related newpaper articles on Fitzroy High

School choice luxury for poor

By EBRU YAMAN
05 June 2001

"WHY would you send your children to government schools if you had a choice?" one senior journalist responded after I had pitched a story to him.

I explained that not everyone believed state schools offered a second-rate education.

"Well, they obviously don't live in Sydney," he said.

We could have had the same conversation in Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or just about anywhere else. The assumption that where absolute financial choice exists, parents will choose private schools is all-pervasive. A couple earning big bucks with children at the local state school is just about newsworthy. Strange times.

Just when did private schools become exclusively associated with excellence? This is not to suggest many private schools are not excellent because we know they are.

But the perception that private schools offer a better standard of education than public schools – with the exception perhaps of selective schools – is powerful, widespread and damaging. Damaging not just to state schools but to that egalitarian notion of choice in education that the Howard Government says underpins its funding policies.

These days, any talk about education policy is peppered with choice. Federal Education Minister David Kemp has explained that boosting funding to private schools, which occurred with the introduction of the new funding model, had a greater effect than a simple correction of the injustices of the old funding system. Ideally, both Kemp and John Howard have argued, schools will lower or cap fees (although they are not obliged to do so) and thereby be more affordable and available to average families. Greater choice.

That notion is meaningless if state schools are seen as a repository for the families that cannot afford the alternative, a second-best option for the less fortunate. A two-tiered system, which many will argue we are facing, presents a serious challenge to this concept of choice. If there is general consensus that the best schools are the rich schools, where is the choice?

Every time an advocate of public education screams poor, it does their cause some harm.

Another anecdote: I recently discussed schools with a girlfriend whose children are similar in age to my own. To which primary school would we send our eldest? There was no question for either of us – her in Sydney and me in Melbourne – the local state school. "We'll have to start saving now, though, for high school," she told me. "There isn't one in our area."

How could that be? "Well, there isn't one I'd trust." She then listed her three local high schools in inner Sydney and the problems she understood those to have.

In NSW, where the drift to the private sector is the most troubling, the Education Department has launched an unprecedented television campaign in support of state schools in an attempt to address this perception.

That many people believe that private schools are better than government schools is borne out by research commissioned by the Australian Education Union late last year. That poll showed overwhelmingly that even among supporters of public education, private schools are believed to offer a better education.

Perhaps it is as simple as believing that you get what you pay for and if a service is free and available to everyone, then it can't be all that valuable. If you pay fees, a certain quality of education is guaranteed. In state schools, you take your chances.

Is it true? We would all like to say it isn't. But the reality is, when it comes to state schools, some are more equal than others.

Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton summed up this disillusionment recently. She told this newspaper she sent her daughter to an elite Melbourne private school to protect her from racism. In effect, she said, the substantial fees were "danger money". She also believed she was paying for a quality of education not on offer at the local school, as well as a degree of civility and respect apparently not available there either.

Teachers and principals will tell you part of the problem is we are not funding our state schools according to need. A government school in an affluent area – where the parent base is generally active and good at fundraising – will receive the same amount of money as a school in the poorer suburbs of any capital city, where unemployment and poverty is high and the fundraising capacity is low. In a nutshell, the poorer the area, the poorer the school.

With the public-private debate still raging, we have a valuable opportunity to lift the profile of state schools, and many committed people are doing just that. But until parents who have the financial freedom to send their children to any school they choose can look to the school down the road with absolute confidence, the notion of choice remains a little hollow.

Schools system 'failing'

EDUCATION CRISIS

By EWIN HANNAN
STATE EDITOR
Saturday 31 March 2001

The Victorian Government has approved a major overhaul of the Department of Education, Employment and Training, following a damning internal review of its performance.

The review, designed to help Labor implement a significant change in education policy, found the education and training system was "plainly inadequate" and in need of significant organisational reform.

It found the department was "not engaged in debate, nor engaging others in debate", did not have a strong sense of accountability, was not formulating ideas for the government, nor challenging or shaping an agenda.

The review, the third big report into education undertaken by the ALP, was commissioned to assist the government deliver on the education targets outlined by Premier Steve Bracks at the education summit last October.

Under the targets, 90 per cent of young people must complete Year 12 or its equivalent by 2010, and Victoria must be at or above the national average benchmark levels for reading, writing and numeracy for primary students by 2005.

Labor also intends to achieve a 6 per cent rise in the number of 15-to-19-year-olds in education and training in rural and regional Victoria by 2005.

While the review said the department's role was to serve the government through advice, support and coordination, it found a "considerable lack of responsiveness to ministers and appreciation of their world and requirements".

The quality of the policy briefs was said to range from the "sublime to the ridiculous", the review said. "The briefs are often too long and unfocused. One minister's office complained that the briefs lacked analysis of issues and so did not assist the minister in participating in and leading the debate."

The review, by the Allen Consulting Group, said there was little appreciation in the department of the critical need to understand and deliver
to clients, most particularly students.

Under the proposed restructuring, which has been reported to Mr Bracks, the department's new management structure would comprise four main offices. A new Office of Portfolio Integration will be set up to ensure integrated and timely policy advice to ministers, while a new Performance Review and Evaluation Division will aim to deliver greater accountability.

Department secretary Stuart Hamilton informed staff of the overhaul yesterday. While job cuts are not expected, there will be significant changes to executive staffing. The deputy director of schools, Don Tyrer, will be seconded to the University of Melbourne. Susan Pascoe, a member of the former Board of Studies, had been appointed to head the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

Mr Hamilton told The Age yesterday that the report showed the department
had not been "well set up" to help the government's reform agenda.

"The message I have had from the ministers is that they wanted the department to be more capable of implementing their initiatives. They don't believe the department was adequately set up to do that."

Did racial tensions trip school brawl?

By STEPHEN CAUCHI
Sunday 11 March 2001

The incident was minor and would have hardly rated a mention in a schoolyard logbook. It happened several weeks ago, schoolboy antics at a Melbourne school that mushroomed into a vicious fight involving students, their families, cousins and friends, armed with a knife, chains, belts and beer bottles.
This particular confrontation demonstrates that tensions in a multicultural school environment can remain hidden until a relatively minor incident brings them to the fore, dividing along racial lines the students, former students, extended families and members of the community outside.
There are concerns that Australia might not be immune to the school-violence trend so prevalent overseas.
Shooting deaths at a high school in America last week and the stabbing at Blackburn High School last Monday of a year 12 student by assailants from outside the school, in which the student was also kicked four times in the face, have focused attention on our teenagers.

The coeducational Brunswick Secondary College on Dawson Street, Brunswick, has 500 students from year 7 to 12. It has recently had a multi-million-dollar refurbishment and is one of the few schools in Victoria with an accelerated learning program for gifted students. But the incident that led to such violence was not part of the curriculum.

It happened like this: A student kicked a soccer ball into the head of a classmate, who threw a punch in return. The incident should have ended there but about a week later a friend of one of them decided to take revenge. He entered the school at lunchtime and became involved in a fight on the school oval.

The battlelines were then clearly drawn. The next day dozens of students and outsiders were involved in a fracas outside the school that spilled into nearby Jewell railway station.
Said one student: "They all planned it because they knew they couldn't do it inside ... there were kids from outside of the school, their families, their cousins and friends. Heaps of students stopped and watched too. Everyone was talking about it."

Police were called and considered the situation so tense they patrolled periodically over the next week. Some students were forced to remain at the school after hours for their own safety.

One student said police and teachers had to escort students to the station to protect them from further attacks by a gang of youths believed to be aged from 13 to 15.

Acting Senior-Sergeant Dave Griffin, of Brunswick Police, said some of the troublemakers were apparently former students who had been expelled from the school the year before and were already known to police for harassing students at Jewell station.
"I suppose it's the old schoolyard (situation) where a couple of blokes say, 'well, I'll get my mates and (the other group says) we'll get our mates and we'll have it out'," said Senior-Sergeant Griffin.
"That's what we were trying to get in the middle of. It's a run-in between one bloke and another bloke and a couple of friends ... one friend did something which was a bit outrageous, he's alleged to have produced a weapon and another person is alleged to have smacked him over the head with a bottle."
Students said the fight, involving dozens of fellow students and outsiders, was largely divided on ethnic lines between two groups who had previously shown no animosity towards each other at the school.

School principal Claude Sgroi declined to talk to The Sunday Age, but a school staff member said while the incident was serious, it was also unusual.
The first fight took place on the school oval. The next night, it had spread to a confrontation outside the school in which a student was headbutted by an outsider. The outsider pulled a knife and was then attacked by a number of other students.
"A teacher saw him pull a knife and we were there quite quickly. And we had a large number of our kids who were quite spooked by that," the staff member said.

The president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union, Mary Bluett, said such incidents were "very, very rare".