Event
Date
by Margaret Vickers.
Presented as the Keynote speech presented at the UWS Annual Education Conference, Parramatta, October 9-10, 2004
Forty years ago, riding the wave of post-War reconstruction and economic optimism and in the context of the population boom, Harold Wyndham established a public system of free comprehensive secondary schools in NSW. At their best, these comprehensive neighborhood schools represented inclusive public spheres: they were small communities in themselves, reflecting the full diversity of the neighborhoods they served. They offered all students in the surrounding neighbourhood a fair go at completing a full secondary education. It was a fair chance, but never an equal chance, since nothing can erase the advantages of having well-educated parents when it comes to feeling fully at home with the academic curriculum of the high school.
This fair go is now being eroded by middle class flight and the residualisation of many high schools. Across Australia, parents of the anxious middle classes as well as many from the aspirational working class are choosing to transfer their children from public schools to schools in the so-called private sector. As a result, some schools accumulate young people who are heirs to a generous legacy of cultural capital while others accumulate the children of the poor and poorly educated. These schools are residualised they teach the students no-one else wants to teach. Teese and Polesel call them the exposed schools, contrasting them with the fortified schools that have the power to exclude (Teese & Polesel, 2003).
The logic of neo-liberalism suggests that the situation we now find ourselves is unavoidable, that the binary juxtaposition of good schools against failing schools is natural; and that the politics of market choice will inevitably dichotomize our systems. In this paper I argue that there is nothing inevitable about this process. Residualisation results from student mobility, but that mobility is at least in part driven by incentives that are shaped by public policies (Vickers, 2004). At both primary and secondary levels but especially at the secondary stage, increasing numbers of students now travel across Sydney to attend schools of choice. This activity is represented as a legitimate exercise of parental responsibility. Yet it is leading to a segregation of our schools and a separation of children by social and family background that is both conspicuous and profound in its implications.
Not so long ago, it was taken for granted that the proper role of public administrators was to monitor public policy for equity effects and make adjustments in order to maximize opportunity. As governments of both the left and the right have embraced neo-liberalism, they have abdicated this approach in favour of the self-regulating device of market choice. This abdication represents a shift away from the notion that the state had an ethical duty of care for its citizens and that it should act in the collective interests of the vulnerable (Sawyer, 2003). Advocates of minimal or weak government argue instead that market liberalism restores self-reliance and reduces what is asserted to be the debilitating dependence of the individual on the state (Nozick, 1974).
In this spirit, self-reliant parents are encouraged to buy their children places in private schools. Student segregation and the residualization of public schools may be a side effect of this asssertion of individual interest, but this negative outcome is then excused by deeming it to be a result of market forces. In effect, the argument runs, this outcome is nothing more that the cumulative effect of the innumerable private choices of parents who are seeking to do the best they can for their children. This argument involves a sleight of hand, in which student segregation is represented as the result of individuals choices, when in fact the contexts in which parents make these choices have been shaped by deliberate government policies. Thus, educational segregation is represented as nothing more than the collateral damage of the individuals freedom to choose. This argument allows governments to absent themselves of their public responsibility it allows them to excuse themselves for what is in fact a failure of public administration.
I am not questioning the continuation of our dual system since this would be futile. Both major political parties have agreed to give privately operated schools a substantial share of government resources. The relationships between public and private schooling have their roots deep in Australian history. The public-private thread is interwoven in the development of education in this country and it is inextricable from most of the policy issues that our systems must address. Yet while we may be able to sustain a dual system, we may not be able to sustain the high degree of unregulated choice that appears to have swept away systemic planning and is leading to the segregation of many of our public schools.
The first question discussed in this paper is: what are the consequences of government decisions to fund market choice and diversity of provision rather than sustaining traditional commitments to comprehensive neighbourhood schools?
Over the past thirty years politicians of both left and right have redefined educational opportunity to mean freeing individuals to seize their chances in the selective system or buy a place in the increasingly subsidised private system. As a result, we have an increasing number of high schools in which the concentration of difficult cases has intensified.
Many UWS staff are familiar with such schools. I am using Westville High as a pseudonym for a typical Priority Action high school in outer Western Sydney. It now has only 450 students, though it was originally built to accommodate 1000. Before de-zoning, the kids came from right across the neighbourhood, but now they are mostly from the Housing Commission flats, because the kids from privately-owned homes mostly go elsewhere. More than half of the Westville kids are recent immigrants and fifteen percent are Aboriginal. They are mostly very poor: teachers cannot assume they will come to class with paper or books or even a biro. There is constant mobility: many students do not go home to the same place each night, so it is pointless to set homework. Lots of kids have intermittent patterns of attendance. Most of the teachers are in their first two years out if Uni, or are overseas-trained teachers on casual contracts.
The second question I wish to discuss is, suppose that we actually created a school like Westville High as a conscious choice, as the result of deliberate public policies? In the spirit of good public administration, we would then be obliged to decide what this school ought to do for the students it was designed to serve. We would need to consider what resources it would need, how it should be staffed, and what curriculum and assessment regimes would be appropriate in the circumstances. Every public education system across Australia has a collection schools that are like Westville High. All of these schools have a special mission. All of them end up educating young people that nobody else wants to teach and all struggle to hold on to their best students. All of them are described as hard to staff which mean that they do not get the teachers they need. Very few of them have adequate control over the curriculum they are required to deliver. In the second part of this paper I will return to these three issues: which students the school enrols and how this is determined, how the school is staffed, and what constraints apply to the curriculum. In relation to the curriculum, I will briefly compare NSW with other states where schools like Westville operate in a more flexible context.
1. What are the consequences of government decisions to fund market choice?
The short answer is that we have moved from comprehensiveness to segregation but it is worth taking a few minutes to consider how this happened.The 1960s was a golden age for the comprehensive schools of NSW (Campbell & Sherrington, 2003). Birth rates were very high and student inflows were augmented by a vigorous program of immigration from southern Europe. Until 1964 there was no state aid at all for non-government schools; substantial subsidies to the private sector did not begin until the mid-1970s (Hogan, 1984). Given the rate of expansion of the public system, financial resources were stretched, and governments struggled to keep up with the endless demand for new places. When the Howard government abolished Labors policy that restricted the creation of new private schools, it accepted that there would be some duplication of places. Given the high priority now placed on supporting parental choice, this is tolerated. Thirty years ago it would have been unthinkable. Large comprehensive schools are cheaper to run than multiple specialized schools. This, through the 60s and 70s the comprehensives thrived and were able to foster social and ethnic integration across their neighborhoods (Kalantsiz & Cope, 1992: Campbell & Sherrington, 2003).
In NSW, selective schools survived despite the fact that the goal of the Wyndham plan was to replace multiple different kinds of secondary schools with a single system of unified comprehensive high schools. Nevertheless, most secondary schools were drawn into an egalitarian project that aimed (in the words of The Report) to provide a satisfactory education for all adolescents based on a core of subjects common to all schools (Wyndham, 1957, p. 72). The selective schools stood apart as anomalies in this system. Together with high schools that served Sydneys affluent suburbs, the traditionally selective schools were distinguished from other schools: while they offered the common core curriculum, they also offered more academic subjects and more subjects at higher levels than schools serving the politically disadvantaged communities (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler & Dowsett, 1982).
Nevertheless, during the two decades after Wyndham, most students in NSW attended public schools in their proximate neighborhood. There was continuing overall expansion of enrollments, and the comprehensives enjoyed a favorable political and ideological climate that ensured State investment and legitimation. Between 1960 and 1969, student enrollments in public schools increased by 32 percent, but in private schools the increase was only 18 percent (Australian Education Council, 1982). While public schools expanded rapidly to meet growing population pressures, the growth rate of private schools was falling. By the early 1970s the private schools were almost at a standstill (Connell, 1993). In the Catholic sector especially, the resources needed to support expansion proportional to the increasing population demands were simply not available (Bourke, 1969). Thus, in terms of enrollment share, the non-government sector reached its historical nadir in 1977. In that year only 26.76 percent of Australias students were in these private denominational schools (Australian Education Council, 1982).
In 1973, the Whitlam Governments decision to grant substantial funds to non-government schools on a basis of socio-economic need put federal aid to the private sector on a firm and lasting footing. State and Federal subsidies started to flow from the mid-1970s, and since 1978, the private sector enrolment share has continued to grow at the expense of the public sector. Australia now has 32 percent of all its students enrolled in schools that can decide who is admitted and who is excluded and can also control their own fee regimes. Current data indicates that no other OECD country has such a high percentage of students in autonomous schools and school sub-systems (Keating & Lamb, 2004). Through the Hawke-Keating period, attempts were made to constrain the creation of new private schools in locations where demographic need could not be established. Labors new schools policy focused on situations in which some interest group (typically a denominational vendor) sought to create a new school in a context where additional provision would inevitably mean that enrolments in nearby public schools would fall, thus increasing overall costs of educational provision.
In 1996, the Howard Government abandoned the federal Labor policy that had constrained the construction of new schools where there were sufficient places available in local public schools. Since then, federal subsidies have been used to establish a wide array of government-funded private providers, including new low-fee Christian schools, ethno-linguistic schools, Catholic schools, as well as high-fee selective schools, against which public schools must now compete. In 1996, the Coalition introduced the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment, under which Federal funds are shifted from public to private schools at the rate of approximately $1600 per student as the proportions enrolled in this sector increase. Data extracted from annual reports on States Grants (Commonwealth of Australia, 1996-2002) indicate that between 1996 and 2001, public schools lost $127.8 million of Federal funding even when their overall enrolments (as distinct from their enrolment shares) had increased by 74,000 over this period (aeufederal.org.au; Commonwealth of Australia, 2003).
Barry McGaw, an Australian who is currently Education Director at the OECD, points out that Australias approach to school funding makes it unique among developed-world countries. There is no other country in which the government operates a fully-funded system of schools whilst at the same time subsidizing a separate (largely denominational) system of schools that operates in direct competition with its own public schools (McGaw, 2004). Most but not all of these private-sector subsidies come from the Commonwealth purse, yet state governments also contributes to private school infrastructure and transport costs. The gross contributions are not trivial. Data extracted from the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) annualNational Reports on Schooling indicate that government grants (from both the Commonwealth and the NSW government) currently amount to 82% of the total recurrent expenditure of the NSW Catholic system (MCEETYA, 2001). This same source shows that teacher in-school salary costs plus superannuation represent 75% of total recurrent expenditure in the NSW system. What this suggests is that Commonwealth grants are sufficient to fund all teachers in Catholic systemic schools, with money left over for other things. Non-government schools in the high-fee independent sector receive 42 percent of their recurrent expenditure from government grants. What we can say here is that if these teachers were remunerated in a way similar to teachers in public or Catholic systemic schools, then government grants would be sufficient to cover half the teachers in independent schools. What this means is that all students in NSW schools, except the 6 or 7 per cent who represent half the students in the high-fee sector, are being taught by teachers who are paid for by the public purse.
A recent Australian Council for Educational Research study commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald found that one-third of parents surveyed said they would switch their children to the private sector if they could afford the fees (Doherty, 2004). Such survey results indicate why politicians believe huge electoral advantages can be gained by promoting a government sponsored market of schools and presenting school choice as a central feature of their education polices.
Given the overall level of taxpayer contributions to our dual system, one might expect some public benefits and not just private benefits from this arrangement. At this stage, very little substantial research has been done on this issue in Australia. Some attempts have been made in the UK. One study examined the outcomes of the Scottish secondary system, which has retained its commitment to the comprehensive model, and compared these with school outcomes for England, where many more local authorities have their schools segmented along class lines (Croxford, 2002). This study found that in Scotland there is a lower tendency for students from different SES backgrounds to attend different schools than in England, and less variation in overall attainment between schools. Importantly, Scotland also has achieved higher rates of participation in post-compulsory and higher education than has England.
Another study, conducted within England, involved a value-added analysis of childrens test and examination results between the ages of 14 and 16. It found that children whose initial scores were sound did at least as well (in values added terms) in comprehensive schools as did similar children in grammar schools. The study also found that in 15 local authorities where the schools were largely or entirely selective, there was a higher incidence of failing or poor schools and a wider attainment gap between the successful and the unsuccessful (Jesson, 2001). What these studies suggest is that the two nations model the creation of system of secondary schools that is segregated along class lines, has few public benefits.
Yet in NSW, the public system has for the past 16 years augmented the segregation created by the public-private divide by further developing its own internal segregation. Between 1988 and 1992, all NSW schools were partially de-zoned. Prior to this only the four agricultural selective high schools and the seven surviving selective schools of NSW were entitled to draw their students from multiple catchments, for example, across the Sydney metropolitan area, or across Newcastle or Wollongong and the nearby rural areas[i]. During the 1990s, a substantial number of comprehensive schools were converted to become selective or specialised schools (Vinson, 2002).
Specialised schools may accept students from the local community but also select students on the basis of talent (for example, by audition or portfolio). By 2002, NSW had 28 fully or partially selective secondary schools, 7 sports high schools, 11 technology high schools, 5 language high schools, and a handful of Performing Arts high schools (Vinson, 2002). To some extent these developments may have reduced the flow from public to private schools at the end of grade 6. However, it appears that they have also weakened the scholastic capacity of neighborhood schools in those suburbs where most of the students come from families that are poor in social capital. I refer to social capital to signify that even among the poor there are those who have worked out how to take advantage of the opportunity to gain scholarships to private schools or admission to the selective schools.
Recent data indicate that each year approximately 15,000 grade 6 children sit the entrance tests offered by NSW-DETs Selective Schools Unit, and that approximately a quarter of these are placed in selective schools (NSW-DET, 2002). Some of the children that fail to gain a place in a selective school remain in the public sector, but many do not. Anecdotal evidence suggests that between one quarter and a third of these children soon become enrolled in a private school. Parents are, in effect, making choices in a segmented and hierarchical market of schools. Selective public schools offer competitive advantages at the lowest cost. For parents with moderate incomes, government-funded private schools provide a backup, ranging across a wide spectrum of market prices. In this sector, price constitutes a market signal, creating a hierarchy of prestige among the high-fee denominational schools, Catholic schools, and the growing number of new low-fee denominational schools.
Which brings us back to Westville High. This has become a very expensive school to run, on a per-student basis. Its intake has withered, becoming very local. Its students are predominantly from families of lower socio-economic status. In neo-liberal discourse, the demise of Westville might be referred to as a market outcomethe downward spiral of a defective product as a result of the cumulative effect of innumerable private choices made by local individuals. This discourse may be appropriate if one were describing the sale of widgets to customers that are under no obligation to buy them at all, but its application to public education is pernicious.
First, the customers in this case cannot walk away attendance at school is compulsory. The government cannot absent itself from its democratic obligation to educate all Australians, and this includes refugees, recent immigrants, and residents in public housing. Second, the school itself is not a defective product. It has a dedicated core of teaching staff who are well-qualified and experienced. Yet it is, as the teachers say, raided by the staffing office if some school that is deemed more important need a qualified teacher.
2. Suppose a school like Westville High was established as a deliberate policy choice:
How it should be staffed?
What can be done to help it attract and keep good students? and
What curriculum would be appropriate for its students?
The material presented in the following sections is based on interviews conducted over the past five years in six high schools in outer Western Sydney. My relationship with these schools partly results from research activities, but is also based on professional connections. I have worked with these schools on the Full-Service Schools program, the Plan-it-Youth mentoring program, and on UWS-funded regional development partnerships. In visiting these schools several times a year over the past five years, it has been possible to observe the impacts of falling enrolments and changes in the mix of students. Some of my teacher-informants have become valued colleagues whom I have consulted often, both within the schools and on an informal basis. Over the past twelve months I have also been involved in a national MCEETYA review of both systemic policies and school-level programs aimed at increasing the proportion of young Australians who remain in school to the end of Year 12 (Lamb et al, 2004). One part of this project involved interviewing three senior education officers from each jurisdiction. Another involved visiting schools in suburbs or towns where one might expect, given the demographic make-up of the area, that retention rates would be low. Overall, the team I was working with conducted interviews in 24 schools in areas of low socio-economic status, across four states (NSW, Queensland, WA and South Australia). So I can say with confidence that although schools like Westville high represent extreme institutional contexts, Westville is not an isolated example.
2.1 How should schools like Westville be staffed?
Interviews with school principals across Australia confirmed the inevitable; that it is very difficult to acquire teachers who can deal with tough schools and equally difficult to keep them. In almost all the schools included in the MCEETYA survey, staff turbulence and staff fit were serious concerns. Across Australia, no state bureaucracy has an adequate mechanism for going beyond the standard staffing formula. Some of those interviewed pointed out that teacher unions resist arrangements that would lead to differential pay, and this cuts off one obvious solution.
Tough schools are not popular placements, so they represent perennially open ports of entry into the system. Thus, there is a constant inflow of new appointees, some of whom are new graduates while others are immigrant teachers seeking their first appointment in Australia. At Westville, new graduates are often appointed as mobiles, meaning they are probationary appointees in the Department who are only temporarily placed at Westville. They can be displaced if an internal applicant whose profile matches the codes for a specific vacancy applies for their position. Another factor that contributes to teacher mobility is that teachers accumulate two transfer points for each year they are at Westville. Transfer points move a teacher up the queue; the more points a teacher has the more likely she is to gain a desirable school when an opening comes up. Two points per year is a relatively high level of accumulation; in schools that are tougher than Westville four points can be awarded.
It takes a special kind of teacher to choose to stay at Westville, so when a mobile turns out to be a good fit, it is inappropriate to displace her. The head teacher, welfare explained -
Stupidly we have mobiles and casuals who come to teach here and want to stay, but some other [internal applicants] number comes up so they are sent [to us] instead. They may not have the willingness or interest in the school. There should be an effort to keep the teachers who want to stay. Some incentive should be there. As it is now there is a constant tide of teachers in and teachers out; teachers in and teachers out. This is difficult situation, bad for the school.
The staffing is critical. You cant effect change without it. But the most qualified and appropriate teachers are pirated way [by the Department] and sent elsewhere. Or they go to the privates. Its ridiculous. They come here new, get experience and then disappear.
The head teacher Science backed her up:
Around 12 years ago, the teachers were far more experienced. Now, most teachers are on their first placement out of Uni. There should at least be a mix of experienced and inexperienced teachers.
Instability of teachers in the school is part of the problem. Some classes have four, five or six teachers changing in a year. Around half of the Head Teachers are acting heads in their first two or three years out of Uni. Its no good throwing us resources, but no experienced teachers. Teachers need to feel valued. They need financial incentives necessary to stay, and to take on new roles. Older teachers are being lost down the coast [while we] are gaining new teachers with less experience and training.
As Westville declines in size, the DET will transfer some of its best and most experienced teachers away to public schools that have sustained their enrolments and have not lost their market share. The Departmental staffing formula does not allow a school of 500 to keep the number of staff it might have warranted when it was a larger school. While this might seem logical, the problem with this policy is that the concentration of very difficult cases among those enrolled at Westville is enormous. There may only be 500 students but the overwhelming majority of them are very high maintenance cases.
2.2 What can be done to help a school like Westville attract and keep good students?
Before de-zoning, local schools tended to reflect the full diversity of the neighborhoods they served. This diversity was an enormous strength because it meant that at least a few students in each classroom had some attachment to academic goals, so that most classes were in fact teachable. As a result of de-zoning, increases in funding for new government funded denominational schools, and increases in the number of selective and special purpose schools, many schools that are historically and geographically disadvantaged have now become residualised, and serving segregated sample of students. Westvilles head teacher, English, believes that the increases in the concentration of difficult cases in this school are totally unjust. The school has, she says, become a dumping ground:
Its a troubled area where theyve decided to dump the visibly marginalised. Its all about pensions, bus passes, sick children, close quarters, poor social behaviours, and sabotage.
Overall student enrolments at Westville have fallen, because families who have what this teacher calls street smarts are sending their children to better local high schools such or to local low-fee private schools.
We still get good students here from migrant families who emphasise education. If they were more streetwise theyd send their kids elsewhere. In some subjects wed be lucky if we had four competent kids at 2 Unit level. Our best students would be average elsewhere. There are insufficient good kids to bounce ideas off one another and to stimulate any sense of learning.
This comment implies that in this teachers view, very few students in a typical Year 12 cohort at Westville have the competencies required to handle a regular 2 Unit Board Developed course at the HSC level. (To be eligible for the HSC award in NSW, students must complete at least 10 units of study including at least three Board Developed courses of 2 Unit value or greater. See www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au.)
At Westville it is considered a major achievement if students to come to school, and a greater achievement if they arrive on time and then go to classes. Teachers suffer huge stress trying to work with kids who arrive at school in a traumatised or aggressive frame of mind. Many students turn to the school for help with basic survival needs. Again and again the school has to provide a lifeline for young people who are homeless, or abused, or who are carrying the full burden of taking care of their younger siblings. The level of concentration of difficult cases evident at Westville is not exceptional for a residualised school in the outer suburbs of any of our capital cities. The creation of a market of schools means that difficult cases will aggregate in some schools while others will be able to exclude or remove such problems. It is relevant to note, for example, that 67 percent of Australias homeless young people are in just 17 percent of our high schools, and for juvenile offenders there is a similar pattern of concentration (MacKenzie & Chamberlin, 1994).
In segregated schools like Westville, the student body is up almost entirely of young people with low levels of scholarly ability, broken attendance patterns, difficult personal histories, and survival needs that take precedence over everything else, including a desire for learning.
I describe Westville high as a segregated school and I have chosen this word deliberately. The struggle to desegregate Americas schools lay at the heart of the civil rights movement through the middle of the last century. Americas blacks were excluded from good high schools because of their race. This defining characteristic was visible for all to see. In Australia today the children of the poor and poorly educated are also excluded from good public schools but the reasons for their exclusion are cleverly disguised. I am referring to ordinary high schools who succeed in establishing a good reputation, or a lucky because they are not in a housing commission catchment. The principal of one of these schools told us
Our proportion of real disadvantaged students is probably nothing compared to some schools in the area. About two-thirds of our students are from within our area and about one-third are from outside. Our intake is set at 180 and, as such, we dont accept every application for enrolment. We choose who comes in. Theyll only get in here if there is solid evidence from their local school that their attendance and other factors are okay.
There is no legal exclusion here, no exclusion based on class or creed or race. Yet preferred schools employ practices that clearly lead to the exclusion of children with complex family circumstances, the poor, and recent immigrants. The processes involved are not well documented and if they were called into question they might not hold up.
Nevertheless, particular young people continue to be excluded from good schools and dumped in residual schools. This exclusion has exactly the same effects as those that were noted in Brown vs The School Board of Topeka.The US Supreme Court decision in this case recognised that the provision of additional resources to Black schools did not compensate for that fact that such schools only enrolled Blacks (Lipset, 1996). The Brown case was concluded in 1954, exactly 50 years ago. Given the cast-like conditions of American Blacks in that era, the segregated schools of the South were filled with children whose parents were poorly educated and little access to powerful social networks. In this context, the judgment of Brown vs The School Board was that separate but equal is not equal (Lipset, 1996).
2.3 What curriculum is most appropriate for schools like Westville?
Here we strike an interesting contradiction between the neo-liberal weak state, where market choice substitutes for public planning, and the strong-arm strategies of the neo-conservative state, where accountability measures are enforced by the Department, the Board of Studies, and the Universities Admissions Centre. Schools like Westville are caught in the cross-hairs their student population is residualised and segregated with most students performing well below their grade levels. Yet at the same time, over the past seven years, the senior secondary curriculum that NSW teachers are required to deliver has become more demanding and more rigid. Through a series of reforms that followed the McGaw report (1997), the Year 11-12 curriculum was changed, removing some of the more accessible academic subjects that were part of the old HSC. Perhaps the most controversial change is the removal of Mathematics in Society a subject often taken by students studying vocational subjects, or by those needing a 2-Unit mathematics subject to meet state requirements for admission to employment as a primary teacher. Teachers from schools like Westville tend to argue that Mathematics in Society should be re-instated, since many students want to study basic mathematics but find 2-Unit General Mathematics too difficult.
In a study using Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth data, Vickers and Lamb (2002) found that among Australian high school students in the lowest socio-economic quartile, those in NSW are less likely to remain at school beyond Year 10 and less likely to complete Year 12 than are similar students in other mainland states. They found, for example, that the likelihood that a NSW student will leave school at the end of Year 10 is one in ten, while in Victoria it is less than one in twenty. For students in the bottom socio-economic quartile in NSW, the likelihood of leaving school by the end of Year 10 was almost one in five. These results reflect a unique feature of NSW curriculum policy. NSW is the only state that still requires young people to sit for externally marked tests at the end of year 10, and still provides a formal School Certificate recording their achievements at this stage. Following the McGaw reforms, the School Certificate has been strengthened; it now comprises formal assessments in four subject areas.
In schools where most students are from the lowest socio-economic quartile, the NSW Year 10 Certificate still functions both as a hurdle and as a minimum qualification for entry to low-skilled work or to TAFE. Whether they do well or poorly at this stage, many low-SES students opt to leave school after attempting this certificate. As stated above, the likelihood of leaving school by the end of Year 10 was almost one in five for NSW students in the bottom SES quartile. By way of contrast, for other students (those whose backgrounds place them in the upper socio-economic quartiles) the School Certificate is now a hardly-noticeable event on the HSC highway. Having flown past this milestone, the risk that these students will leave school is relatively small and declines over time.
The patterns of year-to-year retention in other states contrast sharply with those of NSW. As stated above, the likelihood of leaving school at the end of year 10 in Victoria is less than one in twenty. Victoria carries a very substantial proportion of its year 10 population into year 11, but is just as successful as NSW in retaining most of those who stay on. The pattern in South Australia is similar to that in Victoria, with relatively high overall rates of retention to year 12. SA and Victoria share certain similarities in curriculum traditions. For example, both states abolished the external year 10 Intermediate Certificate over 35 years ago. During the 1980s, both states created alternative programs leading to a year 12 qualification, and offered these programs to approximately one third of all senior students. A more complete discussion of the culture of curricular reform in these states is provided in Collins and Vickers (1999).
High retention rates characterise the senior secondary years in Queensland, reflecting both the breadth of the Year 11-12 curriculum and the fact that internal year 12 assessments have been a core feature of this states upper secondary curriculum since the adoption of the Radford system in 1973. Following Radford, Queensland replaced its external year 12 examinations and introduced a school-based system that used district-level exchanges of student work between schools to develop common assessment standards through professional discussion. This is a system that has consistently been re-evaluated and improved upon over the past thirty years. It is a system that involves senior high school teachers in regular face-to-face moderation meetings with their peers as they review samples of student work for assessment. This work not only helps teachers at all levels to understand what a good student response looks like: it also provides a context in which teachers can discuss how such responses can be achieved. In 1976, the Scott Report endorsed school-based assessment but advocated a move from traditional norm-based to standards-based assessment. In 1990, Viviani endorsed the Spirit of Radford once again, but moved forward another step by abolishing the single tertiary entrance score system and offering universities a profile of information about each student rather than a single number. Current policies in Queensland, titled Education and Training Reforms for the Future, continue this states tradition of adaptive curriculum reforms in the service of achieving higher retention rates (Queensland Department of Education, 2002)
Currently, the apparent retention rate to year 12 in NSW is 70 percent, but Victoria and Queensland, the equivalent figure is over 80 percent. One proposition that needs to be considered seriously is that the high-stakes curriculum NSW has adopted might explain some of the continuing differences between NSW and the other jurisdictions in terms of overall retention rates. This is of particular relevance for schools like Westville. As the Vickers and Lamb (2002) analyses indicate, it is among the students in the lowest socio-economic quartiles that one observes the greatest state-by-state differences in patterns of retention beyond Year 10.
Conclusion
Across Australia, public high schools continue to face the challenge of providing a full secondary education for all who come to them, but do so now in the context of government-driven, competitive pseudo-markets in education and growing government sponsored resource gaps between the sectors. The paper has provided an outline of how the market works at the bottom end of the public sector hierarchy. Enrollment mobility is driven by market choice, and it leads to residualisation. Residualised schools become internally homogeneous as they are left with students that no-one fights for, students whose families cannot manipulate the system, families that do not know how to pull the strings to move their children out of the local catchment area.
Choice is only possible because of the proliferation of private schools, the segmentation of the public system into selective and specialised schools, and other forms of selection associated with the de-zoning of catchments. Choice is encouraged by government rhetoric that characterizes parents who choose non-public and selective schools as responsible citizens while characterizing schools that are residualised as failing schools. Choice is funded by State and Federal governments and the political reality is that neither Labor not the Coalition is likely to stop funding private schools. Since the residualisation of a sizable number of public schools is the direct result of government policy, governments must now take responsibility for the education of all Australians including the young people who attend these extreme institutions that they have created. This paper has only begun to sketch out what this might entail, but at the very least it would include: a return to some form of control over the creation of new private schools, scrutiny of the methods public schools use to exclude students they do not want to teach, a serious review of the methods used to staff difficult schools, and in the case of NSW, a review of the suitability of our high-stakes curriculum in relation to the interests and scholastic achievements of students attending these schools.
References:
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2002). Expenditure on Education. ABS, Canberra.
Australian Education Council (1982). Enrolments in Australian Schools. AGPS, Canberra.
Bourke J. E.(1969). Australian Catholic Schools: Into the Seventies. Quarterly Review of Australian Education, 3:2, 12-18.
Campbell, C. & Sherington, G. (2003). Residualisation and regionalism in the recent history of the Australian comprehensive school. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, 22 April.
Campbell, C. (2003). State policy and regional diversity in the provision of secondary education for the youth of Sydney, 1960-2001. History of Education, 32: 5, 53-73.
Collins, C and Vickers, M. H.(1999). Post-Compulsory Curriculum Policy in Comparative Perspective. Paper presented at the Australian Curriculum Studies Association biennial conference in Perth, WA, September 29 - October 1, 1999.
Commonwealth of Australia (1998-2002). Annual Reports on the States Grants (Primary and Secondary Educational Assistance) Act. See www.dest.gov.au/schools/ publications/green/. For a summary of data on Educational Benchmark Adjustments, see www.aeufederal.org.au
Connell, R. W., Ashenden, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W.(1982). Making the Difference: Families, Schools, and Social Division. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Connell, W. F.(1993). Reshaping Australian Education, 1960-1985. Melbourne: ACER.
Croxford, L. (2002). School differences and social segregation: Comparisons between England, Wales, and Scotland. Education Review, 15, 68-73
Doherty, L. (2004). Push for values drives public school exodus. Sydney Morning Herald, August 9, page 1.
Hogan, M. (1984). Public vs Private Schools: Funding and Directions in Australia. Ringwood: Penguin Books.
Jesson, D. (2001). Selective systems of education blueprint for lower standards. Education Review, 15, 8-14.
Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B. (1992). The post-compulsory curriculum for students with special needs. In T. Seddon and C. Deer, A Curriculum for the Senior Secondary Years. Melbourne: ACER.
Keating, J & Lamb, S. (2004). Public Education and the Australian Community. Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Life-long learning, The University of Melbourne.
Lamb, S., A. Walstab, R. Teese. M. Vickers, & R. Rumberger. (2004). Staying on at School: Improving student retention in Australia. Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Life-long learning, The University of Melbourne.
Lipset, S. M (1996). American Exceptionalism: A Double Edged Sword. New York: Norton & Co.
MacKenzie, D. and Chamberlain, C. (1994). The National Census of Homeless School Students. Paper presented at the International Year of the Family National Conference, 20-23 November 1994, Adelaide.
McGaw, B. (1997). Their Future: the NSW Government’s Reforms for the Higher School Certificate. NSW Minister for Education and Training: Sydney.
McGaw, B. (2004). ‘Levelling up’ or ‘dumbing down’: What can be achieved through curriculum reform? The 2004 Harold Wyndham Memorial Lecture. Sydney: NSW Institute for Educational Research.
Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training & Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). (2001) National Report on Schooling. www.mceetya.edu.au
Nozic, R. (1974). Anarchy, Utopia, and the State. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
NSW-DET (2002). Student Assessment and School Accountability. Selective Schools Unit. Sydney: NSW Department of Education and Training.
OECD (2003) Education at a Glance. Paris: OECD.
Queensland Department of Education (2002). Education and Training Reforms for the Future A White Paper. http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/ETRF
Sawyer, M. (2003). The Ethical State? Social Liberalism in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Sherington, G. (2004). Public commitment and private choice in Australian Education, in R. Aldrich (Ed.). Public or Private? Lessons from History. London: Routledge.
Teese, R. & Polesel, J. (2003). Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and Quality in Mass Secondary Education in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Vickers, M. (2004). Markets and Mobilities: Dilemmas facing the comprehensive neighborhood high school. In press, Studies in Education.
Vickers, M and S. Lamb. (2002) Why State Policies Matter: The Influence of Curriculum Policy on Participation in Post-Compulsory Education and Training. Australian Journal of Education, 46: 2, 172-188.
Vinson, T. (2002) Inquiry into the Provision of Public Education in NSW, pp. 122-126 Sydney: Pluto Press and NSW Teachers Federation.
Wyndham, H. S.(1957). (Chair). Report of the committee appointed to survey secondary education in New South Wales. Sydney: Government Printer.