Federal and state public school funding

You can make statistics say anything. Public school advocates have been pretty noisy in the press lately about federal funding for public schools. It looks like the union hacks have decided what the message is going to be, and the pundits are singing along obediently. It's this: the federal government funds private schools more generously than public schools, and this is Disgusting. I've heard this song in newspaper opinion columns and most recently from the lips of a public school principal appearing on a television debate.

Somehow, they forget to mention that funding public schools is a State responsibility and any Federal funds are a bonus. The federal government could, and probably should, cancel all public school funding right now in an effort to remind people that it's a state responsibility and political pressure should therefore be directed at that level. (Federal funding also comes with a lot of conditions, which I find odious.)

So why do private schools get federal funding? Because the states have historically neglected to fund private schools. Fair enough, I suppose. But in the 1960s (I think) the Catholic education system got in such a financial "situation" that the feds decided to prop it up in the interests of both the kids being educated and the state systems that couldn't possibly cope with the surge if the Catholic schools collapsed.

So who gets what and why? Public schools are funded by State governments. Private schools get some federal money because private school parents are taxpayers who deserve to have some taxpayer money spent on their kids' education. Public schools also get some federal money because – as far as I can tell – the federal government wants to influence education in various ways (flying flagpoles, the teaching of history, displaying "values" posters, school reports) and can only achieve its objectives through bribery.

Now I'm short on the facts (at least I'm honest!) but however you dice it, I'm 99.5% sure that the most important thing remains true: public schools receive significantly more public money per student than private schools. That's as it should be. It doesn't matter whether that public money comes from Canberra or Sydney. I desperately wish that the federal government would take full responsibility for education and implement a transparent funding formula for all schools so that we could have a proper debate about the appropriate balance between public and private school funding. But wishing for a transparent debate sounds naïve given the anything-but-transparent tosh written and spoken by the pundits. As a teacher, I value clear and rational thinking; in this, they disappoint me.

Some related points worth making:

• The pundits are certainly aware of this and are playing a political game to try and extract more money from Canberra for their cause. That's fair enough, in a sense. But as I said, I expect better standards of advocacy from teachers and resent the fact that they play into the stereotypes of teachers being unprofessional third-rate hacks.
• Although I'd like to see government involvement in education simplified and rationalised, I have reservations about the proposed national curriculum. There are certainly positives and negatives there, which may be examined in a future article.
• Another line in The Song goes something like this: federal funding of private schools has declined, as a percentage of all federal education funding, in the 10 years John Howard has been in power. Well, that's because, in that 10 years, we've seen less people going to public schools and more people going to private schools. Simple, isn't it?

Update 19 March: The Sydney Morning Herald has this information in an article today:

Funding for primary and secondary schools for 2009-12 is already $42 billion. The bulk of public school funding comes from the states, with the Federal Government kicking in between 10 and 14 per cent on average.

But independent and private schools are assessed on a complicated mix of socio-economic data, which means some schools are receiving 70 per cent of their funding from the Federal Government.