I remember how it was -- JR
Australia: Authoritarianism lives in the mind of a Leftist teacher
Brendan McDougall (below) teaches in a government school in country Victoria. He realizes that some parents are prepared to make considerable efforts to ensure that their children get a good education while others are prepared simply to accept what the government offers. He deduces rightly that, no matter the system there will always be at least some people who seek privately-funded education in order to give their children more than the government offers. He wants to stop them doing that. He wants to forbid private education altogether. He would approve of the old Soviet system.
That is a distinctly radical proposal from a distinctly radical website and one with no chance of adoption so why does Brendan argue that? His argument is actually realistic in some ways. He thinks that having private schools diverts resources that might otherwise go to government schools and he wants more resources for government schools. Private schools get all the best teachers, for instance.
What he overlooks is that the existing system greatly expands the share of national resouces that goes into education. Private schools attract private money, which adds to what the government spends on education. He is actually advocating for LESS money to be spent on education
He cannot be unaware of that. It is just Leftist envy that is heaving in his breast. He is aware that many private school users "are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group" and he hates it. He just cannot bear the thought of other people doing well for themelves and feeling happy about it. Their happiness makes him unhappy. He must be miserable a lot of the time.
We can be thankful that there are not enough like him to be influential. When Mark Latham was leading the Labour party, he suffered a crashing electoral defeat after just a mild threat to Federal funding to private schools. Around 40% of Australian teenagers go to private schools so that is a huge voting bloc to threaten.
In case it is of any interest, I went to a small country State school in Queensland and sent my son to a regional Catholic school. Both schools were rather good, I think
Australia’s public schools are in crisis.
Teachers nationwide have been shouting about this for more than a decade. There are no teachers. Our students are falling behind internationally. Many kids are depressed and school refusal is through the roof. It’s become so dire that even Education Minister Jason Clare agrees.
Over the past decade, right-wing responses have been to blame the teachers or claim there are too many soft skills being taught. Those advocating in the media for school reform have tended to argue about the funding disparity between public and private schools, and the fact our schools are many percentage points away from meeting the school resourcing standard.
These arguments ignore the reality that our current system values the education of some young Australians more than others — and the numbers obfuscate and distract from the true rot in the sector: class segregation.
We have one of the most robust private education sectors in the world, and it’s hard to argue, especially following a recent Four Corners investigation into allegations of harassment and discrimination at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, that this is doing our society any good.
Private schools don’t need tweaks or reforming; they need to be abolished.
No teachers, no resources
Our teachers are overworked, overwhelmed, burnt out and undervalued — and the numbers often cited are egregious. In New South Wales and Western Australia, shortages of more than 2,000 teachers were reported at the end of 2023. In Victoria, 800 jobs remained unfilled across the state when students returned from the summer (now reduced to 795 at the time of writing, including 14 principals).
This shortage is being felt across the board, but the pain is sharpest at schools in our most vulnerable communities, such as mine, where six teachers have returned from retirement this year and we still have seven unfilled full-time jobs, with no applicants in sight.
In the decade following the 2012 Gonksi review — which assessed school funding and depicted a system characterised by alarmingly declining test scores and increasing educational inequality — funding of private schools has increased at twice the rate of public. Not only did the review’s warnings go unheeded, but successive governments have worked in tandem to accelerate the trend. In Victoria and NSW in 2021, five elite private schools spent more on new facilities than governments spent on 3,372 public schools combined.
These numbers are shameful, but while they liven up discussions in staff rooms, they’re not effective at creating change. There are deeper issues at play. For every cartoonishly posh school in Kew or Bellevue Hill charging well over $30,000 tuition a year, there are five or more smaller, lower-fee private schools that cost $5,000 a year that compete for teachers and students across Australia’s less affluent areas.
These schools are often as materially scruffy as the fee-free public school down the road, with similar performances in metrics like NAPLAN and ATAR. Despite this, parents flock to these independent private schools in droves, with enrolments ticking up 14.1% over the past five years, while enrolments at Catholic private schools increased by 4.8% in the same period. Yet despite recent cost of living pressures, enrolments in public schools only grew by a measly 0.7% over the past five years, well below the average growth for all schools of 3.5%.
Paying for a peer group
We are certainly not getting richer, particularly those of us young enough to have kids starting school for the first time, so why might cash-strapped parents be willing to spend an ever-increasing portion of their disposable income on a product that isn’t measurably “better”?
One reason is that private schools have marketing departments, but a more potent force is that middle-class parents in Australia consider privately educating their children a cultural norm.
Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, and we have one of the highest percentages of private-school-educated young people in the world — 36%, with an increase of 4 percentage points over the past 20 years. In a country like the United States, where there are roiling debates about school choice and rampant social inequality, only 10% of students attended private schools as of 2022-23.
In Australia, enough parents send their kids to private schools that to do otherwise can feel inadequate or negligent. Parents care about their kids and they don’t want them to miss out, so they work two jobs and send their kids to private school so they can relax knowing they did everything they could.
In doing this, however, they inoculate themselves against needing to care about what happens to those who can’t afford what they can. They tap out, and if a third of our families tap out of public education, there becomes little political will left to make our public schools work. This is compounded by the fact that it’s the wealthier, powerful third — the parents who are also doctors and bankers and lawyers and politicians — who leave the public system first.
This means that in Australia we have two education systems — one for everyone, and one for the students whose parents believe that the one for everyone isn’t good enough. These latter children spend their formative years only associating with people like them, with limited mixing across class lines. Parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t necessarily paying for a better education — they are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group.
This has been true for decades. Parents today who attended public schools grew up knowing the state didn’t care about their education, and so it is with today’s young people. They know this in their bones as they walk through the gates. As teachers, we see it in their eyes, but we also see it in our declining PISA scores, our school refusal rates, completion rates, our problems managing behaviour, and the upticks in youth crime statistics. These kids know that their country cares about other children more than them.
Education for all
In a debate about the value of VCE in my Year 12 English class last week, one student asked me if “a 40 here is really worth the same as a 40 at a private school in Melbourne”. The truth is that it’s worth so much more when it’s been fought for so much harder, but there aren’t the structures in place for us to see that.
The rampant, chronic underfunding of our public schools is a blight on our national identity, especially for a country that lionises the idea of a “fair go”. But simply reallocating funding to be more equitable will not address the class segregation corroding Australia’s school system.
So what can we do? Well, we can start by phasing out the federal taxpayer dollars pouring into the coffers of private schools — a minimum of $17.8 billion in 2024. If someone wants to pay for their child to attend a school where they won’t fall in with “the wrong crowd” or the other classist monikers we reserve for poor kids, they can pay for it themselves. We could then invest that money back into our public schools, targeting funding to the communities like mine who need it most.
We could ban the new construction of private schools that are de facto designed to siphon away from the public sector the families who have the resources to invest in their children’s education, robbing their local school of their assistance. A better-resourced public sector could be designed to provide different educational options for different kids, and we could repurpose some of those three-storey performing arts centres into facilities accessible to everyone.
These solutions aren’t easy — they require long-term thinking, values-based politics and bravery. The issue has been ignored for so long that it is entrenched. Decades of underfunding and neglect have made our public schools less competitive and less attractive to middle-class parents. Decades of conversations during school pick-ups and dinner parties have made parents increasingly anxious that their child might get left behind.
Even if we did manage to abolish the grossly inequitable privatised model we currently have, our schools would still be segregated by postcode; by the capacities of parents to pay “top-up fees” to give their local public school an edge. But unless our leaders dare to acknowledge the injustices baked into the system, more kids will leave the public system, more burnt-out public school teachers will leave the profession, and more of our next generation will leave the education system feeling as though it wasn’t designed for kids like them.
If governments, state and federal, are serious about fixing public education, they must consider the radical choice of abolishing the private education sector. Until they do so, they will never truly ensure that our schools are about every child learning, growing and flourishing.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/15/australia-public-school-private-school-funding-class-disparity/
*********************************************California State University’s Mandate of Ethnic, Social Justice Studies Driven by Hatred of America
Pan-African studies are “the intellectual arm of the revolution,” the unrepentant communist Angela Davis triumphantly told students at California State University, Los Angeles, in a candid moment in 2016. Well, that arm got a lot longer this week.
The entire California State University system just announced Thursday that it was making ethnic and social justice studies mandatory for everyone who wants a degree.
Yes, that means that ethnic and social justice studies will now have pride of place along with English and science as subjects that must be mastered by those brandishing a bachelor’s degree from the vast California system.
Not that ethnic or social justice studies will do one iota to help these young Americans master their fields or become future leaders, which used to be one of the aims of what was formerly called higher education.
No, ethnic and social justice studies are political indoctrination.
Critics would say, hang on, wouldn’t ethnic and social justice studies help Americans get along better in a diverse workforce, body politics, classrooms, etc.? Those critics, of course, would have very little understanding of what actually is taught in ethnic studies or social justice studies.
Ethnic studies teach the members of what in today’s lexicon we call “minorities” (really, any American who belongs to a group that the activists have convinced the bureaucracy to officialize as marginalized) that they have a long list of grievances against the United States, and particularly against whites.
To Americans who have been cordoned off into the groups thought of as belonging to the “oppressor” classes, ethnic and social justice studies classes instruct them to forthwith act submissively, assume the burden of collective guilt for sins in which they have taken no part, listen, not talk, etc.
Who are these oppressor people? It used to be only white male Protestants, but we are seeing the anger turned against white women, who are now dismissed and cruelly disparaged as “Karens,” (anti-racist consultant Robin DiAngelo actually devotes an entire chapter of her bestseller “White Fragility” to “White Women’s Tears”), Jews, and, increasingly, Chinese and Indian Americans.
Why? Well because Chinese and Indian Americans have had the temerity to succeed, which destroys the narrative that we have oppressor and oppressed classes, and individuals cannot do anything about it.
So would anyone want to introduce this witches’ brew into the educational system of anything? Because Angela Davis was right: ethnic studies are a political project.
Ethnic and social justice studies are just one more attempt at demolishing the “hegemonic narrative.” The hegemonic narrative of this country, to those not yet indoctrinated, is the American Way of life. It is the American Dream. It is the promise of liberty and prosperity that has attracted more than 100 million immigrants to our shores in over a century and a half.
That attraction continues to this day. There is a very long line out the door of people seeking to come in and there is no line for people waiting to leave.
As I explain at length in my new book, “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free,” to be published this Tuesday, the hard left wants to strangle this goose that laid the golden egg.
To the hard left, this is not a dream, but a dystopian nightmare of an America that is structurally, systemically and institutionally racist. It is also too individualistic (and at the same time too family-centered), profit-driven, male-ist, etc.
To Davis and the others who understand the political value of ethnic studies, this awful American hegemonic narrative must be replaced with a counter-narrative filled with the aggrieved and the aggressors.
That is why every student who will go through the Cal State system will now receive these lessons, and be hugged more tightly by the intellectual arm of the revolution.
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School choice wins in Texas — and shows other states how it’s done
The educational-choice movement is a once-in-a-generation political earthquake in America, and politicians in other states should take notice.
The Texas House failed in November to pass Gov. Greg Abbott’s school-choice legislation.
Twenty-one Republicans joined all Democrats to kill a groundbreaking compromise bill that would have created Texas’ first private school-choice program, sent $7 billion extra to public schools and provided $4,000 raises for public-school teachers and support staff.
But instead of empowering families, defecting Republicans voted against their party platform and their constituents.
It looked like the nation’s largest red state would continue to be a stubborn holdout on education freedom, but Abbott quickly and boldly went on the electoral warpath.
He endorsed primary challengers against those members and ultimately deployed more than $7 million of his own campaign cash to make sure voters knew where they stood.
The results were extraordinary.
Of the 16 anti-school-choice incumbents seeking re-election, a stunning six were defeated outright, and another four were pushed into runoffs.
Meanwhile, all five of the seats vacated by retiring members will be filled by pro-school-choice candidates.
This change in the whip count represents the largest shift toward school choice in Texas political history.
It’s difficult to recall another political event in any other state of this magnitude.
It also settled the score on school choice.
On multiple occasions, anti-choice incumbents claimed their constituents are opposed or indifferent to vouchers.
But their actions betrayed the truth.
Until election week, those incumbents still ran advertisements digging in on their vote against school choice.
Ousted Rep. Glenn Rogers wrote multiple opinion articles arguing school choice “isn’t conservative.”
Rogers lost his seat to a school-choice supporter by a 26-point margin.
As Texas’ most popular political figure, Abbott and his endorsements were hugely important to the electorate.
But the governor wasn’t alone.
In the past three months, our affiliated super PAC, AFC Victory Fund, also spent more than $4 million to make sure voters knew where their representatives stood.
All told, this election will be remembered as one of the most significant events in state-level politics in recent history.
Defeating an incumbent lawmaker is the hardest thing to do in politics.
By defeating six incumbents and pushing four more to runoffs, Abbott and AFC Victory Fund blew expectations out of the water with a resounding 77% success rate.
Coming into this year, no Texas Republican incumbents had lost a March primary re-election bid in the prior two election cycles.
Because of school choice, at least six lost in one night.
Thanks in part to the hard work of the governor and several other crucial state and national allies, parents have become the strongest interest group in town.
Texas will now have its best opportunity to pass school choice for every family, which would be the largest Day 1 school-choice program in history.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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