Australia Association for Research in Education
School funding
Stop all government funding for private schools. (Why and how we could do it)
Along with many fellow Australians I was momentarily heartened last year by the United Kingdom’s Labour party announcing that it would scrap elitist private schools in the UK (which are confusingly called “public schools”) if it won the UK election. Had it happened, those UK private schools would have been nationalised, their charitable status removed …
Q:Which major party will fully fund public schools? A:None. Here’s what’s happening
You would be forgiven for thinking that policy related to schooling is not a major issue in Australia. …
Why Simon Birmingham is wrong about school funding
Education ministers from all of Australia’s governments, state, territory and Commonwealth, met on Friday to begin negotiations over …
Turnbull’s $1.2 billion “additional funding” for schools is not additional at all, here’s why
The Turnbull Government budget announced an additional spend of $1.2 billion on schooling between 2018 and 2020. It …
Charter schools: an old, flawed idea and wrong for Australia
A new report proposes Australia adopt a US styled charter school, or UK type academies, approach as a solution to our falling scores on international tests. It even suggests Australia should consider for-profit schools. The report comes from the Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative pro-business pro-privatisation think tank. US charter schools and UK academies …
Urgent: take a closer look at the Abbott Government’s plans for school funding
Two months ago, four proposals for reforming government roles and responsibilities in schooling were leaked from the Abbott …
The ‘right’ to government subsidised choice of schools is another wasteful snout-in-the-trough entitlement
Parents who choose a private school for their child have a ‘right’ to expect governments to help with the costs because they are taxpayers; so the argument goes in Australia. Certainly chief executive of Independent Schools Victoria, Michelle Green, makes such an argument. But where does this so-called ‘right’ come from? Neither Michelle Green nor …
Australia’s most disadvantaged children invisible in official NAPLAN results
It seems simple enough. The idea behind the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing program …
URGENT: we need to act on equity in Australian schools now
There is an equity problem in Australia and we urgently need to talk about it. Christopher Pyne couldn’t …
Reid responds to Donnelly’s “inaccuracies and obfuscations”
My blog of 3/8/2014 was an edited version of the opening statement I made in a debate with …