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eBook details

• Title: Editorial (School Funding Policy) (Editorial)
• Author : Australian Journal of Education
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 171 KB

Description

Policy on schools funding in Australia has long contained two mutually contradictory strands and the contradiction has subverted good policy making. The first strand is the development of fair and objective technical instruments for the measurement of funding entitlements--systems common to all schools and sectors. The outstanding example of this tradition in policy making was the work of the 1973 Karmel committee, extended further in the mid-1980s reassessment of funding needs by the then Commonwealth Schools Commission. The Karmel committee was less Olympian than government system-builders often are it gathered a significant volume of data on the day-to-day problems of schools, so that it was closer to the felt needs of schools serving needy communities than were their own system administrators. On the whole, this perspective was maintained by the Commonwealth Schools Commission that followed the Karmel committee (1974-1988), at least for most of its history. The Commission was the highpoint of national policy making and policy implementation on schools in Australia, and it deserves more attention from students of policy, and latter-day policy makers and administrators, than it has so far received. The Schools Commission was not free of government manipulation or interest group advocacy. Its meetings were often contested. But it was not solely reducible to these elements. Most members of the Commission and of its secretariat also had their eyes on educational improvement--they wanted this to be universalised, while they also focused first on the areas of greatest need. However the Schools Commission continually found itself subverted by the second strand in policy making on schools funding, that of electoral politics. This second strand in policy making has been too often dominant since state aid to non-government schools was first announced by the Menzies coalition government in the lead-up to the 1963 election. Menzies won that election easily, and his political craft on the question of schools funding--he succeeded in capturing an increased proportion of Catholic votes and split the Labor Party--was reckoned a key factor in his electoral success. It was a fatal lesson. Since then, too many funding decisions have been determined by the politics of buying and the rewarding of political supporters and constituencies. Thus the motives for devising funding allocations have been hopelessly mixed. Honest attempts to devise fair and workable systems for calculating needs and allocating scarce government dollars have been subverted.

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