The latest PISA results confirm a long-term decline in Australia’s performance, along with a slight worsening of our already lower-than-average equity levels. Disparities in results between schools and sectors sharpened, and disadvantaged schools reported significantly fewer resources than advantaged schools.

We need to address these disparities front-on by articulating a positive project for democratic schooling that demands, as a minimum, schools and a curriculum that are accessible to all students.

We come closest to this ideal at primary level, with many socially integrated learning environments, where collaborative learning and creativity are encouraged. The ideal is furthest from reality in the senior years of secondary schooling, where competitive examination preparation yields radically uneven results in socially segregated settings. This is one reason the transition from primary to secondary school is often experienced as a shock by both children and parents.

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But Australia needs socially and ethnically integrated schools at all levels. The US experience of desegregating schools in the 1970s and 1980s showed that it dramatically decreased the achievement gap between Black and white students. In part, this was because the most disadvantaged students began attending schools with superior resources, including more experienced teachers. Just as in the US, the best resourced schools in Australia are those that cater almost entirely to the most privileged student groups – that is to say, they are segregated schools. It is impossible to hold such schools up as models of quality education when their results are gained under conditions of exclusion.

None of the so-called “top” schools in examination league tables are able to tolerate more than about 5% of students drawn from the most disadvantaged socioeconomic status group.

The creation of a market in secondary schooling and uneven distribution of resources between sectors has led to intense parental anxiety, including heightened fears about schools with migrant, refugee and working class components. In Australia, as globally, these market policies have increased ethnic, social and academic segregation – deepening achievement gaps and moving away from a democratic vision of universal quality.

Access to well-resourced sites is connected to access to the curriculum, which consistently rewards students from socially privileged backgrounds, while failing those from disadvantaged homes. Despite abundant pedagogical innovation, the competitive senior school curriculum remains effective and appealing to only part of the student population.

The curriculum is so attuned to the interests, strategies and needs of socially privileged families that academic selection has virtually the same effect as economic exclusion in producing segregation.

In short, academically selective and high-fee schools share socially segregated profiles that are uniquely well-catered to by existing subject offerings and teaching methods.

The result of a curriculum that is unequally attuned to diverse student populations is that schools, and families, and even teachers, seek out those privileged students who are most likely to be easy to teach and achieve high grades. At its most perverse, schools with curriculum offerings that appeal to weaker and working-class students (such as vocational streams) have been known to drop these in order to become less appealing to such students, and attract an “academically” minded clientele only. Middle-class families with high-achieving children thus have more educational options available to them than those without economic power or academically brilliant offspring.

So, what needs to change? First, the normative model for learning and teaching, as well as curriculum and assessment development, must be socially integrated schools. Curriculum and assessment authorities are often a reflection of the most socially segregated educational settings – partly due to the concentration in exclusive schools of the most highly qualified and experienced staff, and partly due to the historical dominance of the high-fee private school sector, hand in glove with the sandstone universities.

Second, there must be direct efforts made to desegregate schools. A school that enrols no students from the bottom quarter of the socio-economic distribution, and just 3% from the bottom half, is not a “top” school, but a candidate for deregistration.

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Australia has a great history of diversified and challenging, school-based and “bottom-up” curriculum reforms, particularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. But these were not brought to fruition and were cut-short by the increased focus on standardised testing. Fortunately, there is still much to be learned at the system level from amazing work going on in schools.

Primary schools, in particular, stand as an example of what is possible when learning is undertaken under a different set of conditions, and with more progressive objectives.

The positive attitudes parents have towards culturally and socially diverse local primary schools show that there is no inherent desire for segregated schooling – it is the product of the way we have structured our school system.