Private and Edu-Business
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Professional Voice Volume 10 Issue 2 | Summer 2015 | RRP $10 ISSN: 1445-4165 privatePUBLIC and edu-business Editor John Graham Editorial Committee John Graham, Meredith Peace and Nic Barnard Designer Peter Lambropoulos Published by Australian Education Union Victorian Branch Printed by Printgraphics Printed on recycled paper Cover: 310g ReArt Gloss ♲ Text: 105g ReArt Matt Annual subscriptions $25 within Australia (free to financial AEU members). Please contact the AEU Publications Unit on 03 9417 2822 for further information. A subscription form is available in the back of this issue or downloadable from www.aeuvic.asn. au/publications. Back issues Free to members. $10 to non-members within Australia. Editorial correspondence should be directed to John Graham, Professional Voice, Australian Education Union Vic Branch, PO Box 363, Abbotsford VIC 3067. Phone: 03 9418 4888. Email: [email protected]. Copyright is held by respective authors. The opinions of the authors are their own and are not necessarily the policy of the Australian Education Union Victorian Branch. For authorisation to reproduce any article in part or whole, please contact the editor. The AEU Victorian Branch can be contacted at: PO Box 363, Abbotsford 3067 Tel: 03 9417 2822 Fax: 1300 568 078 Web: www.aeuvic.asn.au ISSN:1445-4165 Public, Private and Edu-business Professional Voice Volume 10 Issue 2 Contents 5 Editorial: Public, Private and Edu-Business John Graham 10 The Comparative Advantage of Public School Graduates Barbara Preston 15 Private or public: Does paying for private schooling pay off in the longer term Jenny Chesters 24 Edu-businesses and education policy: the case of Pearson Anna Hogan, Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar 31 A sad case of slogans in and slogans out Tony Taylor 36 After the review: professional concerns about what’s next for the Australian Curriculum Libby Tudball 42 Aspirations, expectations, experiences: VET in Schools for young Australians Kira Clarke 47 Jill Blackmore on equal opportunity, accountability and school improvement Interview by John Graham 4 Editorial: Public, Private and Edu-business John Graham This edition of Professional Voice has three articles which look at the relationship between the public and private sectors. Two of them add to the growing research evidence busting the myth that the education offered in private schools is superior to that offered in public schools. The third one documents the alarming rise of edu-business in Australia through a case study of the largest and most influential of the companies involved – Pearson. Our other articles investigate the report of the national curriculum review and explore the complexities of VET in Schools. Finally we interview Jill Blackmore as the next subject in our unique interview series with influential educationists. Does paying fees for private schooling pay off in the long term? The messaging from private schools on their websites, in newspaper and magazine display ads and on outdoor hoardings (only in the right sort of suburbs) is ‘of course it does’. If the type of social selectivity portrayed in the ads (middle class enclave images) is all potential parents are looking for, it may well do so. For the doubting Thomases who want some hard data linked to academic success, such as NAPLAN results, VCE results, and university results the evidence is becoming less and less conclusive. In 2013 Chris Ryan, in examining Australia’s decline in performance in reading and maths in the PISA testing program, concluded that “the declines appear to have been concentrated among private schools”. Another recent study (2013) by Cardack and Vecci examining the academic advantages of students attending Catholic schools compared to attending government schools, concluded that they were “marginal” in terms of secondary school completion, and university commencement and completion. In fact they put forward the possibility that attending a Catholic school may have a comparatively negative effect on these student outcomes. John Graham is a research officer at the Australian Education Union (Vic). He has carried out research in a wide range of areas related to education and training. He has had particular responsibility for the range of the issues impacting on teachers and teaching as a profession, teacher education, developments in public education in general and in schooling in particular, the organisation and funding of education and curriculum change. He has written extensively about all of these matters. This includes many articles, submissions to state and federal inquiries and reviews, development and analysis of surveys and various papers to seminars and conferences. 5 In this edition of Professional Voice, Barbara Preston compares the success at university of public school and private school students in Australia and England and finds that public school students outperform their private counterparts in both countries. By the end of their first year of university Australian public school students receive the same marks as private school students with tertiary entrance scores three to six points higher. The English research found that at each A-level standard, on average around 7 percentage points more graduates of state schools than graduates of private schools received first class or second class, first division (upper second) honours degrees from university. Preston’s results for Australian students reinforce those described in a previous article in Professional Voice (Autumn 2013 edition) by Andrew Harvey and Catherine Burnheim. They reported on their study into the performance of public and private school students in their first year of tertiary education at Monash and La Trobe Universities. They concluded that public school students with the same ATAR as their private school counterparts both outperform them academically and have higher retention rates. The second article in this edition querying the comparative value of a private school education is by Jenny Chesters from the University of Canberra. She examined the longer term outcomes of attending private schools and found that it is parents’ education, rather than the proposal that private schooling is in some way superior to public schooling, that determines educational attainment and employment outcomes. Factoring in parental education removes the differences between public and private school student outcomes in terms of the completion of Year 12, the completion of a university degree, being in full- time employment and average weekly earnings. Preston also refers to the effect of parental background on educational achievement and quotes recent research into NAPLAN scores which shows that public school students tend to do better than private school students at schools of similar SES background. In other words, in terms of comparative value, private schools are not doing any better than public schools, and may be doing significantly worse than them, while coasting along on a public perception of superiority created by the very different parental cohort in each sector. What are the implications of the research set out in these two articles? In the first place the higher education system should continue to be evaluated through filters such as SES profile to ensure its accessibility is based on potential and talent, rather than family background, and its entry processes should reduce the influence of ATAR scores as the principal means of identifying students who are likely to succeed at university. Governments should abandon the notion of the private school as the paradigm for public schools, for example as the outgoing Napthine Government did in its statement that “…there is a clear opportunity for government schools to learn from the approaches used in non-government schools.” It would seem that a far stronger argument exists that it is time non-government 6 Professional Voice 10.2 — Public, Private and Edu-business schools learned from the approaches used in the government school system regarding accountability, access, and the pedagogy of in-depth learning in non-differentiated classrooms. If parents pay high private school fees for their children to get academic results above what they would get in a government school, then the evidence indicates they may be wasting their money. Present estimates of the cost of a child’s education in a private school until they leave at Year 12 are around $400,000 and rising. The argument being floated by a number of economists is that parents would be better off using government schools and banking their money to pay off the anticipated substantial higher education debt which will be accumulated if the Federal Government deregulates university fees. According to trends in the property market, many parents have already realised this. Real estate agents claim that the price difference between a home in a “desirable” government school zone in Melbourne and one outside the zone, even just a street away, can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Houses in sought-after zones almost always outperform the median price for the suburb. An odd sort of footnote to the findings by Preston and Chesters was provided by Australian private schools’ most enthusiastic point man, Kevin Donnelly. After reading the earlier versions of these articles in The Conversation he stated that: “Defining the value of a school education in terms of tertiary performance and employment outcomes ignores the fact that there are many other less utilitarian reasons why parents might choose a Catholic or independent