digging around

A newspaper reported that the OECD Report on Intergenerational Social Mobility found Australia’s education system was the third worst in the developed world for contributing to social mobility.  This fed into my biases about the ineffectiveness of school.  School’s on-going reputation as  *the* mechanism for social justice, creating “equal opportunity”, is baffling, when all around we see it doing such a brilliant job of perpetuating the status quo.  Surprise surprise, doctor’s kids have a good chance of becoming doctors, and Centrelink kids don’t.

The problem here is the flawed belief that an institution can function as a change agent.  It can’t.  The only change agent out there is another person- and in some cases an heroic teacher can be that person.  But here, the institution of school works against any developing mentor relationships, as at the end of the year, you get another teacher.  And on the side of the coin, this structure itself can preclude teachers making major investments in their relationships with the children in their class, as they know that the end of the relationship is already proscribed. 

Anyway, I pulled up the report and have to confess that I struggled with it because it’s full of economic jargon and tables that are too small to read on my PC.  But I got enough to realise that the journo at the Oz had got it wrong, and that Australia’s system is comparatively good at facilitating social mobility – comparatively, not in absolutes –  because the UK, USA and southern Europe have virtually no social mobility (even though everyone goes to school).

This research supports *early* intervention/care/education as the best way to overcome social disadvantage.  So this is not news.  Everything you read says that if you want to make a difference in kid’s lives you have to get in there early (80 – 90% of the brain synapse connections are made from age 0 – 3)  Policy makers just can’t seem to come up with wholistic ways to do this.  They continue to direct their efforts at school – starting at kindy when the kids turns 4!  If you believed they had the nous to be that organised, you’d think it was a deliberate plot *not* to make a difference in the lives of disadvantaged children.

Further, it confirms my view that school is designed for and by the middle classes/elites.  It serves their children well – it’s obviously designed as a neat continuum from a middle class infancy, and if you didn’t get that, well, you struggle.  And I note that the good economists at the OECD recommend investment in early intervention for disadvantaged groups rather than re-designing school to work for non-elites.   I mean, we wouldn’t want to change what is working is working perfectly well for us, would we?  Worse, we don’t seem to have the imagination to know that it could even *be* different.

 The report finds that in many cases, it is the average socio-economic standing of the school’s parent group, rather than the socio-economic standing of the individual child’s parents, that is the key to a child’s own socio-economic outcomes after school.   This one’s pretty interesting, and I guess is behind the push for aboriginal kids to go to flash boarding schools….. but obviously this is only ever going to be the solution for a minority of disadvantaged kids, as it’s a numbers game.  If a whole bunch of disadvantaged kids rock up to Geelong Grammar, then they are bringing down the average.   I gather that this is also the argument for a school voucher system…  if you can’t afford to buy a house in a rich area and thereby get your kids into the local state school where the other rich neighbourhood kids go, you should be able to buy your way into these schools with your vouchers. 

Anyway, I guess that makes it clear what you are actually buying when you spend money on a private school…. and the more money you spend the more you are putting your child into an environment where chances are all the parents are filthy rich, and somehow – by osmosis – but the best I can think of (and I couldn’t find analysis in the report as to *why* this finding holds) is that if most of the parents are uni-educated and rich, then this is the value system that the child is being exposed to and so they work hard to fit in with that peer group.  Is it that the dominant value system of the school community is a key driver of individual outcomes?

This makes sense, and is supported by all the research that says that in our society teenagers are more influenced by their peers than their parents – and the main reason for this is that they spend far more time with the former than the latter.  That is actually the community within which they have to function, rather than the community of parents/adults.

And is the reason for the high academic results (though I haven’t seen any research on subsequent adult socio-economic outcomes) achieved by some of the charter schools in the US working with disadvantaged groups?  That the seeming inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm of the (young) individual principals/teachers involved is able to oust the general malaise?

On a related topic, I see that in her quest to have more students from low socio-economic backgrounds get to university, Julia Gillard is starting to try to break the link between school results (TER & similar) and university entrance.  (An acknowledgement that the school system can’t  deliver equitable outcomes?)  In Victoria they are are trialling new ways of offering university places – focusing on aptitude tests and interviews and portfolios of work. ( All good news for people who don’t bother to go to school by the way)  I see that the President of the Australian Secondary School Association (of something like that) is all in favour of this, as he feels that the focus on university entrance severely limits the “meanings” of post-compulsory education.  Unfortunately the only other “meaning” he mentioned in the interview was vocational training.

Well, this is all half-baked I’m afraid.  I’ve had it sitting in draft thinking I’ll have time to clear my thinking, but I have just seen that Noel Pearson has pipped me to the post in the latest Quarterly Essay - on “Education and Equality in Australia”. (!!)  The title?  “Radical Hope”.  Anyway, I’m off to find a decent newsagent & I’m hoping to be inspired!