Schooled in denial of systemic, creeping apartheid
This was published 11 years ago
By Jane Caro
WHY are private religious schools allowing themselves to become toxic to social justice, particularly when it comes to the future opportunities of our poorest and most disadvantaged students?
Before supporters of private schools trot out heart-warming anecdotes about the struggling families that are part of their community, let me state bluntly that the hard facts do not support their claims to social justice.
According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics census data, 40 per cent of students in government schools — which enrol the majority of school-aged children in Australia — are from families with the lowest incomes.
Only 25 per cent of students in the much smaller Catholic school sector are from families with the lowest incomes. Indeed, the bishops came out a year or so ago deploring the fact that Catholic schools were rapidly becoming middle class and forsaking their mission to the poor. An even smaller percentage of students in other private schools are from families with low incomes.
Private schools, therefore, despite their much-vaunted "values", are helping to create a two-tiered education system based on entrenched privilege. Private school students are now predominantly from families with higher incomes. Worse, the schools are, no doubt inadvertently, starting to create a racially segregated education system.
You see, 84 per cent of all indigenous secondary students attend government schools. Despite this, there has been some self-congratulatory noise about prestigious private schools taking a small number of Aboriginal students as boarders. The Federal Government is giving $20 million in extra funding to help support this program. Trouble is, as they can with every student, private schools are able to pick and choose which indigenous students they are prepared to take on, so most of them are from higher-income families. As Chris Sarra, ex-principal of Cherbourg High in Queensland, pungently pointed out, that's great for the small number who get the nod, but what happens to all the rest?
In 2008, the NSW Secondary Principals' Council conducted a survey that confirmed its worst fears about "white flight" from public schools, particularly in regional areas. Some teachers and principals called it "de facto apartheid". The report showed enrolments of white students in public schools had fallen by a third in western NSW, 42 per cent in North Sydney and 37 per cent in New England. It would be interesting to see how Victoria's schools compare. This report is backed up by the data. Only 10 per cent of indigenous kids get to go to a Catholic school, and a pathetic 6 per cent attend other non-government schools.
But we seem to be in deep denial about this creeping apartheid. A few years ago, I watched a student from a prestigious regional boarding school win a statewide prize for his essay on reconciliation. In his speech, he thanked the principal of the local government high school for allowing him to visit and meet some actual indigenous students, there being none at his own school. The exquisite irony seemed to escape most of those present, but it positively screamed at me.
Perhaps the greatest injustice, however, is in the very way grants to private schools are calculated. To apply for public money from the Federal Government, private schools merely send in the addresses of their students. Based on the designated socio-economic status of the relevant census code, they receive their ranking and so the size of their grant. The students do not actually have to be disadvantaged, they merely have to live in a disadvantaged area. In other words, students from better-off rural families who can afford private boarding fees but who live in an area with a large disadvantaged population are assessed as if they were actually poor. Their neighbours, many of whom may be indigenous, receive no such largesse and usually attend the often chronically under-resourced local public school.
Worse, thanks to the no-loser clause in the SES policy, such schools are now overfunded to the tune of $2.8 billion over four years, because they keep their so-called disadvantaged status whether they enrol more students from disadvantaged areas or not. The same is certainly not true for public schools.
Australia is developing a publicly funded, two-tiered education system, divided according to income, class and race. Private schools collude with this because their market — largely anxious middle-class parents who want to separate their kids from the mad, the bad and the sad (and, it seems, the ethnically diverse) — demands it, and also, shockingly, because our vote-conscious governments tacitly encourage it. Private schools exclude less desirable students because market forces reward them for doing so.
Tragically, as the Bible warns us, we will all eventually reap what we have sown.
Jane Caro is co-author of The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education (New South).