Australia’s schooling system is among the most highly segregated in the OECD. Public schools educate the majority of disadvantaged students, while there is concentrated advantage in private schools.
This situation can be attributed, in large part, to our school funding arrangements.
A really informative article that explains how we got to where we are and what we can do about it. Australians must demand a fair and more intelligent system.
There are valid exceptions.
There are students who live in isolated rural towns that can’t easily access secondary school in particular, who need assistance attending a boarding school or the like and all of these are private. The government offers this assistance as Isolated Childrens Allowance, which is delivered in two parts, a direct payment each term to parents and there’s also a boarding component paid to the school, if the kid is attending a boarding school.
This includes those who live on grazing properties and farms. Quite often primary school is done by distance ed with a tutor employed on the station to help with classes. It exists for secondary as well but there are social costs; most opt to send kids to boarding school if they can.
To offer a true public option around that where these could attend a public school, more regional public schools with boarding capability might be required, perhaps in larger towns which already have public schools.
So yeah in the bush it’s not cut and dried.
My only argument/retort is that with a wealth tax of 99%, it would completely, thoroughly and spectacularly fund for the production of large, public boarding schools with twice enough teachers to have low teacher-student ratios, other staff to assist with hygiene and food, etc so that the children were put into exceptionally good boarding schools.
Even if this hypothetical school cost $500M per year to run, it would be worth it to make sure absolutely no children are left behind and with the assistance and means to pull themselves out of poverty.
Collectively, we could be raking in hundreds of billions of dollars per year for these schools, free tertiary education, free public health. We don’t need to divide ourselves between imaginary lines of difficulty when making sure our children are educated.
Yeah look no argument here, at least not in funding public schools over private.
But yeah, that’s one that is necessary, however it’s cut. If we were to take the private out of that problem, it’d mean investment in the same type of boarding school they provide.