In his successful 2017 leadership campaign, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer proposed a $4,000 federal personal income tax deduction for parents who send their kids to private and religious schools. This pledge won many social conservatives to his cause, putting him over the top on the last ballot. Scheer may now hope the same political logic will pay dividends in the coming federal election.

If replicated in the final Tory platform, Scheer’s pledge might cost Ottawa between $1.5 billion and $2 billion a year – not the most expensive election promise ever. But for anyone concerned with public education and its importance to social and economic equality, it would plant a ticking time bomb at the core of Canada’s school system.

I have learned first-hand of the risks and unintended consequences of government-subsidized private schools in my time in Australia, where I moved from Toronto in 2016. My daughter attended public high school there. But the entire education system in Australia has been distorted by a historic shift toward private schools. Worryingly, that shift got started with a policy very similar to Scheer’s.

In Australia, education is primarily a state responsibility (as in Canada it is provincial). Traditionally, the federal government stayed clear of school policy and no level of government significantly funded private schools. But in 1963, anticipating a close election campaign, conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies broke with tradition.

He promised new federal support for private and Catholic schools, purportedly to upgrade science education. But the true motives were more calculated: to split off support from a devout Catholic faction within the opposition Labor Party. The strategy worked and Menzies was reelected. But that policy proved to be the thin edge of a wedge that has since transformed Australian education into one of the most unequal and privatized school systems in the industrial world.

From those modest beginnings, focused pressure to protect and expand federal funding for private schools proved unstoppable. Later Labor governments tried to limit the rush to private schools, but couldn’t stem the tide.

In 1996, conservative Prime Minister John Howard threw open the flood gates, eliminating previous restrictions on federal funding. Hundreds of new private schools were built, even as hundreds of public schools were shuttered. Parents looked at underfunded public schools and worried their children would be disadvantaged unless they, too, went to private schools – accelerating the transformation even further.

By the end of Howard’s tenure in 2007, more than a third of Australian students were enrolled in non-government schools. The expansion of private schooling, and the parallel crisis of confidence in public schools, provide a textbook case of the dangers of two-tier social policy – be it health care, education or any other area.

Today Australia’s federal government pays about three times as much per student to non-governmental schools as it does to public schools. (Most state government funding, in contrast, goes to public schools.) There’s no evidence that, correctly measured, scholastic achievement is any better in private schools. But there’s no denying the social connections and privilege that come with attending private school. To take just one indicator: nine of the 10 CEOs of Australia’s largest corporations attended private schools.

Elite private schools charge up to $40,000 per year. They boast state-of-the-art technical equipment, world-class aquatic centres, libraries built like castles, and performance theatres that put Broadway to shame. Yes, their (mostly well-heeled) parents pay huge tuition fees to help fund those luxuries. But about half the total revenue of private schools comes from government.

It is startling that taxpayers subsidize these elite enclaves while public schools (attended by the vast majority of disadvantaged and special needs students) scrape by. Two-tier schooling has been very important in growing inequality in Australia.

Scheer’s pledge to support private schools represents an unprecedented federal foray into education policy – traditionally a provincial matter. It is clearly intended to politically mobilize social conservatives and religious fundamentalists.

Dressed up with rhetoric about “parental choice,” it would in fact pose a major threat to the principles of equal, public education. Australia’s experience confirms it.

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Jim Stanford is director of the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute and Harold Innis Industry Professor of Economics at McMaster University.

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