The school funding wars are over: rich people won and the country lost

It’s almost always the same. In the shadows of Australian plenty, a child wearing a wafer-thin polo cuts a lonely figure, eyes trained on worn shoes. As the camera pans out, the scene ripples with pathos at their unconcealed exclusion from the nation’s social fabric. 

At this point, a Smith Family voiceover tells you the child is emblematic of one in six children in our (staggeringly wealthy) country, but — reassuringly — it’s within your power to help ensure one of these 850,000 children has “a chance to succeed” at school.  

Against this chilling lament, two questions suggest themselves. How many of us reach the end of the advertisement without also staring down at our shoes or, put differently, have become so inured to the invisible poor that we’re able to navigate that sting of conscience with precision? And do we truly comprehend the scale of what’s at stake? After all, the endgame of such crushing poverty for all of society is, I promise, much worse than you think. 

For at least 20 years, the bonds of citizenship and basic fairness written into our social contract have cracked under the weight of a series of attacks disguised as benign policy changes. Though rarely cited, chief among them is the way in which successive governments have allowed the civic mission of public education to be debased not only by the onward march of neoliberalism, but by the wealthy’s almost preternatural sense of entitlement. 

Unspooled from notions of the public good, the common thread which runs through the arid funding landscape for public schools finds itself anchored to ideas of competition and unfettered parental “choice”. Underpinning this shift in approach lies a logic which holds out the promise, or illusion, that the more the education sector can be refashioned in the mould of a marketplace, the greater the chances that excellence will triumph. 

Yet as any objective autopsy of the nation’s schools shows, what’s instead manifested is one of the most segregated education systems in the Western world, and one defined by impenetrable barriers of class, privilege and wealth. 

It’s true that it was the Whitlam government which, having failed to introduce limited needs-based recurrent funding to the nation’s poorest non-government schools, extended such funding to all private schools. 

But it was the Howard government that smothered the nation’s conscience with the deceit that any school funding reform should never come at a cost to private schools. And courtesy of the Rudd-Gillard governments, that same pernicious “no losers” principle was permitted to survive and deprive the historic Gonski reforms of all of their revolutionary élan. 

Instead of one overarching needs-based sector-blind model of school funding, as recommended by the Gonski review all those years ago, this toxic legacy ensured the country was left with a series of blighted needs-blind, sector-based “political settlements” specific to each state and territory government.  

In the result, private and independent schools in all states and territories but for the Northern Territory have since habitually received well over 100% of their needs-based funding from federal and state governments. Public schools, by contrast, continue to average between 80-90% of their requisite funding, despite catering for the most disadvantaged children. 

As things stand, none of this appears set to change. Writing in the Nine papers in October, one of the architects of the Gonski review, Dr Ken Boston, pointed out that on current trends most public schools will reach only 91% of their funding by 2029. If we care to speak plainly, this means our governments have made a conscious decision to underfund and devalue the two in three children who attend public schools for all of the foreseeable future and beyond. 

Indeed, the full scale of such funding inequity is only really cast in sharp relief when it’s remembered it doesn’t account for the hundreds of millions in revenue private schools derive from school fees, donations, charitable tax exemptions and separate government grants. Nor does it reflect the former Morrison government’s separate $4.6 billion boost to private schools to ease their “transition” from a position of over-funding to full funding by the end of the decade.

It’s against such thickets of inequity and deprivation by design that public schools have been bled dry, reduced to the degrading spectre of having to beg for donations to pay for basics such as cheap blinds, plastic chairs, air-conditioning, low-level maintenance and local excursions. 

In the same way, public school children have been cheated of their dignity and dreams, having arrived at the exquisitely obvious conclusion that — in the eyes of both major parties — they’re neither worthy nor deserving of full funding, much less the array of civic and life opportunities such funding secures. 

Their private school peers, by contrast, have been left with the opposing “self-evident” truth. Not only are these children more deserving of full public funding, their future contributions to the fabric of Australian society must be taken as a given, elevated and revered.  

It’s from this vantage point that parents are sold the fallacy that education should be approached not as a public good but a consumer product. Such a mentality is stimulated by the misconceived MySchool website established under Labor, which weaponises competition between schools by publishing each school’s NAPLAN results along with the socio-economic composition of their students. 

Unsurprisingly, those public schools with greater numbers of poor students and lower than average academic results have invariably struggled to retain middle-class students, who are increasingly migrating to the congenial campuses of private schools. And it’s from here a vicious cycle ensues, with the school’s prospects declining in tandem with its rising concentration of disadvantage and need. 

It’s in such ways we’ve invited the unedifying spectacle of a bifurcated nation: where there’s ample opportunity for some but not for all; where high-quality education is defined not as a birthright but a privilege; where full public funding unconditionally flows not to public schools but to private schools; and where the sum value of a child’s life is weighted almost from its inception according to their parents’ wealth and postcode.  

What lies in wait, however, is entrenched educational and democratic malaise. Contrary to the seductively intuitive idea that competition among schools will bend outcomes towards excellence, the country has witnessed two decades of grim declines across reading, maths and science in the benchmark assessments administered by the OECD. 

The 15-year-olds of today are likely to be a full year of learning behind 15-year-olds from 2000, and two-thirds of a year behind in learning of their Canadian counterparts. Ordinarily such realities would give government pause, particularly given well over 90% of students in Canada attend a public school, but so much presupposes a government motivated by evidence-based policy as opposed to ideology or class.

And so rather than take responsibility for the forces which have combined to produce such miserable social failures, the usual response of government and much of the media is to sheet home blame to “dud teachers” in public schools.

No teacher in this connection is likely to have forgotten or forgiven the choice words of Stuart Robert early last year, who as acting federal education minister claimed many public school teachers were not only unequal to the task of educating but “can’t read or write”. Nor are they likely to have forgotten or forgiven his predecessor, Alan Tudge, for his cavalier suggestion that the solution for parents lies in shopping around for a better school.  

Normally, rhetoric this unmoored from reality would sound an alarm, but instead it’s seized upon and reiterated as veritable truth, along with the lie that never before has so much relative funding been “thrown” at public schools. In trading denial for dissonance, what’s followed are demands for yet more teacher accountability, yet more curriculum changes and the imposition of yet more managerialism.  

Such fact-free pabulum, of course, is nothing less than obfuscation. By design, it conveniently writes out the realities of disadvantage, staff shortages and gross funding inequities. It also reduces millions of children to mere abstractions, glossing over the material unfairness of their inequitable learning conditions. In this way, it cynically distracts from the very real civil rights storm that’s brewing before our eyes: after all, what else can we call legislated discrimination against public schools and the children who attend them. 

And by pathologising the public school system as a whole, it summons a future in which the responsibility for schooling lies increasingly with the private sector, with public schools reduced to little more than a crude safety net for the poor. 

In the event the partial erasure of the public school system seems singularly extreme or fanciful, you need only cast your mind back to the closure of some 400 public schools in total witnessed in Victoria over the past 20 or so years. Indeed, the Victorian government’s 2014 budget papers expressly stated that some of these schools were closed purely so the sites could be sold to Catholic and independent schools to “improve choices for students and parents”. 

Victorian public school students, it bears mentioning, rank among the most underfunded in the country, and have suffered yet another real funding cut in the state’s latest budget. It’s true the same budget flagged an intention to wind back some of the generous tax privileges enjoyed by private schools. But in a nod to the power of the independent schools sector, the government is forfeiting the high ground on this idea like an army in retreat. And as if to placate the sector, it’s even including schools such as Trinity Grammar, Methodist Ladies’ College and Caulfield Grammar in its limited $1.5 million rollout of free fishing kits to children in Year 5.  

All of which returns us to The Smith Family. In a recent speech to the child poverty charity, federal Education Minister Jason Clare congratulated it for having always understood that “education is a powerful cause for good — that it is a real change agent in our society, the great equaliser in our unequal world”. 

Lost on him was the irony of his words. After all, he may as well have thanked the charity for supporting children his party — courtesy of an unholy bipartisan alliance — has abandoned over years of intentional neglect. But more than this, he was praising a charity for trying to ensure the same children are afforded an education (and pathway out of poverty) his party is actively complicit in degrading. Clare’s government, as he has implied, has chosen not to ensure public schools are funded to the requisite standard for the foreseeable future, instead relegating the possibility of such reforms to after yet another expert review. 

What’s left is a nation that’s bearing witness to levels of child poverty that now surpass that of the US, and a nation where the interests of the true beneficiaries of such poverty — all those who profit from a tax system heavily tilted in favour of the wealthy and the aspirational — are protected and shielded from view.   

But it’s also a nation set on a dangerous path. History shows us the drumbeat of inequality is invariably accompanied by rising political polarisation and discontent among those who — like many in Donald Trump’s America — perceive a system that is rigged against them. 

And so before we further acquiesce to those crosscurrents of inequality rippling across society and all that they portend, perhaps we should remember that every attack on public education is more than a national disgrace. It’s an attack on our democracy and it’s an attack on our country. 

Disclosure: The author attended a public primary school and split her secondary education between a private school and a select-entry government school. She also donates to The Smith Family.