Epilogue Craig Campbell

Epilogue Craig Campbell In the period 2005–2012, seven years since the writing of the first edition of this book, the comprehensive high school in Australia has benefitted little from continuing educational reform. In New South Wales, the main focus of this study, there was a period of relative policy quiescence. The institutions, public and nongovernmental, that organize secondary schooling remained much the same. Nevertheless if state government policies affecting the public comprehensive high school remained stable, then the same cannot be said for the interventions of the Australian federal government. Much of this epilogue discusses federal policy and its effects on the continuing history of the public comprehensive high school. Nor do there appear to have been remarkable policy shifts internation- ally, or at least in those countries that Australia compares itself with educa- tionally through the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Intensification of existing policy directions is prob- ably the most accurate characterization of international and Australian educational reform. The OECD regularly produces comparative statistics concerning national efforts in improving levels of literacy and numeracy. The regular publication of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) statistics are important for educational policy making in each of the OECD countries. Their impacts are usually more significant than the policy arguments, now often regarded as tired, and likely not “evidence-based,” that sought to support comprehensive public school systems in a range of countries through the twentieth century. In 2007 an international study of the comprehensive high school was published.1 Significantly it was titled The Death of the Comprehensive High School? The majority of its separately authored chapters confirmed the pre- carious state of comprehensive schools in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. We know that the attempts by governments to invent common secondary schools for all youth was a twentieth-century project. It was in the 1950s 166 The Comprehensive Public High School and 1960s that the comprehensive high school appeared most likely to suc- ceed across the English-speaking world. Pioneered in Scandinavia and the United States such a school promised to solve a number of problems.2 First was the newly discovered adolescent. A new institution was required to protect youth from premature entry into dangerous adult worlds. The school also promised greater social cohesion, especially where new migrants were required to assimilate rapidly, and where old and new ethnic, racial, religious, class. and other social divisions were endemic. It promised better informed citizens for democracies. It promised a great lev- eling up of average educational standards. No longer would too many young people be trapped in schools—central, junior technical, secondary modern, and similar—that routinely reduced opportunities for higher education and careers. Such a high school also promised a common curriculum, at least in the junior years, that would meet modern labor market require- ments. Young people would be better “adjusted” for employment and living in modern societies. The essays in The Death of the Comprehensive High School? tend to suggest that these expectations were too heavy a burden for any single institution to meet. Two essays make specific populations their focus. Thomas Pedroni and Pavla Miller contrast individual and group private purposes, with the public policy intentions of comprehensive schooling.3 Pedroni writes about Black American voucher-using families. Miller looks at Italian-Australian families. Such families become rational actors in the schooling circumstances of the cities within which they live. They are not selfish users of neoliberal-inspired reforms to public schooling. Instead they make the best of the schooling opportunities presented to them, within the contexts of their family histories, cultural circumstances, and, in some cases, long- standing historical discriminations. Comprehensive public schools may or may not form part of such families’ educational projects. These essays demonstrate the potential explanatory power that attention to the stories of real families can bring to the debate. This approach contrasts dramatically with the essay by Rene Gonzalez and Anthony De Jesus.4 Latino and Latina youth in the United States are constructed as certain victims of uncaring, alienating, overlarge comprehensive high schools. The authors’ advocacy of segregated schooling is prob- lematic, failing to overcome crude portrayals of both comprehensive and segregated community schooling. Their demand for the “death” of the comprehensive school is nevertheless significant, representing as it does the hos- tility of various groups who have felt marginalized within such schools. Their conclusion aligns with that of Jose Rosario who interprets contrasting documentary films on American secondary schools.5 He concludes that Epilogue 167 “soul-making,” especially in large comprehensive schools, did not occur well. The systems and authoritarianism of the large comprehensive high schools produced multiple problems for students and teachers. David Crook’s essay on England and Wales introduces a significant dis- tinction between comprehensive schooling and comprehensive education. Comprehensive schools may be in deep trouble, but the curriculum that young people experience in the wide variety of alternative or successor schools is likely to be comprehensive in character. This is rightly seen as an achievement of the comprehensive schooling movement. For New South Wales, a variation of this argument was used by the Director General of Education, Ken Boston, in 1999 when he argued that a comprehensive public school system was a more sensible goal than that every school attempt to be comprehensive (see p. 124). Franklin and McCulloch argued that the main question for the comprehensive school is that of whom such a school should serve.6 This looks like a simple question—the answer is: “All young people in a society”—but as the different essays point out, there is contested ground between the theory, policy, and practice. The Death of the Comprehensive High School? covers much of the contest. Nevertheless there is room for further research and dis- cussion. For example, the enemies of comprehensive schooling and their interests need systematic analysis. We can ask other questions such as whether very small schools with strong pastoral ethos are always the supe- rior alternative. Recent school choice policies have their problems. Parents may choose a school, but schools may not choose to enroll their children. Do we know enough about how comprehensive schools operate in different urban, suburban, and rural contexts? And if comprehensive schools make way for specialist schools, how likely is it that such schools will not turn into hierarchies of schools, differentiated not only in terms of their curriculum specializations but also in supporting increased levels of social selection and exclusivity? Such comment hardly exhausts the recent international literature on comprehensive secondary schooling, but it does indicate the continuing sig- nificance of the debate, both national and international. Commissioned in 2010, the then Labor federal minister for education in Australia, Julia Gillard, initiated a review of national funding arrangements for all schools, public and nongovernment. Recommendations were to be “financially sustainable and effective in promoting excellent educational outcomes for all Australian students.”7 Potentially the most significant review of Australian education in 20 years, the Gonski Report produced evidence that the schools most likely to be in trouble or failing, were public schools that were being forced into enrolling unrepresentatively large num- bers of students in poverty, with learning difficulties, and poor command of 168 The Comprehensive Public High School English. The Report recommended a substantial reinvestment in “disadvantaged” schools and “disadvantaged” students. The Gonski Report also used OECD and other data arising from literacy and numeracy testing to argue that nations that had diverse and hierar- chical systems of schools were more likely to have large gaps between higher and lower performing students and schools, and that national average scores in literacy and numeracy would consequently decline. Australia was clearly such a nation. The Report identified 18 coexisting school systems in Australia. One of the paradoxes of the Report’s conclusions was that, even though this source of decline was identified, Gonski was asked to support the choices parents might make among a diverse range of schools, public and nongovernment. There was little in the report to suggest that comprehensive public high schools would be much better off as a result of funding reform in the long term. Such schools are almost always the most disadvantaged where school markets are encouraged.8 In New South Wales, the secondary school enrolment trends we identified from 1990 to 2004 (p. 123) showed the decline in the proportion of students enrolled in public high schools. This decline continued through the following decade as Table E1 shows. In 2011 the enrolment in public high schools was down another one percent. As was true in Table 5.1 (p. 123), the percentage of secondary students in

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