Public Education

Privatisation is Class Warfare

All major Australian political parties are pursuing educational policies which maintain and extend the privatisation of the Australian education system. This private/public model is accepted without debate because of the vested interests that such a debate would offend and threaten. Yet it’s a broken model which is holding back education, disadvantaging the majority of students and the progress of society as a whole. The inequitable reality created is often justified by the ideological catchcries, “freedom of choice” and “user pays”.

In fact, what we are seeing is the skewing of educational policy and funding to benefit big business and to embed the profit motive as the main driver of educational decisions. From this openly partisan position the values of equality of opportunity and education as a right, have no place and the intrinsic value of education for the individual and society is denied.

In recent decades the public-private seesaw has tipped even more towards privatisation and away from an ideal of free universal public education. Massive funding cuts, funding bias and the penetration of edu-business into the growing education industry, are only the tip of the iceberg which is crushing Australian public education.

Gonski circumvented

The constant battle over Commonwealth funding of primary and secondary education reflects this trend and its ideological underpinnings. Gonski in his first report made a number of recommendations to address the urgent need for reform in primary and secondary education and these received, on the surface, bipartisan support.

Gonski’s recommendations required a massive injection of funding to schools to ensure programs and resources needed to raise educational standards were available to all students at a basic resource standard, Schooling Resource Standard SRS. Gonski also tried to go some way towards redressing the private schools funding bias.

The Turnbull government refused to fully fund Gonski recommendations and then came to the table with a new plan costing $19 billion less. Its revised plan ensured the bias in federal funding to private schools, which Gonski had attempted to replace with a needs based formula, was further reinforced.

Late last year the Turnbull government cut a further $2.2 billion from the education budget over the next two years. Public schools will lose a massive $1.9 billion of this money despite the fact that these schools educate the majority of Australian children. This plan will mean the federal government will now fund public school children at a level of 20 percent of what Gonski said was a minimum Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), but at the same time will fund private school students at 80 percent of the minimum SRS.

It is blatantly biased but made worse by the fact that the need for full resourcing of our public schools is necessary because the public system is doing the heavy lifting in education. Students with greater need or “disadvantage” overwhelmingly attend public schools, including students from low socioeconomic-economic backgrounds, special needs students, students with disabilities and children who speak English as a second language.

TAFE

The “small government” mantras of user-pays and “private equals competition and less waste” also laid the ideological ground for the dismantling of TAFE and opened the way new private educational industry in post-secondary education. This new industry exploited not only Australian students but also many desperate and vulnerable overseas students. TAFE was slowly hacked to pieces and public money was re-routed to subsidising a myriad of private colleges, institutes and shady providers. These often shonky private colleges and institutes have since been plagued by scandal and corruption involving fake enrolments, dodgy diplomas and non-existent courses. Many millions in government subsidies have disappeared down the black hole that is privatisation.

Unis’ business model

At yet another level the privatisation agenda has replaced free university education for all with the user-pays ideological model. The introduction of fees, followed closely by repeated funding cuts to universities, has pushed universities into adopting business models to meet their funding needs.

Educational decisions at universities are now increasingly influenced by these business model which are usually always in contradiction with best educational practice. The dependence of university researchers on grants and sponsorship from industry often determines the direction of research undertaken, not the need or social value of this research.

In teacher education, a possibly “unintentional” trend has begun to emerge which can be directly linked to the underfunding of universities and the fee-paying model. Data is emerging that shows universities are increasingly accepting students into teaching degrees with lower and lower ATARs.

It appears teacher education may be becoming a cash cow for many universities. It appears that fees from teacher education courses can provide universities with a strong guaranteed income. Future teachers and students will be the victims of this short-sighted economic side effect of user pays in education.

This is not a surprise when we refuse to plan for the future based on social values and it is no different in many other sectors of the capitalist economy including the environment, aged care, health, employment and developing a people-based economy – and the list goes on.

It is clear the profit motive has subsumed the greater good and led education down a dead-end path. What has not always been obvious on this one way road is the insidious reach of edu-businesses into both the resourcing of teachers and schools, and into the lucrative provision of professional support and consultancy roles in the education industry.

Edu-business NAPLAN

NAPLAN is a clear example. All education stakeholders agree NAPLAN is not about assessing learning of the NSW curriculum but about teaching to the test.

NAPLAN underpins the insidious MY School website which gives parents the misguided impression that a school’s NAPLAN ranking can help them find the “best” school for their child. It creates wasteful “competition” between students and schools and unnecessarily pressures student and distracts teachers.

What many parents do not know is that the last bastion preventing the downfall of NAPLAN is not the Department of Education in NSW but the multinational edu-businesses which make huge profits from NAPLAN. The NAPLAN market produces for schools, governments and parents test resources including workbooks, practices papers, data analysis services, preparation development of tests, remedial services, management and online services to the value of hundreds of millions of dollars and is growing. Again we have to ask in whose interests is education policy being pursued?

To build resistance to the recent Turnbull/LNP cuts to public education the NSW Teacher’s Federation has recently launched its “Fair Funding Campaign” which it hopes will build understanding and support for the need to vote the Coalition out of office in the coming federal elections.

The ALP, the Greens and others often frame the education debate in terms of “fairness” but this limits the debate to the space between the Coalition Liberal Nationals and the other reforming parties who are happy to stay on the seesaw. They do not challenge or reveal the economic and political class interests that are represented by these policies. The ALP and the Greens may have a “fairer” policy on education but they do not fight for a single quality public education system, fully resourced and committed to planning for the future.

They are happy to lurch between a bit fairer and unfair depending on an election outcome. They will not challenge vested interests by demanding free universal public education fully resourced and funded.

The recent second Gonski Report was highly critical of the continuing failures of the Australian education system. It made a raft of new recommendations for improving education outcomes which the federal government again allied itself with. It did not however acknowledge or commit to the extra funding needed to realise the report’s recommendations.

The pressure will now be on teachers to deliver more with less.

Budgeting less money for public schools is not just irresponsible or accidental, it reflects an ideological commitment to a user pay system and small government that is only in the interests of big businesses who avoid paying taxes and/or want taxes to be used for subsidies to the private sector. It is an ideological commitment to provide opportunities for the wealthier sections of society while limiting the outcomes for the majority and particularly those students who are disadvantaged economically or in other ways.

Signing up for their public education campaigns like the NSW Teacher’s Federation’s “Fair Funding Now” campaigns is important and necessary to maintain the fight back. At the same time we must fight politically and ideologically for fully funded universal public education and for an economic and political system that represents the interests of the vast majority. Education is a right not a privilege is the catchcry of our communist ideology because it benefits every child equitably and it benefits society as a whole, not a privileged minority.

* Dorothy Costa is a public school teacher and a member of the CPA’s Central Committee