The law of unintended consequences is a wonderful thing, as we've seen again the last week, with the launch of the federal government's My
School website. In the weeks leading up to the launch you could've been
forgiven for thinking it was all some horrific New Right plot to expose
the failings of hundreds of underperforming state schools, staffed by
lazy communists, timeserving hacks and angry 1960s throwbacks Who Hate
Everything About Australia. Instead the hard questions are suddenly
hovering like black thunderheads over the ivy-covered sandstone
battlements of those super-privileged fee factories to which the upper
classes (yeah, we got 'em) send their offspring as a birthright, and to
which the struggling arriviste demographic struggle to send theirs in
the hope that ... well, I'm not sure really. Perhaps they hope something might rub off.
How many of them would be wondering about the value for money they're getting now that they can directly compare results across a range of government and private schools?
I don't know if anybody recalls a really nifty little diversionary campaign that the Rodent once ran against public schools and public school teachers to distract attention from the unfortunate realisation by a majority of the electorate that he was a total rat bastard in need of a good kicking at the polls. It had something to do with public schools not inculcating decent values in our little Vegemiters. And yet the evidence of the data-miners who've been unleashed on My School since it went live, is that underfunded, under-resourced and hugely unappreciated public school teachers are doing a much better job with what little they have than their colleagues in the fee factories.
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, what sort of results the taxpayer might get from the public school system, if it were showered with some of the treasure currently spent on elite private schools. By this I don't mean those hundreds of middling, usually church-run campuses, many of which work hard at keeping their fees relatively low, so that someone other than a bunch of rich thickies might have a chance of a better resourced private education. No, I mean those schools which are nothing but bastions of inherited privilege and rank, and the 'values' of which often boil down to something little better than a postmodern form of social Darwinism.
Remind me again why some minimum-wage laborer is having a proportion of his taxes extorted from him by the customers of those institutions to pay for their heated swimming pool, or 22nd football oval, when his own kids are trapped in a rundown state school.
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