Dr Neil Béchervaise

NB Consulting (Australasia) Pty Ltd

Millenium myopia and the educational sleepers [3] Privatisation and the public education system

© 1998 Neil Béchervaise

The shift towards segmentation, selectivity and privatisation of public education at the post-compulsory years represents, some argue, a giant leap back to the future. The Dawkins amalgamation of Teachers Colleges, Colleges of Advanced Education, Institutes of Technology and Universities into a unified tertiary education system in the name of equity has been achieved. Claims of economy of scale have been separated from findings of falling research and development across the nation.

Literacy and numeracy levels in early primary years have been represented as leverage for arguments in favour of national year level testing and curriculum coherence. More recently, punitive educational funding strategies encouraging privatisation in the face of failure by the public sector to meet media demands for educational success - represented as league tables based on year level and year 12 successes among the top 5-10 per cent of students remaining at school - have been foreshadowed [eg Education Review, July 1998]. The steadily increasing use of selective high schools in New South Wales to support academic, sporting, dramatic or technological excellence at the expense of general education encourages private sponsorship. Introduction of the Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank, an extraordinary representation of year 12 success moderated against results projected from year level testing in the compulsory years, provides support for these privatisation initiatives.

The net effect of this raft of variously related educational initiative, short-cut, economic expedience and political opportunism has been the generation of a public perception that academic success is a simple linear computation of equivalent educational outcomes where ability to form letters and count rows or columns of digits has some relation, initially at least, to the development of complex intellectual, emotional and moral processes. This relation, moreover, is determinedly linked with an increasingly benighted vision of Robert J. Hawke's 'clever country' in which 'no child will live in poverty'. The unwillingness of either major political machine to challenge the fundamentals of such an impoverished intellectual argument must remain both a mystery and on-going challenge for all who maintain the principle of a free, secular and comprehensive public education system.

The proposition that intelligence is unequally distributed across the community, and across the nation, according to some socio-economic imperative may be attractive to the instinctual responses of occasional fish and chip vendors but it is not borne out by any substantive research, either here in Australia or anywhere else in the world. So what are the potential realities and what are their implications for senior secondary education and the educators who are influenced by it?

Principles, political advantage and education

As I suggested in closing my previous article in this forum, "A largely privatised public education system seeking funding to develop its programs might not be quite so principled" as to fight for state autonomy in the education field. Educators have a tendency to argue in favour of their students' best interests. They have a tendency to consider the development of the student in consideration of a life-time of potential rather than in terms of immediate socio-political advantage. Educators tend to be in for the long haul - not dis-interested but uninterested in the triennial [if we are fortunate] feeding frenzy of election promises.

Educators have a propensity for educating students towards the multiple career changes their students will face in an increasingly brave new world that will require them to be dynamic respondents to societal, technological and economic change.

Inequitable, divisive and reductionist

So whither the senior high school, the post-compulsory education institution? Do we return to the technical college [no doubt now the 'technology' college] diminished to create a docile soylent green factory fodder for an unpredictable economic rationalist future? Or do we accept the challenge of articulating the real necessities behind a comprehensive "liberal" education to an apparently uninformed media and to a political juggernaut intent on decreasing the cost of compulsory education - by increasing community faith in a system that is at once inequitable, divisive and reductionist. Inequitable because it presumes an intellectual difference which deepens the social divide between the 'haves' and the 'cannot haves'. Divisive because it selects on the basis of success in mechanistic skills acquisition at ages which none of us would accept are sufficiently formal [to use a Piagetian term] to generate reliable prediction patterns. Reductionist because it promotes a view that success can be measured in terms of outcomes learnt uncritically and unproblematically in isolation from their application. If a child can steer a motor car while sitting on cushions then she will become a competent operator of the range of locomotors she will be confronted with in her future. Her success in year 3 motor car steering, of course, being sufficient to determine the appropriateness of exposing her to these more complex systems when she is 15 in expectation of her establishing potential as a 'top gun' aeroplane pilot if she so decides.

But this is rampant cynicism unless the education system can be shown to provide eqitable educational opportunity across the nation. And how can such equity be established. Certainly not by the deliberate maintenance of a raft of autonomous state educational bureaucracies churning out their own unique offerings and arguing the predominance of their product on the national scene. Nor by maintaining a social chasm between independent and state systems and then funding them differentially. A more appropriate and equitable approach should clearly be achieved by centralisation of the educational funding from a single federal entity - DEETYA perhaps.

The political and economic advantages to be gained from a centralised compulsory schooling with a centralised compulsory testing program based on a centralised curriculum are clear to those who seek demonstrable equity. Despite the failure of successive systems, funding formulae and governmental initiatives, literacy and numeracy levels have remained remarkably stable across time, state and, perhaps most significantly, socio-economic boundaries.

The complexity of the shift towards privatisation of public schooling cannot be seen as accidental. Education is complex and changes to its fabric demand careful negotiation if a withering crossfire of public, union, media and political disapproval are to be avoided. The piece-by-piece development of public perception that the public education system is inadequate to the needs of the current generation of students was initiated more than a decade ago. The media focus on trivial and overgeneralised statistical simplifications of the educational process have supported apparently uncoordinated state and federal initiatives directed at solutions to youth unemployment. This focus has allowed infrastructure changes necessary to the privatisation of public education to pass without comment.

The infrastructure for privatisation of public schooling has already been established through implementation of the unified tertiary system and development of an Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Ranking. The use of year level testing from the compulsory years to substantiate ENTER scores represents a substantial step towards the imperative of a national curriculum. Acceptance of a national curriculum provides a strong argument for the privatisation of public schooling under a federal funding formula based on existing year level performance results. The social engineering potential of such an initiative is at least as compelling as that used to justify new universities in western Sydney, western Melbourne and regional centres such as Griffith and the Gold Coast. One can only assume that the results will be at least as gratifying.

The educational sleepers remain, however.

Do we want:

• a privatised public education system of specialised academic and vocational junior colleges through the post-compulsory years?
  
• a national curriculum through the compulsory years?
  
• a tertiary entrance scheme based on statistically moderated year 12 performance incorporating the compulsory years performance of students who did not complete their schooling?
  
• a unified tertiary education system which flags vocational and university performance under a single banner for economic expediency?

The educational sleepers will impact most significantly on schools that market their success in terms of tertiary entry. It will, however, leave no school untouched. The federal funding system has been attractive to underfunded schools since its post-Karmel introduction.

Caldwell, B. J. & Hayward, D. K. (1998) The future of Australian schools.
Practising Administrator 20(1), 4-6,44

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