A school is a school is a school, weather it be public or private. All funds to schools should be distributed equally, regardless of if they are public or private.

The difference is that private schools have Fees paid by the parents, usually very high Fees. These fees allow the private school to add more facilities, etc.

That is the difference. The parents pay highly for this difference. The Government does not pay for the difference. It does provide funds to private schools per student on an equal basis with public school.

If you wanna pay high fees to send ya kids to school, thats your choice.
If they were all payd equally, you wouldn't have a choice.
So quit ya monin and make your choice.
When times are tough you have to make a choice.
It's either the kids get pulled out of school or the 4 wheel drive goes, it's your choice.

The author says
"why on earth would parents freely choose to send their children to crappy, run down private schools?".
She suggests two answers, and has apparently no interest in whether either of them is correct - if she had, she would have discovered a third possibility.

That is, she would have discovered that there are schools which are funded less (that is in total funds, parent fees plus government money) than state schools, where the parents do not generally have rocks in their heads, and which are considerably more popular than local state schools.

She also says "other countries that publicly subsidise private schools (and there aren’t many)" Since all the countries I've lived in do, I rather doubt the accuracy of this. But in all these countries, there are privately run schools, which are _fully_ funded by the Government, have to be open to all, don't charge top-up fees - seeming in many ways just like part of the public system.

To understand what happens in Education and the perverse reasons why students fail Parents should read the archives of PLATOWA.com
Parents pining to achieve Private Edu for their kids simply realise Political intervention in Schools is a triple zero ; in Victoria Political intervention is Law now so there in no inderpendant Schools in Victoria . Julia Gillard writes the Curriculum end of story .
There are Privately Funded Schools though and rightly a percentage of the Tax Private School Parents pay gets to the School , rightly so surely no one would want to tax them twice .

The dead hand of education is the Educrats , Nut Cases and Fanatics define Education in Victoria , and these people have unlimited power , you effectively loose your children , they pay lip service to you but you have no choices it's their way or no way you are disenfranchised . You even get to apoligise to Aboriginals for having an assembly on their land . Where is my Country then ? I would feel like a Plum growing on an Onion plant at the 'Spittal of Glenshee'so I guess I am a misplaced person...homeless .
Education is a Discipline but not in our schools , it's a Curriculum there is no Discipline it's decidered by out of touch Educrats and a long out of school Politicion with no Kids inventing new Curriculums .

What a catastrophy !

It is time for a completely new approach to the problem of public schools, and in particular the need for a solution that does not cost the taxpayer very much money.

Two simple amendments to the NSW Constitution Act would go a long way towards solving the problem. These would be:

1. No person can become or remain Premier of NSW unless they have school age children attending a NSW public school.

2. On pain of forfeiting their seat in Parliament, and becoming ineligible for re-election, the Premier must cause these children to be enrolled in the NSW public school nominated by the Leader of the Opposition.

However, a more practical approach would be to just issue education vouchers, with a value equal to the average cost of educating a child in the NSW public system, to each child in the State, and these would be redeemable at any school their parent chooses.

Another simple approach would be to recognise that parents vote in elections, and are therefore able to enforce their desire to choose the school that their children attend. If you want parents to choose public schools, you need to make then attractive. The competition to enter one public school, James Rice Agricultural High, shows what is needed, which is more selective schools, from which disruptive students can be expelled.

Life is definitely full of choice - for some of us. I truly believe that we all pay our taxes; although the rich are good at paying less; and therefore we should all have some of our taxes contribute to the education of our children. I think the real issue at hand is the undeniable fact that the private education sector does appear to get a very generous helping to the public coffers. If the distribution of funds was even that would be a whole different subject but we all know that the distribution is obviously not even. The private sector are getting more BER money and are given total flexibility about how they spend that money while public schools get considerably less and no choice/say about how to use it. It is sad that the social gap in Aus continues to grow and with a system like this will continue to.