Tenured failure and self-indulgent pedagogy
If one judges matters by intentions (such as by presuming that effects flow from intentions), one lives in a very congenial world. You are always right, because your intentions are always good. Those who disagree with you must, therefore, have “wrong” intentions and so always be wrong
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is simply bullshit.
Your ‘example’ of totalitarian regimes is a furphy: they want to control education, like they want to control everything else, because that is what they do. They eliminate private schools because they eliminate all opposition, competition and choice, because that is what they do.
That is a very different thing from providing a service. A service which, don't forget, was provided by the government in the first place out of the socialist, dare I say communist, idea that poor children deserve education too.
No-one is talking about banning private schools, no-one I know of, at least. What there is is publicly wondering why Scotch and Caulfield Grammar, with their massive resources, budgets and fees, still get government assistance as well. If people want to choose something, then let them do so, but why am I being forced to subsidise that choice? Or does that argument only work against the ABC? And no-one, even in that argument, is saying to remove all private school subsidy, but to means test it to a degree: a poor Catholic school in Sunshine could use a $500,000 grant to build a new arts center far more equitably than if the same money were given to Ivanhoe Grammar to help build that Polo Stables they always wanted.
Tenure is a difficult one, and you will always have teachers you would prefer to fire. Arguably, tenure is not always a good thing (indeed, it was traditionally something reserved for the upper echelons of academia, as much to support research and their old-age as anything else.. and to give the rest of faculty something to work towards). And yet, the cases you have provided about how horrible, horrible, the US education system are, are irrelevant. This is not, you might have noticed, not the US. Our system is different. And our problem in public schools (schools generally) is the opposite of tenure: casualisation. Teachers don't have the security of knowing that they'll necessarily have a job next semester, let alone next year.
Then there are issues arising from low staffing levels arising from vanishing low morale (not knowing if you'll have a job next term, and being paid for far fewer hours than are required and being blamed by everyone and their dog for everything which is wrong with modern society will tend to degrade one's joy in one's work), leading to a greater proportion of entry-level teachers, and of teacher teaching subjects which they don't know, because there is no-one else.
But, no. There is no reason to provide public, universal schooling other than to brainwash the population. Let's just remove it all, let the Jesuits and private schools take care of those that qualify, and for the rest there's always work in the fields and factories, right?
As far as it goes, I agree with you that giving more autonomy to principles, with more discretion over their budgets and staffing would be a good thing. Allowing them to actually hire a teacher, rather than rent one would make teaching a far less precarious proposition, and might lead to more teachers staying teachers, more people who love teaching and their subjects going into the pool.
But turgid bullshit like your claim about how public schooling is totalitarian is just arrant nonsense, and precisely the sort of (ignorant, or at least thoughtlessly ideological) commentary which is part of the problem.
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You should check your history. There was already extensive provision of private education, even catering for quite poor student, before state education. It was quite explicit in its original provision that state education had specific socialisation aims.
You should also read the original paper. The point about why religious schools are the main competitor to state schools is an excellent one, for example.
The point of the Californian example was it is such a horrible example. Particularly given the performance of American public schooling is so notoriously bad. Mind you, one advantage the US have has it that it is easy to find out how bad their schooling does, since the ASAT tests (the ASAT system is not government run) provide results which are comparable across schools, years and jurisdictions.
Oz citizens have no comparable information about the performance of the government schools we pay for. Now, why might that be?
Besides, as I pointed out above to sacred_chao, Just because the government may not provide schooling directly itself, does not mean it cannot fund it. It would be perfectly possible to fund students--with extra grants for students suffering indicators of educational disadvantage--without the government running any schools. You could even pay by results.
One of the purposes in funding private schools is to improve the performance of government schools. A regulator which was genuinely disinterested between schools would do that much better.
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"Making little Americans" was an explicit part of having government schooling in the US. Such "nation building" was, in one form or other, a pretty common aim, including in Australia. The story out here was not quite as different as all that.
I am a little confused about how providing education is seen as discouraging a wish to get educated.
That there was going to be a push to increase provision for education is more or less a given. Besides, we all have an interested in a literate citizenry. The issue is more why the government would do it. It persistently came down to some form of "because we do not trust anyone else to do it the way we want".
My point about intentions was not to complain that people or policies have them, but about using them as a basis judgments about policy effectiveness/goodness.
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When there is an effort at specific ideological and political ‘socialisation’ in modern schools, and it certainly does happen - the subject of ‘Australian Studies’ in the first few years of the VCE was a blatant hagiography of unions and unionism so egregious that I made a deliberate, and successful, attempt to fail that subject - but these are not done by the bureaucracy itself, but as the result of explicit government interference, and in this case it was enforced over all schools (or, in other words, you won't stop that sort of bullshit by privatising all schools), and was so widely hated that the bureaucracy managed to wind it back relatively quickly.
And as far as it goes, education has had, does have, and always will have “specific socialisation aims”: they aim to inculcate that obeying the law and cooperating with people are good things, and fighting and breaking the law are bad things. They also try to inculcate, with varying degrees of success, how to think for oneself and continue learning without a teacher forcefeeding you. As far as outcomes go, for the most part if students come out the other end of the education system literate, socialised (as in able to fit in to society), and ready to work, that's a success. Anything further is gravy. (That's from a policy overview POV, of course, where the aspirations of individuals are less important than the overall outcome.)
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That there was going to be a push to increase education levels is a given. The interesting question is why get the state to provide schooling itself. Which is some version of "because we do not trust others to do it". Having the regulator also be the provider means you can also give yourself necessary free passes.
As for literacy, etc, government provision has not exactly been covering itself in glory on that one. Not that it is easy to find out exactly how well, or not, they are doing. Perhaps someone should prod the regulator on that. Oh, wait ...
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Because at the time, there were the religious schools, and there were the (few) private schools, and there were... Oh, right, there was nothing else, and it wasn't seen as cost effective, let alone profitable, to give education to poor people. And yet it was a common good, which enhanced all people. And so, as a common good, the government took up its provision.
I imagine that a Thatcherite might find this incomprehensible, yet still it makes sense.
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Australia does not have such a system of tests, and the inevitable orders from politicians and other people with no idea what they're talking about are resisted because those who know most about pedagogy know that the results of such tests can be used productively, but as soon as they get reduced to a meaningless number, and the schools put into a ranked list, all that useful information is lost and the result will be elected politicians who don't know a damn thing about education demanding to write the curriculum, and throwing around money to improve the school in their electorate, instead of where it is needed. The interviews I have heard with Education Experts is that they have no problem per se with a national test, just so long as politicians and thinktanks and media opinionists aren't allowed to get away with misrepresenting the results, such as by implying that the analysis is simple and the answers can be expressed in a simple chart.
My father has been doing statistical analysis of test results for decades, learning how to write a test which produces meaningful results, and how to extract those results in a way which can demonstrate a student's understanding of a subject, and which bits they do or don't get. And what I get from our talks on the subject is that it's really really hard.
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And the American system does about as well as a range of other government systems, so it is hard to blame ASAT for that. Americans can at least actually do some comparison in outcomes from year to year and group to group.
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The ASATs may well be providing comparable data, but if those data are not the data that actually carry useful and meaningful information, then what is the point?
And measuring to three decimal points the increase in adult illiteracy rates in the US is not actually going anywhere to fix that problem, and the incessant testing (which, every time the scores come out worse, the calls come to increase the testing, as if measuring something twice will change the answer) are actually part of what is causing those degradations.
Amongst other things, of course. Such as the school system in the US consisting in many places as a cross between a child-minding service and a jail, with a insane hothouse social environment, with teachers with even less pay and lower conditions than in Australia, &c &c.
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And listing predictable problems of public provision, of regulator-as-provider, is not exactly an endorsement of public provision.
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Indeed, one cannot simply reduce the US situation to Private Good Public Bad, or vice-versa. The strong control over syllabi (at State level, mainly) was done to reign in the more insane communities, usually of religious tragics of one stripe or another. And it has managed to (i) be overwhelming enough to be harmful in its own right, (ii) not actually control those nutters much anyway, and (iii) actually been subverted, or attempted to have been, by those same nutters.
The teaching conditions are another tension of historical forces. The US unions have managed to get a regime in place where teachers cannot be fired for much less than actually molesting a student. Luckily (/sarcasm), the legal system in the US means that teachers who touch a student on the arm or get a virus on their PC can be sued and fired for molestation.
There are lots of factors in play, not all of which carry over to the Australian situation.
And as for the German situation, this looks like a good summary of the differences in policy. As for the results, well both countries officially are in the “we are too important to need to tell anyone our stats so just assume 99%” category. I couldn't find any stats for Germany but there are reports of US research that as many as a fifth of the US population may be functionally illiterate. I have no doubt that the proportion is high in Germany as well, if only from the Turkish immigrant and Gastarbeiter population. But to have a proper idea, I'd need to see the evidence.
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“Privatise and subsidise” simply doesn't work for any public good. It didn't work for Telstra. It hasn't worked for any infrastructure enterprises (power, water, public transport). It hasn't worked for the Health System. That is to say, it worked wonderfully for the providers who bought in: they're going great guns and making good profits, which is the point of running a private enterprise. Alas, the customers, provision of service to whom was once the point, have been getting shafted. These services have not improved with competition, they have degraded, and prices have not gone down, they've if anything been inflated by the subsidies so that the providers can keep their bottom line good. I have no problem with there being Health Insurance. But the American experience is that making it de facto compulsory to buy health insurance to get medical treatment has been a complete unmitigated disaster, where the cost per patient is higher, the cost per head population is higher, the coverage is far lower, and the quality is dangerously variable. Experience with the ‘quality’ of Connex's provision of Public Transport is a similar experience. It used to be that if the PTC was doing such a godawful job, that the government could go in and fix it. Now they are too chickenshit to do anything but call for retenders after waiting out the contract, and still risking being sued by the losers.
And you want to do that to children's education?
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Water has been corporatised, not privatised and any problems are the failure to build dams and price correctly, both government failures.
I fail to see what the major issues are with power (apart from some of the private operators over-bidding for the assets) or buses. Have not been following the ins and outs of Connex's problems in detail, but I suspect the contracts have not been sufficiently well specified (or, alternatively, properly enforced). We still seem to be doing notably better than Sydney rail.
That the Government is both schooling regulator and provider and uses the bureaucracy as its instruments for both remains a fundamental conflict of interest that (negatively) purveys the system. Yes, regulation of schools should be entirely separated from their management.
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Article of Faith II: any department of the Government may as well be the Government.
Therefore: the provider of education should not be any government department. Which is, in practice, privatising the school system.
Providing more autonomy to the principles, especially as regards school works and HR matters, I'm all for it. Allowing deviations from the syllabus where that will enhance learning, within reason. But the purpose of a private enterprise is to make a profit. If there are provisions for the education of students to happen in the process of making a profit, then students will get educated to some level. But the rise and fall of ABC learning that profit takes precedence over quality, unless there's a buck to be made from selling the quality. And there are only so many niches for elite schools, and only so many dollars to pay for them.
It's late, and I have to go shopping before I can go to bed, but the thing about the education department, shoddy as its operation is, is that its purpose is to provide education to all school-age children in its purview. That is its purpose. If it is broken, then it needs to be fixed, because that purpose has not gone away, and that purpose is too important to be defaulted to the lowest bidding contractor.
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