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What Makes a Good School?
School choice has become one of the most agonizing issues of parenthood; while schools boast of unsurpassed facilities, genius teachers, and stellar academic achievement, parents wonder whether the marketing hype is actually true. Drawing on the authors' experiences and knowledge—one as a school principal and both as parents and advocates—this account compares public, Catholic, private, selective, and comprehensive schools and examines how well each responds to the recurring crises in the lives of Australian children. Offering clear-eyed advice to policymakers as well as parents, this book argues that schools must be a good fit for the students, the parents, and for the nation.
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2012
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February 28, 2014
The other day I had to try to remember the name of this book. Knowing that I read it last year I looked it up on GoodReads – and it wasn’t there. Somehow I had read the thing and typed out quotes from it, but not reviewed it.
This is a really good book to read if you are in Australia and you are thinking of sending your child to school. School choice has become a bit of an obsession in Australia. But the problem is that people think they know about schools – didn’t we all go to school? However, we also really know that we don’t know nearly enough about schools. We know what we didn’t like about school and we know what we did like – but now, looking back, we can’t really tell if the bits we didn’t like weren’t the bits that were actually good for us. We may not have done as well at school as we would have now liked, but how much of that was down to the school and how much was basically down to us?
So, we are basically experts who aren’t completely sure if we know anything at all.
There is a sociologist called Ulrich Beck who wrote a book called Risk Society – it is as close to a must read as books on sociology get to be. Anyway, in that book he says that there was a time when we thought risks could be overcome societally. This was the great post-war experiment in social welfare. But towards the middle of the 1970s we seem to have decided that we were all individuals. In fact, this seemed to happen just when the actual risks facing us – global warming, energy crisis, unemployment, globalisation – got to be so huge that no nation state could convincingly tackle them anymore. Nation states started tackling issues they could deal with – endless wars on drugs, or on terrorists, or on single mother welfare cheats being driven around in their fleets of limousines. And governments started getting out of the business of delivering services and moved into the business of giving this over to the private sector. Steering, not rowing became the mantra.
This looked like a great idea. People would be given ‘choice’ – and everyone loves choice – and governments couldn’t be then blamed when people made the wrong choice. Risk, then, moved from society to the individual. Now, I’m not suggesting that the risks aren’t real – they are very much real. A risk isn’t a risk if there is no chance of really stuffing up. And nothing quite provides risk like education. I mean, who wants to be responsible for destroying their child’s life?
The other interesting process that has happened over this same period is the gutting of the middle classes and the remarkable increase in the number of kids staying on until the end of high school and even going on to university. This means that what once could have been called a ‘middle class education’ is today barely enough to get any sort of job at all. I’ve said this before, but it is still true – when I finished school only 30% of students who started school with me finished school with me. Today that figure is 70%. There hasn’t been a 40% increase in the number of ‘middle class’ jobs. In fact, very many of the ‘new’ jobs that have replaced the jobs that had existed in industry have been in created in services. And many of those jobs are lower skilled, lower paid and more regimented than the factory jobs they replaced. So, we have much more highly educated people doing lower skilled work. This is referred to as credential inflation. And there is no Reserve Bank tasked with keeping this inflation within the 2-3% range per annum.
What we have done is create societal problems and then told individuals that they are responsible for overcoming the risks these problems create using the only tool they have available to them – their ability to choose. Because choosing sets you free, right?
To be able to choose all you really need is information. Well, and maybe some knowledge about how to understand that information. So, governments all over the world have been more than happy to provide parents with information on how schools are going. They do reading and counting tests. Perhaps not exactly twenty-first century skills, but cheap and easy to give, assess and report back on. And they create league tables to let you know which school to send your kid to. The problem is that none of this information is really of any worth. You see, there is as much diversity within most schools as there is between them. If that is true, what good is a test that tells you how good a school is when your kid might end up in a crap class?
So – how do you go about choosing a school for your kids? Well, reading this book is a really good place to start. Not least because it tells you what are meaningful things to look for when making your choice – pretty much the things that can’t be measured (you know, like the feel of the school and your best guess about the morale of the students and teachers) and what not to bother with – basically league tables.
But in Australia as in most other countries in the world, it is unfortunately the case that the best advice you can give people is to send your kids to a school with the most middle class kids in it with ‘aspirational’ parents. Those kids have what Bourdieu liked to call habitus and if you are lucky that will rub off on your kids too. We’ve pretty well known this forever – but to really admit it would mean that the fact we as a society direct much more funds to middle class schools and away from other schools would be seen as the scandal that it is. Instead we pretend that there are other reasons for success at school. One of the guys in charge of the review of the Australian curriculum at the moment (Kevin Donnelly) believes that directing funds to schools in poor suburbs is a gross mistake and in fact, more money should be directed to rich schools as they are the places where real ‘merit’ exists. Poor people don’t fail because of disadvantage, they fail because they are a bit less than human.
Still, having said that kids tend to do better in middle class areas, I still wouldn’t advise anyone to send their children to private schools. I don’t believe these places really teach good values. I also don’t feel they provide a good education. If you take lots of kids that have a middle class habitus it is actually quite hard to stuff up and not get good results. But do kids that get good results come out of school with a good eduction? If you kick out kids that look like they are going to bring your average down in the last year of school. If you can pick and choose who will come to your school – well, it is pretty hard for you not to do well as a school. But your pedagogy and your curriculum are likely to be constrained and likely to be anything but innovative. You are likely to be conservative and afraid to take risks. You are likely to use rote learning and convince your students that school is about 'the right answer'. Real innovation in our system comes from schools in the state system.
A few years ago we had a Prime Minister who was elected calling for an education revolution. The problem is that the revolution we really need in Australia in education has to go further than putting computers in classrooms. It requires a fundamental change in what we think of as education. At the moment we have become obsessed with giving kids ‘job ready skills’. But we live in a world where the best jobs around today didn’t even exist in science fiction novels a decade ago. How do you give kids the skills they’ll need for jobs that don’t even exist? Well, by teaching them how to think. By teaching them how to learn by themselves. By finding ways that encourage them to love learning for its own sake rather than the sake of a job that might not even exist once they qualify – and not just skills that can be easily and cheaply turned into numbers on a chart.
Some quotes:
The flip side of the era of parental choice is choice for some schools (those judged to be more desirable) over who they will or will not educate, leaving parents even more anxious about getting their child into one or other of these fortunate establishments. The ugly side of this is, as we'll find out, that the choice process itself has left some schools marginalised – not because they are bad, but because their kids are strugglers. Page 4
In the face of so many confusing alternatives, many parents have fallen back on the simple premise that underpins a consumer society – the more you pay, the better the school. But are they right? Page 5
Business has an increasing say in what young people should learn and the competencies they need to develop. Some of the skills that employers seek might surprise those who think that schools should be regimented places where teachers just fill up the empty vessels. Two decades ago the Mayer Committee, set up by the Federal and state governments, identified what were known as key competencies for young people. Employers wanted, and still want, school leavers who are not only literate and numerate, but who can collect, analyse and organise as well as communicate both ideas and information. Planning, organising and working with others are important, as are problem solving, mathematics, technology and cultural understanding. We need citizens who can adapt quickly and solve new problems in new ways. Pages 14-15
Despite all of this, much of our education system is rapidly becoming more and more centralised, rigid and standardised. Page 15
Often it is the schools nearest to a particular family that have the worse reputation. Precisely because, perhaps, these are the schools that locals have at least some interaction with. Page 22
Our advice – if you are looking for a school for your child – is to visit those on your shortlist and see for yourself. Talk to the principal and the teaching staff, attend open days, and any concerts or public functions the school runs, and you will pretty quickly get a feel for a school and, most importantly, the morale of its staff and students. Pp25-26
You might also ask your child, particularly if they are of high school age, which school they prefer. You could think about your child’s special interests and talents and the extent to which a school might cater to them. Page 42
When considering a school for their children parents are significantly driven by priorities which they may not be prepared to divulge. Parents claim to be concerned about quality and academic aspects of schools – but what they actually do in terms of choosing a school is best predicted by who goes to that school already. A paper, by Australian National University fellow Dr Astghik Mavisakalyan, found that at primary school, a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of immigrants increased the probability of Australian-born children attending private schools by 3.5 percentage points. This compared with 6.45 percentage points at the secondary-school level. Pages 42-43
If your child attends a private school and does well, the rest of the world will give credit to the school because of its excellent reputation. If your child performs badly at such a school, the world will blame you – the child’s parents – because how could any well-brought-up child fail to do well at such a ‘good’ school.
The opposite is true if you choose a public school (unless it is one of the highly desirable selective schools’ of course). Then if your child performs well, everyone gives you credit, believing that only wonderful parenting (and excellent family genes) could possibly overcome the disadvantage of such an ordinary school. And if your child does badly? Well, it is the school’s fault, of course, because that is just what people expect from such a school. Page 45
Remain sceptical of any and all school marketing. Page 47
High percentages of Indigenous students or students from non-English speaking backgrounds, to put it in crude marketing terms, are not usually considered attributes that attract parents to schools, no matter how brilliantly the school may actually be teaching its students. Page 57
The higher the results of the new Year 7 kids, or Year 3s, the higher the likely socio-economic background of their families. Page 61
His (the principal of a large regional high school in NSW) view of the effect of the My School website on an often forgotten and ignored audience – the students themselves – is, unsurprisingly, scathing. Page 69
Think about the gender balance in the school’s enrolment: leave aside all the reasons, educational performance at school does vary according to the sex of the student. My School assumes no difference. Page 70
Perhaps the whole My School experience is an object lesson in how giving parents what they say they want – more information – is fine up to a point. What it has also revealed is that comparisons of complex, fluid organisations like schools are almost inevitably flawed. Page 72
(Quoting Trevor Cobbold – Convenor of Save Our Schools) One core assumption of market theory is that all participants in the marketplace have full information. This is a demanding assumption that never applies in the real world … There is also strong evidence that people base their choices of schools on the socio-economic and racial composition of schools rather than their academic performance. Another core assumption for markets to work is that there are no barriers to either buyers or sellers participating in the market. Page 78
…parents of more ‘desirable’ children – by which we mean the kids that bring cultural capital to the school that will increase its results (girls, high socio-economic background families, academic ability, sporting or creative prowess). Pages 83-84
For your average parent, however, My School probably just adds to the confusion. One thing that is becoming clear to all of us, however, is that it is less about the type of school your child attends – religious, private, selective, comprehensive or public – and more about the type of kids that already go there. Educators have long made this claim, particularly those who advocate for public schools, but now the proof is becoming clearer to everyone. On Sydney’s prosperous North Shore, for example, My School has resulted in an increase in enrolments in local public schools, both primary and secondary, to the extent that many now have waiting lists. Page 85
School principals break out into a cold sweat if anyone wants to relax rules about school uniforms. They know that, along with discipline and homework, uniforms are part of the public relations front-line of the school. Page 130
Good schools have clear school rules that make sense. Page 134
As the OECD marketplace study we cited in our opening chapter revealed, parents want a school to teach kids to think and to love learning for its own sake. They want schools that help a child discover their potential and then develop it. And they want schools that work for the good of all students and for the good of society as a whole; what we sometimes call the public good. Pages 142-43
Research from the US, where the program has been in operation for longer than in Australia, concludes that students of novice Teach for America teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of beginning teachers with traditional credentials. Worse, less than a quarter of the Teach for America teachers are left standing in their original low-income school after three years. Page 165
The message such programs send to teachers – and particularly to young people who might be considering teaching as a career – is that they are of less value and talent than their peers in other courses. Page 165
This is driven and supported by the free-market idea that the sum of what is good for individuals creates a greater good for whole communities and the nation. Unfortunately, in the case of schools, we have created something that is demonstrably good for some individuals – but at the expense of others. Page 197
How strange it is that we are reluctant to invest upstream in equity in schooling, yet are apparently happy to be burdened with the downstream costs created when such investment is inadequate? We either pay now – or we pay more later. Page 200
After three decades of experimenting, our contention is that the application of free market to schooling has essentially failed. Competition has not lifted all schools for the benefit of all. It just gives some of our schools and students a comparative advantage over others, with no overall improvement; in fact there is evidence of an overall decline. Page 203
Competition has quickly taught schools and principals a golden rule of business: the quality of the product – and the reputation of the producer – is enhanced if there is greater control over the inputs. Page 204
There is a substantial daily commute of students across cities such as Melbourne to schools in higher income suburbs. Thirty per cent of students in Tasmania don’t attend their local school.
(Quoting Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s director of education) Well, this Global Educational Reform Movement is a way of thinking about reforming education that is based on ideas of competition, choice, accountability, testing. In other words, all these market-based ideas of running the education system. I’m using this term GERM, because I have found that the Finnish way of building a good education system is not only different to the GERM, but is almost the opposing way of building education policies and reforms. Page 220
Flawed reform is symbolised in Australia by the My School website, which has some good features, but just about ticks all of the boxes that don’t work if you want to change schools for the better. Page 222
In many ways, we would recommend you begin your search for a school by seriously considering the school closest to you. Sending your child to the local school makes a lot of sense in all sorts of ways. It helps to build a community of friends that are geographically close and helps you establish contact with local families. Page 241
If you are stressing about finding the money, we suspect your anxiety may actually do your kids more harm than whatever good the fee-charging school may appear to offer. Most kids would rather have relaxed parents who have time for them, than anxious, over-worked parents slogging their guts out to pay for a school they can’t really afford. Page 245
This is a really good book to read if you are in Australia and you are thinking of sending your child to school. School choice has become a bit of an obsession in Australia. But the problem is that people think they know about schools – didn’t we all go to school? However, we also really know that we don’t know nearly enough about schools. We know what we didn’t like about school and we know what we did like – but now, looking back, we can’t really tell if the bits we didn’t like weren’t the bits that were actually good for us. We may not have done as well at school as we would have now liked, but how much of that was down to the school and how much was basically down to us?
So, we are basically experts who aren’t completely sure if we know anything at all.
There is a sociologist called Ulrich Beck who wrote a book called Risk Society – it is as close to a must read as books on sociology get to be. Anyway, in that book he says that there was a time when we thought risks could be overcome societally. This was the great post-war experiment in social welfare. But towards the middle of the 1970s we seem to have decided that we were all individuals. In fact, this seemed to happen just when the actual risks facing us – global warming, energy crisis, unemployment, globalisation – got to be so huge that no nation state could convincingly tackle them anymore. Nation states started tackling issues they could deal with – endless wars on drugs, or on terrorists, or on single mother welfare cheats being driven around in their fleets of limousines. And governments started getting out of the business of delivering services and moved into the business of giving this over to the private sector. Steering, not rowing became the mantra.
This looked like a great idea. People would be given ‘choice’ – and everyone loves choice – and governments couldn’t be then blamed when people made the wrong choice. Risk, then, moved from society to the individual. Now, I’m not suggesting that the risks aren’t real – they are very much real. A risk isn’t a risk if there is no chance of really stuffing up. And nothing quite provides risk like education. I mean, who wants to be responsible for destroying their child’s life?
The other interesting process that has happened over this same period is the gutting of the middle classes and the remarkable increase in the number of kids staying on until the end of high school and even going on to university. This means that what once could have been called a ‘middle class education’ is today barely enough to get any sort of job at all. I’ve said this before, but it is still true – when I finished school only 30% of students who started school with me finished school with me. Today that figure is 70%. There hasn’t been a 40% increase in the number of ‘middle class’ jobs. In fact, very many of the ‘new’ jobs that have replaced the jobs that had existed in industry have been in created in services. And many of those jobs are lower skilled, lower paid and more regimented than the factory jobs they replaced. So, we have much more highly educated people doing lower skilled work. This is referred to as credential inflation. And there is no Reserve Bank tasked with keeping this inflation within the 2-3% range per annum.
What we have done is create societal problems and then told individuals that they are responsible for overcoming the risks these problems create using the only tool they have available to them – their ability to choose. Because choosing sets you free, right?
To be able to choose all you really need is information. Well, and maybe some knowledge about how to understand that information. So, governments all over the world have been more than happy to provide parents with information on how schools are going. They do reading and counting tests. Perhaps not exactly twenty-first century skills, but cheap and easy to give, assess and report back on. And they create league tables to let you know which school to send your kid to. The problem is that none of this information is really of any worth. You see, there is as much diversity within most schools as there is between them. If that is true, what good is a test that tells you how good a school is when your kid might end up in a crap class?
So – how do you go about choosing a school for your kids? Well, reading this book is a really good place to start. Not least because it tells you what are meaningful things to look for when making your choice – pretty much the things that can’t be measured (you know, like the feel of the school and your best guess about the morale of the students and teachers) and what not to bother with – basically league tables.
But in Australia as in most other countries in the world, it is unfortunately the case that the best advice you can give people is to send your kids to a school with the most middle class kids in it with ‘aspirational’ parents. Those kids have what Bourdieu liked to call habitus and if you are lucky that will rub off on your kids too. We’ve pretty well known this forever – but to really admit it would mean that the fact we as a society direct much more funds to middle class schools and away from other schools would be seen as the scandal that it is. Instead we pretend that there are other reasons for success at school. One of the guys in charge of the review of the Australian curriculum at the moment (Kevin Donnelly) believes that directing funds to schools in poor suburbs is a gross mistake and in fact, more money should be directed to rich schools as they are the places where real ‘merit’ exists. Poor people don’t fail because of disadvantage, they fail because they are a bit less than human.
Still, having said that kids tend to do better in middle class areas, I still wouldn’t advise anyone to send their children to private schools. I don’t believe these places really teach good values. I also don’t feel they provide a good education. If you take lots of kids that have a middle class habitus it is actually quite hard to stuff up and not get good results. But do kids that get good results come out of school with a good eduction? If you kick out kids that look like they are going to bring your average down in the last year of school. If you can pick and choose who will come to your school – well, it is pretty hard for you not to do well as a school. But your pedagogy and your curriculum are likely to be constrained and likely to be anything but innovative. You are likely to be conservative and afraid to take risks. You are likely to use rote learning and convince your students that school is about 'the right answer'. Real innovation in our system comes from schools in the state system.
A few years ago we had a Prime Minister who was elected calling for an education revolution. The problem is that the revolution we really need in Australia in education has to go further than putting computers in classrooms. It requires a fundamental change in what we think of as education. At the moment we have become obsessed with giving kids ‘job ready skills’. But we live in a world where the best jobs around today didn’t even exist in science fiction novels a decade ago. How do you give kids the skills they’ll need for jobs that don’t even exist? Well, by teaching them how to think. By teaching them how to learn by themselves. By finding ways that encourage them to love learning for its own sake rather than the sake of a job that might not even exist once they qualify – and not just skills that can be easily and cheaply turned into numbers on a chart.
Some quotes:
The flip side of the era of parental choice is choice for some schools (those judged to be more desirable) over who they will or will not educate, leaving parents even more anxious about getting their child into one or other of these fortunate establishments. The ugly side of this is, as we'll find out, that the choice process itself has left some schools marginalised – not because they are bad, but because their kids are strugglers. Page 4
In the face of so many confusing alternatives, many parents have fallen back on the simple premise that underpins a consumer society – the more you pay, the better the school. But are they right? Page 5
Business has an increasing say in what young people should learn and the competencies they need to develop. Some of the skills that employers seek might surprise those who think that schools should be regimented places where teachers just fill up the empty vessels. Two decades ago the Mayer Committee, set up by the Federal and state governments, identified what were known as key competencies for young people. Employers wanted, and still want, school leavers who are not only literate and numerate, but who can collect, analyse and organise as well as communicate both ideas and information. Planning, organising and working with others are important, as are problem solving, mathematics, technology and cultural understanding. We need citizens who can adapt quickly and solve new problems in new ways. Pages 14-15
Despite all of this, much of our education system is rapidly becoming more and more centralised, rigid and standardised. Page 15
Often it is the schools nearest to a particular family that have the worse reputation. Precisely because, perhaps, these are the schools that locals have at least some interaction with. Page 22
Our advice – if you are looking for a school for your child – is to visit those on your shortlist and see for yourself. Talk to the principal and the teaching staff, attend open days, and any concerts or public functions the school runs, and you will pretty quickly get a feel for a school and, most importantly, the morale of its staff and students. Pp25-26
You might also ask your child, particularly if they are of high school age, which school they prefer. You could think about your child’s special interests and talents and the extent to which a school might cater to them. Page 42
When considering a school for their children parents are significantly driven by priorities which they may not be prepared to divulge. Parents claim to be concerned about quality and academic aspects of schools – but what they actually do in terms of choosing a school is best predicted by who goes to that school already. A paper, by Australian National University fellow Dr Astghik Mavisakalyan, found that at primary school, a 10 per cent increase in the proportion of immigrants increased the probability of Australian-born children attending private schools by 3.5 percentage points. This compared with 6.45 percentage points at the secondary-school level. Pages 42-43
If your child attends a private school and does well, the rest of the world will give credit to the school because of its excellent reputation. If your child performs badly at such a school, the world will blame you – the child’s parents – because how could any well-brought-up child fail to do well at such a ‘good’ school.
The opposite is true if you choose a public school (unless it is one of the highly desirable selective schools’ of course). Then if your child performs well, everyone gives you credit, believing that only wonderful parenting (and excellent family genes) could possibly overcome the disadvantage of such an ordinary school. And if your child does badly? Well, it is the school’s fault, of course, because that is just what people expect from such a school. Page 45
Remain sceptical of any and all school marketing. Page 47
High percentages of Indigenous students or students from non-English speaking backgrounds, to put it in crude marketing terms, are not usually considered attributes that attract parents to schools, no matter how brilliantly the school may actually be teaching its students. Page 57
The higher the results of the new Year 7 kids, or Year 3s, the higher the likely socio-economic background of their families. Page 61
His (the principal of a large regional high school in NSW) view of the effect of the My School website on an often forgotten and ignored audience – the students themselves – is, unsurprisingly, scathing. Page 69
Think about the gender balance in the school’s enrolment: leave aside all the reasons, educational performance at school does vary according to the sex of the student. My School assumes no difference. Page 70
Perhaps the whole My School experience is an object lesson in how giving parents what they say they want – more information – is fine up to a point. What it has also revealed is that comparisons of complex, fluid organisations like schools are almost inevitably flawed. Page 72
(Quoting Trevor Cobbold – Convenor of Save Our Schools) One core assumption of market theory is that all participants in the marketplace have full information. This is a demanding assumption that never applies in the real world … There is also strong evidence that people base their choices of schools on the socio-economic and racial composition of schools rather than their academic performance. Another core assumption for markets to work is that there are no barriers to either buyers or sellers participating in the market. Page 78
…parents of more ‘desirable’ children – by which we mean the kids that bring cultural capital to the school that will increase its results (girls, high socio-economic background families, academic ability, sporting or creative prowess). Pages 83-84
For your average parent, however, My School probably just adds to the confusion. One thing that is becoming clear to all of us, however, is that it is less about the type of school your child attends – religious, private, selective, comprehensive or public – and more about the type of kids that already go there. Educators have long made this claim, particularly those who advocate for public schools, but now the proof is becoming clearer to everyone. On Sydney’s prosperous North Shore, for example, My School has resulted in an increase in enrolments in local public schools, both primary and secondary, to the extent that many now have waiting lists. Page 85
School principals break out into a cold sweat if anyone wants to relax rules about school uniforms. They know that, along with discipline and homework, uniforms are part of the public relations front-line of the school. Page 130
Good schools have clear school rules that make sense. Page 134
As the OECD marketplace study we cited in our opening chapter revealed, parents want a school to teach kids to think and to love learning for its own sake. They want schools that help a child discover their potential and then develop it. And they want schools that work for the good of all students and for the good of society as a whole; what we sometimes call the public good. Pages 142-43
Research from the US, where the program has been in operation for longer than in Australia, concludes that students of novice Teach for America teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of beginning teachers with traditional credentials. Worse, less than a quarter of the Teach for America teachers are left standing in their original low-income school after three years. Page 165
The message such programs send to teachers – and particularly to young people who might be considering teaching as a career – is that they are of less value and talent than their peers in other courses. Page 165
This is driven and supported by the free-market idea that the sum of what is good for individuals creates a greater good for whole communities and the nation. Unfortunately, in the case of schools, we have created something that is demonstrably good for some individuals – but at the expense of others. Page 197
How strange it is that we are reluctant to invest upstream in equity in schooling, yet are apparently happy to be burdened with the downstream costs created when such investment is inadequate? We either pay now – or we pay more later. Page 200
After three decades of experimenting, our contention is that the application of free market to schooling has essentially failed. Competition has not lifted all schools for the benefit of all. It just gives some of our schools and students a comparative advantage over others, with no overall improvement; in fact there is evidence of an overall decline. Page 203
Competition has quickly taught schools and principals a golden rule of business: the quality of the product – and the reputation of the producer – is enhanced if there is greater control over the inputs. Page 204
There is a substantial daily commute of students across cities such as Melbourne to schools in higher income suburbs. Thirty per cent of students in Tasmania don’t attend their local school.
(Quoting Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s director of education) Well, this Global Educational Reform Movement is a way of thinking about reforming education that is based on ideas of competition, choice, accountability, testing. In other words, all these market-based ideas of running the education system. I’m using this term GERM, because I have found that the Finnish way of building a good education system is not only different to the GERM, but is almost the opposing way of building education policies and reforms. Page 220
Flawed reform is symbolised in Australia by the My School website, which has some good features, but just about ticks all of the boxes that don’t work if you want to change schools for the better. Page 222
In many ways, we would recommend you begin your search for a school by seriously considering the school closest to you. Sending your child to the local school makes a lot of sense in all sorts of ways. It helps to build a community of friends that are geographically close and helps you establish contact with local families. Page 241
If you are stressing about finding the money, we suspect your anxiety may actually do your kids more harm than whatever good the fee-charging school may appear to offer. Most kids would rather have relaxed parents who have time for them, than anxious, over-worked parents slogging their guts out to pay for a school they can’t really afford. Page 245
December 23, 2021
Good book on schools in Australia. Highlights the inequities in resourcing that successive Governments have entrenched, making parents confused about the “choice” they have in selecting the “right” school for their children, when in reality ALL public schools should be able to cater for the variety of need.
November 13, 2018
Too biased. I felt like I was reading an education academic essay all along and couldn’t get much out of it. It would be great to have more talk from the angle of parents or students in the book.
May 1, 2016
Good simple lefty advice on how to get over your anxieties about choosing a school for your angel/s.
Some simple but sensible points:
- The school is only providing a small part of your child's education. You are providing the majority through your attitudes and actions. Get this in perspective.
- We worry about the social networks, moral standards and academic qualities of potential schools. Can these things really be measured and if so, do they tell us anything salient? Maybe, maybe not.
- There is a whole lot of implicit racism and classism in avoiding a government school that is low on the socio-economic scale. Poor/refugee/ESL students don't rate well using our current ways of measuring them as human beings. This is sad. This should be fixed. For now, lets try and keep some diversity in the public school system by trying to identify and avoid the implicit isms. My apologies to the authors if this is not what they intended, but I'm paraphrasing and giving you my anecdotal learnings from the book.
I liked this book because it made me stop worrying about demons that might exist (the wrong crowd, the resource-strapped art department, the dumbed-down curriculum, the lowest common denominator) and made me start thinking about the demons that do. For example, the huge pressure that parents put on children so that they can get in to a 'good school'; the tendency to think we are choosing a school according to its educational standards but are actually looking to avoid a socio-economic group that we don't belong or aspire to belong to; the idea that the more you spend, the better your child's education and future; and the myth that a greater choice of schools improves outcomes (no, it just means you have a greater choice).
You may get something different, but I hope it relieves (or redirects) your anxiety the way it did mine.
Some simple but sensible points:
- The school is only providing a small part of your child's education. You are providing the majority through your attitudes and actions. Get this in perspective.
- We worry about the social networks, moral standards and academic qualities of potential schools. Can these things really be measured and if so, do they tell us anything salient? Maybe, maybe not.
- There is a whole lot of implicit racism and classism in avoiding a government school that is low on the socio-economic scale. Poor/refugee/ESL students don't rate well using our current ways of measuring them as human beings. This is sad. This should be fixed. For now, lets try and keep some diversity in the public school system by trying to identify and avoid the implicit isms. My apologies to the authors if this is not what they intended, but I'm paraphrasing and giving you my anecdotal learnings from the book.
I liked this book because it made me stop worrying about demons that might exist (the wrong crowd, the resource-strapped art department, the dumbed-down curriculum, the lowest common denominator) and made me start thinking about the demons that do. For example, the huge pressure that parents put on children so that they can get in to a 'good school'; the tendency to think we are choosing a school according to its educational standards but are actually looking to avoid a socio-economic group that we don't belong or aspire to belong to; the idea that the more you spend, the better your child's education and future; and the myth that a greater choice of schools improves outcomes (no, it just means you have a greater choice).
You may get something different, but I hope it relieves (or redirects) your anxiety the way it did mine.
September 21, 2016
I bought this book because I wanted some idea on how to choose a school for my kids - and found that after hours spent reading through the pages, I am none the wiser for how to choose one - only that trying to evaluate a school based on any data currently available is futile.
Save yourself the time of reading the book and go to the last chapter, where the author gives the advice of sending your children to your local school.
Save yourself the time of reading the book and go to the last chapter, where the author gives the advice of sending your children to your local school.
November 20, 2014
A well written account of our schools and current state of our education system. This book confirms my long held beliefs about (in)equality in schools and the long term impacts this has. Should be compulsory reading.
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December 26, 2012An interesting account of the current state of education in Australia. The underlying message to parents is - give your local school a chance and make an informed decision.
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