars) and $13,544 in 2008-09 ($14,637 in 2012 dollars). That is a real increase of only 24.7 per cent.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports a real increase in per capita GDP over the ten years from 1998-99 to 2008-09 of 24.4 per cent. The relevance of this is that the salaries of teachers have to keep up to some extent with the general living standards of the population as a whole. Does anyone really think we would attract able people to teaching and retain them if that 24.7 per cent increase in education spending had not occurred and, as a consequence, the top Victorian teacher salary last year was only $67,406 and the beginning salary was only $45,696?

“Classrooms” didn’t get smaller at all, and class sizes (which I think is what the author is trying to say) did not decrease by anything like 40 per cent over a decade. The average Victorian primary class went from 25.4 students in 1999 to 22.1 students in 2012 (a decline of 13 per cent, not 40, nothing like 40). The average Victorian secondary class went from 22.7 students in 1999 to 21.4 students in 2012 (a decline of 6 per cent, not 40, nothing like 40). It had been 20 in 1999.

The Gonksi review was funding review, not a review of every aspect of education.

There are two serious flaws in the current funding system.

The Australian Government Schools Recurrent Costs formula for funding private schools is absurd 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 when they do not attend the school being funded.

The SES funding model is absurd. It pays schools on the basis of the wealth of the other people who live in the streets where their students come from. It thus underfunds the majority of low-fee Catholic schools, which is why they need top-up funding to achieve the same level of resources as applied under the Hawke government.

The Gonski plan fixes the first problem by separating the cost of educating a mainstream student from the cost of educating a student with additional needs.

The Gonski plan fails to fix the second problem. In fact, it entrenches the Howard government’s SES funding model, though you wouldn’t know it from the reporting. We now have a Labor government forcing schools still protected from the injustice of the SES model by being left on Labor’s more rational education resources index model onto the Coalition’s bizarre SES model. The Gonksi panel renamed the SES model “capacity to pay”, so just about every journalist in the country thinks it is different.

Chris C: "The National Reports on Schooling in Australia show that government spending per student in Australia was $8,115 in 1999-2000 ($11,731 in 2012 dollars) and $13,544 in 2008-09 ($14,637 in 2012 dollars). That is a real increase of only 24.7 per cent. ... The average Victorian primary class went from 25.4 students in 1999 to 22.1 students in 2012 (a decline of 13 per cent, not 40, nothing like 40). The average Victorian secondary class went from 22.7 students in 1999 to 21.4 students in 2012 (a decline of 6 per cent, not 40, nothing like 40). It had been 20 in 1999."

Given the supposed 24.7% real increase in government spending per student over those 9 years, undeniably quite a significant increase, and the accompanying significant decline in average class sizes, it would be reasonable to expect a measurable improvement in the quality of education. Sadly, this has not been the case.

This is clear indication that what is required is not increased funding in real terms as Chris C implies, but increased focus on improving the quality of education. It is disappointing that the Rudd and Gillard governments failed to appreciate this.

Chris your hair splitting arguments in your posts has done a lot to convince me that most of what Scott suggests is correct.

If you have a reasonable argument for not consigning Gonski to the trash heap of wasted taxpayer funds please present it.

The best outcome would be to sack the bottom 20% of teachers judged by their results, spilt their students & their wages among the better teachers.

Continue sacking the bottom 5% of teachers annually, until we get down to a reasonable quality of teacher. We have no hope of getting anywhere even with three times the budget, while we continue to employ so many dead heads in teaching.

The Government has shown it can not manage the money they have with any competence. Now they want more.Gonski is just a smokescreen for a Government that has squandered Australian taxpayers money.

Good article which I largely agree with.

The Gonski report, however, ducked the real issues by pushing for yet more increased spending on school education. Good public policy is about getting better value with existing resources, especially in times like these where tax revenue is weakening. Have parents of kids in government schools considered putting their hands in their pockets to help their local school in the same way as those with kids in non-government schools do?