State Schools vs Private Schools

State Schools slowly waking from nightmare by Michael Duffy (SMH)

I read this article this morning whilst eating marmalade on toast, slowly but painfully recovering from a cold. I had heard about the book, The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education" (Bonner & Caro, 2007) , to which Duffy refers on EdPod (education roundup on Radio National) and was surprised to hear that people are not leaving the public schools in droves to go to Private schools. Some of the issues mentioned:

Three points I thought interesting:

1. Movement from Private to Public based on the pursuit of socioeconomic, behavioural, racial and intellectual sorting.
e.g. movement to catholic schools not based on religion but based on class & in rural areas the occurrence of black and white schools, sorting by race.

2. State schools have a higher incidence of discipline problems - they tolerate more than private schools. The book asserts that the government has spent money so that now principals have increased powers to suspend students and there have been special schools set up to help deal with unruly students. Also there has been more movement on dealing with less competent teachers.

3. From EdPod - the numbers in private schools is stagnating in some areas and state school enrolments are steady or increasing. This is dependent upon the state, area, and city of course (e.g. Western Australia has seen a big increase in Private school enrollments. "Rise in Private Schooling no surprise"

It is a very interesting point that state schools have to be much more transparent in communicating information about the schools than private schools (even though private schools receive between 42 and 82 % of annual costs from the government (Dufy, 2007).


AiW