Journal-No.05_09
4/8/09
3:16 PM
Page 11
SCHOOL VOUCHERS School vouchers are still a bit ‘out there’ as social policy ideas go in Australia. They are an article of faith for neo-liberals whose time, according to some, has passed. Unfortunately, the reports of the death of ‘extreme capitalism’, privatisation and the dictatorship of the market have been greatly exaggerated and nowhere are the vital signs stronger than in the current debates over public education. The skewed state and federal funding system favouring private schools is locked in. The blurring of the lines between government and non-government schools is continuing apace. School performance league tables seem inevitable in one form or another and a lot of work is being done by think-tanks to make school vouchers sound mainstream – something parents ought to be clambering for. A paper on the subject from the Liberalaligned Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has been getting a good reception in the columns of the major dailies. Vouchers are ‘one in the eye’ for centralised government, educational bureaucrats (‘educrats’) and, of course, teacher unions. “With students observed to register academic improvements in a voucherised environment, this funding reform promises to redress educational disadvantage in ways that previous efforts have failed to do. There is little doubt that vouchers come with a big tick of approval from parents, as evidenced by surveys in
From fringe to ‘the way to go’ School vouchers are back on the agenda says Giles Goldsmith several countries,” report author Julie Novak wrote in The Australian recently. So what is a school voucher funding model? For this the API’s paper (A Real Education Revolution: Options for voucher funding reform) refers us to a 1955 article by none other than Milton Friedman. The architect of Pinochet’s post-coup economic policy in Chile puts it this way: “Government, preferably local units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises run for profit, non profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and even some governmental units”. The federal opposition is excited by the idea. Turnbull has long favoured vouchers – “This is core Liberal stuff,” he said in 2002. So are voucher systems as effective and as popular as the author claims? It is stated that systems are in place in “30 countries around the world from the United States right through to developing countries such as Colombia”. The idea of playing social
policy catch up with strife-torn Colombia boggles the mind but the US might have something to teach us. It turns out voucher systems are not widespread stateside. Voucher systems have been decisively rejected 22 times across the country in referenda from 1967, most recently in the 1990s in California, Oregon, Washington State and twice in Colorado. The cities of Cleveland, Milwaukee and Washington DC have vouchers and their example has not set the education system on fire. When US parents were polled by Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup on the subject, respondents preferred “improving public schools” to “providing vouchers” by 75 percent to 22 percent despite heavy campaigning in favour of vouchers by neo-liberal and religious groups. Of course, the API paper appears to put children from disadvantaged backgrounds at the centre in its variants of a voucher scheme. As well as a universal scheme with a $12,000 voucher for every Australian child, there is a proposition for “differential vouchers”. This involves higher voucher values for Indigenous students (including a $7,000 relocation payment), disabled students and those whose family income is less than $1,000 a week. ‘Targeted vouchers’ would be a limited scheme where only the aforementioned disadvantaged groups receive a docket for
their education. All of the scenarios are more expensive than the present funding system and predict a drift from government to non-government schools – an alarming result for equity of access to quality education according to a 2006 Australia Institute report on vouchers but scarcely commented on by the API. Novak does not explain, either, how disadvantaged children would suddenly be able to enrol in distant elite schools with staggering fees. The truth is the concept is not concerned with disadvantaged children. According to Professor Michael Apple in his book Educating the Right Way (2001), vouchers are a form of middle class ‘gate keeping’: “By changing the process of selection to schools, middle class parents can raise the stakes in creating stronger mechanisms of exclusion for blue-collar and post-colonial peoples in their struggle for equality of opportunity”. AEU Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos is quick to nip the idea in the bud. “The international evidence shows the introduction of vouchers has increased the privatisation of education and failed to increase the overall quality of education being delivered. Our students and schools are not a marketplace and no place for a radical right wing agenda to be rolled out.” I
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