The local school is in decline, reducing social cohesion

I love living in my suburb. I shop locally, just so I can run across friends and neighbours on a Saturday morning, and be greeted with a smile – even a name – by shopkeepers who know me.

I figure the best ways to get to know people in your suburb is to own a dog – you get to talk to other dog-owners as you stand around in the local park – and send your kids to the local school. You can't help getting to know the other parents in your kids' classes.

But all that was some years ago, and times change. The local school isn't the institution it used to be.

Perhaps it won't surprise you to be told that, over the years, our capital cities have become more stratified, with a greater tendency for better-off people to live in better-off suburbs – the ones with water and views and, these days, those closest to the centre – and for the less well-off to live in less well-off suburbs far from the centre.

This is most true of Sydney, then Melbourne – which is catching up with Sydney in size – but less true of the other capitals.

But maybe this will surprise: something similar is happening to our schools, particularly secondary schools.

We have a widening divide between the schools attended by the offspring of better-educated, better-off parents, and those attended by, well, the not so well educated and paid.

This is happening partly in consequence of the increasing stratification of suburbs, but also because of the education policies pursued by federal and state governments.

Unlike almost all other rich economies, Australia runs three school systems rather than one.

This array has tempted us to treat school as though it was a market, where government, Catholic and independent schools compete for youthful customers, thus providing parents with greater choice and obliging government schools to lift their game.

John Howard was big on choice. Julia Gillard left Howard's pro-choice funding arrangements running until Labor's last year, while emphasising competition between schools.

She introduced the NAPLAN testing of literacy and numeracy and, to ensure parents were well-informed before making their choice, she introduced the My School website, loaded with detailed information about every school.

We got a lot of choice, but no improvement in measured performance. Moral: schools aren't a market.

One benefit, however, is that researchers can collate the My School data to give us a much clearer picture of what's happening to our schools. Leaders in this research are two retired high school principals, Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd.

Everyone knows there's been a decades-long drift of students from government to non-government schools.

What our not-so-retired principals have discovered, however, is that this has masked a big shift from schools with low socio-educational advantage to those with high socio-educational advantage. (A school's socio-educational advantage is rated largely according to the socio-economic status of its students.)

My School shows that, over the five years to 2015, average enrolments at all schools grew by more than five students a year. But enrolments at schools with high socio-educational advantage grew by an average of 11 students a year, whereas enrolments at disadvantaged schools grew by just more than one student a year.

When choosing schools, many of us think of a hierarchy of excellence – in teaching and results – running from government to Catholic to independent. But that's just what you see on the packet. (Echoed by the prices of the packets.)

Studies estimate that 78 per cent of the variance in the performance of schools is explained by differences in their socio-educational advantage – that is, by the socio-economic status of their students.

Independent schools tend to get good exam results because most of their students come from well-educated families. Catholic schools get better results than you might expect because the days when their classrooms were full of working class kids are long gone.

You'd expect this to mean public schools increasingly full of disadvantaged kids getting poor results. True, but they retain a higher proportion of advantaged students than you'd expect.

Why? Partly because public schools in posh suburbs still have lots of smart kids, but mainly because – particularly in Sydney and, to a lesser extent, Melbourne – state authorities have responded to the demand for greater "choice" by creating more selective schools.

But this means greater stratification on the basis of socio-economic status even within the government system, coming at the expense of disadvantaged government schools.

Choice, however, isn't available to all parents. To have a choice you need either brains or money (which usually comes with brains attached).

The vogue for choice has also allowed greater stratification of students on the basis of religion. These days, Jewish kids go to Jewish schools, Muslim kids go to Muslim schools and Baptist and Pentecostal kids go to "Christian" schools.

Trouble is, high socio-educational advantage schools aren't always located in high-status suburbs. So these days, a lot more traffic congestion is caused by a lot more students and parents travelling longer distances to and from school.

Leading to the decline of the local school. Less than a third of schools now have an enrolment that resembles the people in their local area.

Sounds a great way to reduce the nation's social cohesion.

What did the rich kid say to the poor kid? Nothing. They never met.

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Private schools becoming less fashionable

It's drawn little comment, but the decades-long drift of students from government to non-government schools has ended.

Figures released by the Bureau of Statistics last month show that 65 per cent of our 3.8 million students went to public schools in 2016, the same proportion as in 2013. If anything, the public-school share is creeping up.

The non-government share divides between Catholic systemic schools with 20 per cent and independent schools with less than 15 per cent. I'll refer to both as private schools.

But the public schools' 65 per cent today is down from 79 per cent in 1977.

Let's start by trying to explain those many years of drift before we wonder about why it's stopped.

When Ipsos Public Affairs asked people why they thought other people sent their kids to private schools, the most commonly cited reasons included the higher standard of education (50 per cent), the better discipline (49 per cent), the better facilities (46 per cent), the size of classes (43 per cent) and because it's a status symbol (40 per cent).

Almost uniquely among other developed countries, Australian parents have a much higher proportion of private schools to choose, and have been given greater freedom to choose between government schools.

Successive federal and state governments have seen greater parental choice between public and private as a virtue, and have encouraged it by increasing their combined grants to private schools at a much faster rate than their funding of public schools.

But I have my own theory on why so many people have opted for private schooling. I think a lot of it gets down to parental guilt.

These days families have much fewer children, which means parents take a lot more active interest in their kids' schooling than they did when I was the last of four.

And these days both parents are more likely be in paid work – meaning they have more money to spend, but see less of their kids than their parents did.

So what more natural than for parents to believe that, in their decisions about how to spend their income, ensuring their kids get the best education possible should have high priority.

And what's more natural in our market economy than to assume that the more you have to pay for something, the higher quality it's likely to be.

It's the old male cop-out, spread to women: I may not see as much of my kids as I'd like to, but I'm working night and day so I can afford to give them the best of everything.

The more materialist you are, the more you're inclined to judge a school by the quality of its facilities – gyms and swimming pools, music, art and drama theatres – than by the quality of its teachers.

Of course, the former is, as economists say, much more "observable" than the latter.

But whatever people give as their reasons for preferring private schools, you'll never convince me they're not well aware of the status they gain by sending their kids to private schools, especially independent schools.

Private schools are among the things economists classify as "positional goods" – they reveal your position in the pecking order.

But what's changed? Why has the drift to private schools come to an end?

One possibility is that the slow wage growth of recent years has made it harder for parents to afford private school fees.

This may be particularly the case for independent schools, where the rate of increase in fees from year to year bears little relationship to rate at which teachers' salaries are rising.

Nor does the rate at which government grants have been growing seem to have had much effect in slowing the rate at which independent school fees have grown. (The extra government grants may have gone into improving schools' facilities.)

My guess is that, as economic textbooks predict, independent school fees rise according to what the market will bear. They judge how strongly demand for their product is growing relative to supply by the length of their waiting lists.

In any case, keeping the cost of independent schooling high is an essential element in maintaining its status as a positional good.

Another possible contributor to the end of the drift to private schools is the decision of state governments – particularly NSW governments – to increase the number of places at selective schools. Why pay fees when you can get what you want inside the government system?

As a parent who's had one of each – independent and selective – I can assure you selective schooling works well as an (intellectual) positional good.

But there's one last possible contributor to the end of the trend to private schools: maybe parents are realising that paying all those fees doesn't buy your kid superior academic results along with their old school tie.

Julia Gillard's My School website has done little to encourage greater competition between schools (a silly idea she got from economists), but it has provided a fabulous database for education researchers.

Various researchers have used it to demonstrate that the best predictor of children's academic results is the socio-economic status (including level of educational attainment) of their parents.

And when you take account of parents' socio-economic status, there's little evidence that kids of similar backgrounds do any better academically at one kind of school than another.

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How we can get better school results

Have you noticed how our politicians, asked to explain or defend their policy on X will, within a sentence or two, switch to expounding on what's wrong with their opponents' supposed policy?

The sad truth is they much prefer scoring cheap political points and blame-shifting to getting on with developing policies to deal with the various problems the nation faces.

Coming up is policy on schools. We'll be hearing a lot on federal funding of schools in a few weeks when Education Minister Simon Birmingham debates the matter at a meeting with his state counterparts.

I've been boning up on schools in preparation for delivering the Australian College of Educators' Jean Blackburn Oration in Melbourne last week. Here's a taste.

The government keeps telling us the problem with schooling is that, for so many years, we spent more and more on school education and the results did not improve. In fact, they got worse.

Well, the last bit's certainly right.

As summarised by Trevor Cobbold, of Save Our Schools, a public schools lobby group, our results on the OECD's program for international student assessment, PISA, have fallen significantly over the past 15 years. We remain one of the high-performing countries in reading and science, but our maths results have slipped to about average.

The results show continuing declines in the proportion of students at the most advanced levels and also significant increases in the proportion of students below the international standard. This includes high proportions of low socio-economic status, Indigenous, provincial and remote-area students.

We get an even more worrying picture from the results of the national assessment program – literacy and numeracy, NAPLAN.

Peter Goss and colleagues, of the Grattan Institute, have pioneered the technique of converting NAPLAN results into "years of progress", using the results of Victorian students.

They note first that the NAPLAN “national minimum standards” are set very low. A year 9 student can meet this standard even if they are performing below the typical year 5 student – that is, four years behind their peers.

They find that the spread of student achievement from highest to lowest more than doubles as students move through school. Low achieving students fall ever further back. They are two years and eight months behind in year 3, but three years and eight months behind by year 9.

Students in disadvantaged schools make about two years less progress between year 3 and year 9 than similarly capable students in high-advantaged schools.

And get this: bright students in disadvantaged schools show the biggest learning gap. High achievers in year 3 make about 2½ years less progress by year 9 than if they had attended a high-advantage school.

Great. But what about the government's claim to have been spending more and more on schools? Birmingham keeps saying that federal funding has increased by 50 per cent since 2003.

This is highly misleading, particularly since what matters is total school funding, coming from both federal and state governments.

According to Cobbold's fact checking, the real increase in total government spending per student over the nine years to 2013-14 was just 4.5 per cent.

There's more. Although the non-government sector enrols less than 20 per cent of all disadvantaged students, the nine-year increase for non-government schools was 9.8 per cent, whereas the increase for government schools was only 3.3 per cent.

So, does spending more money buy better school performance? Not if you spend it on more of the wrong things.

The truth is that we haven't been spending a lot more in recent times but, in any case, much of what we have been spending hasn't been spent effectively.

Between the federal and state governments, we've given more to advantaged schools than don't need it, at the expense of disadvantaged schools that do need it.

When you study the standardised test results, the answer to how the money could be spent more effectively – that is, in a way that increases the probability it will produce better school performance – leaps out at you: we need to spend more per student on disadvantaged schools and less per student on advantaged schools, where parents have demonstrated their willingness to supplement the school's finances by paying fees.

In other words, the obvious way to make government spending on schools more cost-effective is to put it on a needs basis.

We'll know soon enough whether Birmingham has made any progress on that, or has succumbed to pressure from non-government schools following that less-than Christ-like motto: "For unto every one that hath shall be given".

But though it would help to direct more of the funding to schools with more of the disadvantaged students, we need to ensure schools spend whatever they get as effectively as possible.

One new technique that research says would improve outcomes is "targeted teaching".

One of its advocates, Goss of the Grattan Institute, says teachers should be provided with the time, tools and training they need to collect robust evidence of student learning, discuss it with other teachers, and use it to target their teaching to the wide range of student learning needs in their classroom.

Higher achieving students should be stretched, lower achieving students should be supported to catch up, and no student who stalls should go unnoticed, he says.

The school fosters a culture of progress, in which teachers, students and parents see learning success as being about effort and improvement, not ability and attainment. And see assessment as a way to improve, not to expose student failures.

The best schools in Australia are not necessarily those with the best ATAR or NAPLAN scores, but those that enable their students to make the greatest progress in learning. The goal is for each student to have made at least a year's worth of progress every year, Goss concludes.

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