Australia's inequitable education system

A feature by Adele Horin in the Sydney Morning Herald of December 2-3 had me nodding my head:

Yet again schools are under the gun. The Howard Government hardly lets a month go by without finding new reasons to deplore what is taught in schools.

There were the wrong values, the wrong approach to Shakespeare, the wrong slant on history, and then geography got a bashing for being too "environmental". Schools sent out the wrong kind of report card. And not enough schools were flying the Australian flag, until the Government provided the financial incentive to do so.

But all this invective is a smokescreen to hide what is really wrong with our education system. It is not that schools are turning out dumbos. On the contrary.

Our students in general are high performers. Of children from 27 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Australian 15-year-olds on average ranked second in literacy, sixth in mathematics and fourth in problem-solving in international tests in 2000 and 2003.

No, the problem is the system lets down youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds. For all our pride in being egalitarian, our education system and the way it is organised and financed is unfair compared to many others.

Unpicking the test results reveals that who your parents are and how well off your family is counts for more in Australia than elsewhere.

School systems in Canada, Ireland, Finland, Korea, Iceland, Sweden, Austria, Norway and Japan have managed to ameliorate the effects of class and social background much better than the Australian system. And they have done so without sacrificing high performance, says Professor Barry McGaw, a former director of education at the OECD, now at the University of Melbourne.

Read Adele Horin's full comments here.