Pasi Sahlberg: Are Australian students receiving the school education they deserve?

Writing for the ABC, Pasi Sahlberg discusses how inequality in education is pushing Australia's education system away from being "admired by many countries as a forward-looking and inspiring model for them".

School funding is a highly emotional subject for many people; particularly for parents who, very understandably, want to provide their children the best opportunities in life. This in part explains the rise in support for "school choice" which gives priority to the ability of parents to choose where their children go to school. Again, in part, this has supported the Coalition's ideological goal of pushing more funding to the private rather public education sector.

The problem with school choice is not that all parents, and by extension not all students, have that same choice. Students with parents living on or near the minimum wage don't have the same choices open to them as students with parents earning wages in the middle or higher end of the scale.

The argument often given for school choice is that parents who work hard should be able to provide advantage to their children. This is fair enough but there has to be a limit. Does that mean other children should be left to be disadvantaged because their parents can't or won't do the same for them? The extremity of this argument perpetuates generational advantage and disadvantage.

Sahlberg's article highlights some of the implications of Australia's current funding approach for schooling while offering some possible solutions. Counting the cost of the education revolution, also by the ABC, gives more insight into education funding in Australia and how it has changed over the past decade.