The Secret Research Report

It has to be said that if you want to get great exposure for a paper, wrap it in secrecy.  I am sure that was not the intention of the Heads and Ministers of Education around the states when they commissioned Richard Teese of Melbourne University to prepare a paper examining how current funding arrangements impact on public schools - in particular our most high need schools.

This article is for those who find the media snatches inadequate but who have not had time to download the report to read in full (available on the Australian Education Union Website).  It aims to highlight the most salient points.

Its key findings:

• Schools that enrol mainly children from low income and poorly educated families record reading scores that place the average child at about two years behind the average child in a school with mainly high SES students. This gap tends to grow over stages of schooling.
• Public schools serving mainly socially disadvantaged families struggle to convert opportunity to outcomes. Australia does not fund them as if the policy intention is to have equality of outcomes - they fund as if the intention is to enable them to produce results that are simply "good, for who students are" but not good in comparison with , the performance expected of schools serving socially advantaged families.
• From a values perspective, the paper argues that a public system cannot be decidedly more successful for well-educated and prosperous families than for poorer families and still be described as "public". The point of public funding is to ensure an equitable performance, at least in national minimum standards, but arguably well beyond this.
• Almost all schools that serve predominantly poor families in Australia are public schools. Public schools also educate 80% of all students with disabilities and 80% of all indigenous students.
• The greatest increase in the proportion of students attending private (including Catholic) schools over the last 20 years has occurred in high SES localities, while no increase at all has been registered in low SES localities. This means that, proportionately, as many children in poor communities attend public schools as they did two decades ago-around 4 out of 5 (both primary and secondary). There has been no change in the "exposure" of public schools to the needs of the poorest families, 80% of whose children continue to rely on public schools.
• However over this same period, need has intensified. Poverty and income inequality have made increasing inroads in Australian society. Many employed workers now live in poverty. This makes their children more vulnerable to economic and social forces. They therefore need to do better at school more than previous generations of the poor children. That is, the quality of public education has grown in importance.
• Mounting competitive pressures on educational performance has led to more and more middle-class parents seeking to give their children a head start - a competitive advantage. While public schools represent a very effective and low-cost alternative as evident in NAPLAN and PISA results, the world of institutional values is different: it is centred on exam results and prestige university courses.
• In a market-driven world, the greater the level of success of children from the socially most advantaged homes, the more uncertainty and insecurity is created amongst parents who are not so advantaged, but are "aspirational". They are vulnerable to the market power of better-off families who enrol their children in high-performing and selective schools, whether private or public. But they are also unnerved by media stories of low standards in public schools. Thus they, too, migrate, even though not to the same extent as more prosperous and highly educated parents.

There are some interesting case studies in the paper that look at enrolment drift in selected regions.  These studies show that in poor urban areas, public schools "over-reflect" the social profile of the area. They have a disproportionate share of the poorest families, but also of children who are most educationally disadvantaged (not necessarily by socio-economic status). Whereas in these same communities non-government schools-whether Catholic or private non-Catholic-"under-reflect" the social profile of the area, though not invariably. They recruit a disproportionate share of socially and also academically advantaged children.

The result is a pattern of residualisation in poorer communities, and an intensification of the stress experienced in public schools in more socially mixed areas. The division of labour between schools works in such a way as to create more socially blended environments in the private sector and more complex and manifold disadvantage in the public sector.

One of the important points made by Teese is that the research confirms that the average child from a poor background increases his or her score with every increase in the social mix of the school attended.

His conclusion:

There is no escaping the imperative of making strong public schooling available to every community. High quality public education must be available to every local community, and funding must operate to assure the highest possible standards of achievement for children from all social backgrounds.

There should be an integrated approach to policy across levels of government as compared to the current fragmentary approach, which divides responsibility for public and private schooling between the Commonwealth and State and Territory governments. Within each jurisdiction, one public authority should be responsible for delivering State and Territory and Commonwealth support to schools within a framework of national accountability arrangements. These arrangements should enable more effective targeting of resources as well as greater flexibility and certainty for schools.

Funding should be according to a standard price per student, adjusted for relative need as measured by student and school characteristics and means-tested against fees and other revenue. Core funding should be supplemented to compensate for disadvantage.

Choice should be managed so as to ensure that segregation does not occur and that public schools are fully supported as regards their viability and their vitality as community assets.

The exercise of choice by some parents erodes quality for others. The concentration of advantage in some schools concentrates disadvantage in others. Funds for equity fight funds for choice.

Choice has not enlarged the educational opportunities of the poor. Indeed the tendency for choice to segregate children in the lower bands of socio-economic status has created worsening conditions for the populations who most depend on the effectiveness of public schools. Growth in public and private spending in the non-government sector has operated to remove more culturally advantaged children and young people from the public systems, leaving these systems less supported culturally by a balanced mix of students from different family backgrounds.

Funding arrangements should not support social segregation, but encourage the pooling of both financial and cultural resources. This is an argument, not from social cohesion, important as this is, but from pedagogical effectiveness, without which neither cognitive growth nor social cohesion can be produced.

Through public funding arrangements, our aim should be to raise educational standards in all communities. We cannot do this by educating the poor apart and the rich elsewhere. Residential differentiation separates rich and poor, and remoteness even more. But how we fund schools must cut across these divisions rather than reinforcing or widening them.

Lack of policy integration across levels of government has weakened the links between public schools and local communities. A growing proportion of children from better educated and more economically secure families is leaving the public system. One level of government has increased resources to support choice, while another level of government struggles to reverse the deleterious effects of choice. There is no policy framework for managing choice. Continual expansion of private schooling is segmenting schools at a local level. This is creating poorer conditions of learning for the most vulnerable children in the school system. It is eroding the viability of public schools, and driving up the costs of maintaining them.

What has slipped from view is what a good public school should look like and what every local community can rightly expect to have in the way of quality educational provision

His Recommendations:

1.          Public education authorities have system-wide obligations which must be recognized in national funding arrangements

2.          These obligations include:

o    making universal provision of opportunities (all communities, all groups)

o    ensuring equity and quality of provision throughout a system

o    securing consistently high standards of achievement

3.          Meeting these obligations should be the first priority of the national funding effort

4.          Public education authorities are responsible for ensuring that schools enjoy the confidence of their local communities

5.          Every local community has an entitlement to access public education of the highest quality

6.          Children in all communities should have effective access to high quality virtual as well as real learning environments

7.          It is the responsibility of public authorities to maintain the viability and the vitality of public schooling in all communities

8.          The vitality of a school refers to its responsiveness to community need as expressed in the range of programs it offers, the suitability and effectiveness of its staff, its facilities, and its relationship with its community

9.          Given the dependence of the most vulnerable populations on the quality and effectiveness of public schools, funding should provide support for continuing innovation and enable in particular those schools exposed to the most complex of demands to become laboratories of professional learning and effective teaching practice

10.       Funding arrangements should give schools both an adequate level of resources (quantum) and a suitable mix of staff

11.       All schools should be able to release staff for professional learning and capacity-building, innovation in teaching practice, collaboration with other schools, student support and development of community relations

12.       Funding from different levels of government should be packaged to give the greatest flexibility to schools in the internal allocation of resources and at the same time an important measure of certainty

13.       The packaging of funds should be through a single authority in each jurisdiction rather than involving multiple sources and complex accountability and reporting lines.

14.       The public authority in each jurisdiction responsible for delivering resources to schools should be accountable to the Commonwealth for the distribution of Commonwealth funds within the framework of agreed objectives, priorities and outcomes

o  making universal provision of opportunities (all communities, all groups

o  ensuring equity and quality of provision throughout a system

o  securing consistently high standards of achievement

15. Funding for schools should be packaged in a standard price per student (student-centered funding)

16. The standard price per student represents the core operating grant, supported where necessary by a base to cover fixed costs (minimum running costs). The price should be adjusted to reflect relative need

17. Schools serving disadvantaged communities have additional needs and very limited locally-raised funds: separate lines of funding are required, and these should be packaged to give flexibility

18. Funding should promote a culture of self-evaluation, testing of programs and initiatives, and knowledge sharing

19. Access to supplementary funding should be restricted so as to ensure that resources are concentrated in schools where they are most needed

20. Student-centered funding does not reduce the obligation on public authorities to manage systems fairly and effectively, nor the requirement on government to meet system obligations and service the needs of school communities in widely varying contexts

21. Policies of school choice must be well managed to ensure that different segments of a local community have equal access to high quality schooling, funded in proportion to need

22. It is the role of public authorities to manage choice. Support for non-government schools-including growth in provision-should not come at the cost of declining quality of opportunity and outcomes in public schooling

23. Funding support for non-government schools should be based on a suitable standard or benchmark of costs. The Australian Government School Recurrent Cost Index (AGSRC) is unsuitable as it reflects costs, which are not incurred by non-government schools. The use of the AGSRC to allocate funds to non-government schools significantly reduces the capacity of public authorities to target support to high-need schools and high-need groups

24. Government and non-government schools should be funded on a consistent and transparent basis. A standard price per student, based on expenditure levels in public schools, adjusted for relative need, provides this basis

25. Access of non-government schools to the standard price per student should increase as the capacity to generate income from fees and other revenue declines

26. Non-government schools that are funded from public sources are accountable to the public authority in each jurisdiction responsible for the allocation of funds

27. The same standards of reporting of student intake, income, expenditure outputs, and student outcomes should apply to all schools receiving public funds

Source: http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/2012/RTeesereport2012.pdf