Education
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John Dwyer. Politics trumps health policy yet again.
Current Affairs. Health. A new medical school in Perth will create more problems than it will solve. As must also be true for many colleagues who have been focussed on evidence based solutions to the serious shortage of Australian trained doctors working in rural communities, I am frustrated and annoyed by the Prime Minister’s capricious Continue reading »
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Joel Windle. School choice: parents follow the money.
If private schools offer little academic value over public schools, why do 35% of Australian parents continue to choose to pay the hefty fees rather than sending their child to the local state school? Parents have a high regard for public schools School choice is a dilemma for a minority of parents. My research with Continue reading »
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Harold Levien. The Coalition Government’s Bankrupt Economic Policies:
The Coalition Government seems to have been fighting the next elections since the day it won Office and using the same misleading tactics. Throughout the last election campaign, and for months before, the Coalition bitterly attacked both Labor’s budget deficit and government debt. Yet when the Labor Government left Office Parliamentary Library statistics show government Continue reading »
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David Zyngier. Australia should follow Chile’s lead and stop funding private schools.
Australia is one of the very few countries in the OECD that publicly funds private schools. More than 40% of Australian secondary children now attend private schools – either so-called independent or religious schools. Australia has one of the most privatised school systems in the OECD. Prior to 1972 no private schools received any government Continue reading »
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Rodney Tiffin. The university rankings no government wants to talk about.
At a conference of university leaders in early 2013, Tony Abbott promised “relative policy stability” in higher education if he became prime minister. A year later, Universities Australia began its first Abbott-era budget submission by welcoming “the undertaking of the government to preserve funding arrangements for higher education, including the commitment not to make further cuts to Continue reading »
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Rachel Wilson, Bronwen Dalton and Chris Baumann. Six ways Australia’s education system is failing our kids.
Amid debates about budget cuts and the rising costs of schools and degrees, there is one debate receiving alarmingly little attention in Australia. We’re facing a slow decline in most educational standards, and few are aware just how bad the situation is getting. These are just six of the ways that Australia’s education system is Continue reading »
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Amanda Tattersall. Community organising aims to win back civil society’s rightful place.
In the wake of the Second World War, Karl Polanyi wrote that the public arena is made up of three interconnected sectors: the market, government and civil society. He argued that democracy thrives when these three are in balance. If only that were the case today. Since the late 1980s, the global influence of the Continue reading »
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Julia Davison. It takes a nation to raise a child.
The week after Australia Day each year, around 260,000 five-year old Australians start school. Of those, almost 60,000 children – 23 per cent – will start school developmentally vulnerable in some way. Children who start school behind often stay behind, and are likely to finish school with skills and competencies that have not equipped them Continue reading »
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Michael Keating. The 2015 Intergenerational Report
Purpose of the Intergenerational Report The Intergenerational Report (IGR) should be an important document. It purports to tell us what the Australian population, economy and Budget could look like in forty years time. Of course no-one really knows what the economy will look like in forty years time. Instead the IGR tells us how fast Continue reading »
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John Falzon ‘Welfare reform’ but where are the jobs?
If by “welfare” we mean giving assistance to those who don’t really need it and who are living off the public purse, then it is indeed time we had a comprehensive review of welfare. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the McClure Welfare Review was given the task of cutting social expenditure to those who actually do Continue reading »
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Andrew Leigh. The remarkable persistence of power and privilege.
If you want to know who made up Australia’s elite in the nineteenth century, a useful place to look is the Australian Dictionary of Biography. In its many volumes, you’ll find business leaders, scientists, media barons and politicians who have featured among the upper echelons of Australian society. Now, suppose we take the first cohort Continue reading »
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Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Tony Abbott, What have you done for peace?
On 23 February, Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a major national security speech, chided Muslim leaders for showing insufficiently sincere commitment to peace. “I’ve often heard western leaders describe Islam as a ‘religion of peace’. I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and mean it”, he said. Abbott also called on immigrants Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Fairness, Opportunity and Security – Filling the policy vacuum
I sense that there is great public concern that both the government and opposition keep playing the political and personal game at the expense of informed public discussion of important policy issues. We have become concerned about the trustworthiness of our political, business and media elite. Insiders and vested interests are undermining the public interest. Continue reading »
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Chris Bonnor. School funding and achievement: following the money trail
The recurrent expenditure on school education in Australia is over 44 billion dollars, around 36 billion of this provided by governments. These are considerable sums, more often than not expressed as a cost rather than an investment – especially when it doesn’t always seem to deliver noticeable improvements in student results. But a closer look Continue reading »
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Chris Bonnor. The education gap is widening.
A repost in case you missed this important article by Chris Bonnor. John Menadue It appears we are going to have yet another tilt at reforming federalism. The persistent overlap between the Commonwealth and states in school education is frequently stated as reason enough to rethink the roles of government. Last May the Commission Continue reading »
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Maggie Callingham. Top schools ‘top’ because someone has to be bottom.
Across Australia Year 12 students are collectively holding their breaths to see what results they’ve achieved and, consequently, what their futures hold. Only hours after their release, many secondary schools proudly display their best results on billboards for passers-by to see. Newspapers select high-achieving students to profile. As schools promote these glowing results, it’s worth Continue reading »
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Chris Bonnor. The public and private of school achievement.
Once again we are in the middle of the annual HSC result festival – time to celebrate the winners amongst students and schools. Names of the top 100 schools are again paraded, seemingly to confirm a language about schools variously described as elite, high performing or prestigious. Everything else is out of sight. We read Continue reading »
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Ian McAuley. Pyne on education funding.
A good friend is someone who, when you’ve had too much to drink at a Christmas party, ignores your protests and takes your car keys to prevent you driving home sozzled. You’re surely grateful the next morning. When he gets back to the Adelaide’s leafy eastern suburbs and has regained his composure, Christopher Pyne might Continue reading »
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Ian McAuley. Is capitalism redeemable? Part 8: Inequality’s downward economic spiral
Let’s start with what looks like a self-evident proposition. “Countries with right-wing or neoliberal governments spend less on social security than countries with more left-inclined governments.” It’s a proposition university lecturers put to students of public economics, and the smarter students usually recognize that there’s a trick in it. Harvard economists Dani Rodrik and Alberto Continue reading »
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Ian McAuley. Is capitalism redeemable? Part 7: Inequality – a shameful waste
“Australia’s program to increase world growth seems to be to cut social security benefits from the poor.” When Geraldine Doogue asked Malcolm Fraser to comment on Abbott’s G20 agenda, that was his summary of the present Government’s economic policy Unfortunately, ministers such as Hockey and Cormann may not understand the sarcasm in his comment, because Continue reading »
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Kelvin Canavan. Gough Whitlam: a tribute to an education visionary.
I first met E. G. Whitlam when he spoke at a series of ‘State Aid’ rallies in Sydney prior to the 1969 federal election. He was in full voice before a Catholic community that had packed halls and cinemas on eight Sunday evenings, demanding financial support for their schools from federal and state governments. The Continue reading »
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Race Mathews. Whitlam eyed our conscience, not our wallet.
Gough Whitlam’s objective was equality for all. He believed the proper business of politics was to secure informed public consent for necessary change, through objective information from trusted sources. He gave back hope to my generation of Labor Party members. Chifley’s “light on the hill” was re-kindled. The party’s electability was restored. His political career Continue reading »
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Wooki KIM, Discrimination against Korean school children in Japan today
On 29 August this year the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which is under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) made rulings on Korean schools in Japan. It said ‘The committee encourages the state party [Japan] to revise its position and allow Korean Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Great Teachers
There has been a lot of recent comment about the importance of good teachers; how they can be recruited, trained and rewarded. Let me tell you about two teachers who turned my life around. Many of us have had such experiences with great teachers. Professor W.G.K. Duncan at Adelaide University taught me Political Science in Continue reading »
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Chris Bonnor, Bernie Shepherd. School equity since Gonski: how bad became worse.
This is a shorter version, prepared for Pearls and Irritations, of a paper which was reported in the Sun Herald on September 14 Go to http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/schools-worse-now-than-when-gonski-wrote-report-20140913-10gepz.html A longer version, including graphics, is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxK25rJrOw-eVU4zM2p2UTF5ZkE/edit?usp=sharing The story of the Review of Funding for Schooling, otherwise known as the Gonski review, is well known. The Continue reading »
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Jennifer Chesters. Private schools, fees and longer term payoffs.
In a recent article published by TheConversation, Barbara Preston examined the link between type of school attended and progress at university. Barbara concluded that after controlling for tertiary entrance score, university students from government schools outperformed students from private schools. This finding suggests that paying for an expensive private school education may not be the Continue reading »
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Barbara Preston. State school kids do better at uni.
State school graduates do better at university than private school graduates with the same end-of-school tertiary entrance score. That’s the clear finding in a number of Australian studies since the 1980s and in England since the 1990s . The Australian research compared academic results at the end of first year at particular universities for cohorts Continue reading »
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David Zyngier. Senate committee backs Gonski.
Gonski’s report on school funding has been backed by a senate committee even though the federal government isn’t backing it. Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Will the new Colombo Plan work?
Julie Bishop has announced a ‘signature initiative’ of the Australian government which aims to lift knowledge of the Indo-Pacific in Australia by supporting Australian undergraduates with internships in the region. This initiative is commendable but I hope it avoids the problem of earlier attempts to lift Australian understanding and skills for our region. The main Continue reading »
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Turning the federation clock back to 1901.
The Commission of Audit has made many unhelpful suggestions about budgetary and economic issues. It seems to have been driven more by ideology than fact. See my blog of May 1 2014 “The Commission of Audit and facing the wrong way”. One of its most unhelpful suggestions is that Australia returns to the 1901 intentions Continue reading »
