Some proposals for change to the role of the catholic sector in the Australian school funding policy process |
| |
Authors: | Michael Furtado |
| |
Institution: | 1. Boyce Furtado Education Consultants, Australia
|
| |
Abstract: | This paper is set against a history of school funding policies in Australia that begins with the first public policy recognition
of the disadvantages experienced by government and non-government schools in the 1973 Schools in Australia (Karmel) Report.
The paper traces a history of school funding policy linking it with the current backlash against public education and retaliatory
backlash constructions of public schools as the new disadvantaged in an increasingly competitive and deregulated school funding
policy environment. These backlashes, argued to be against the indiscriminate funding of independent schools policy by several
protagonists of public education, are framed in terms equivalent to what Lingard and Douglas (1999) have called ‘recuperative’
politics. From the kind of recuperative statist politics considered in this paper, construing the backlash effects of public
and private schools as damaging and unproductive as those emerging from the gender wars in education policy, I propose a move
to an Australian school funding arrangement in which all schools, both public and private, are integrated into one deregulated
and equally funded sector, as typify diverse school provisions in several OECD polities (Caldwell 2004, FitzGerald 2004).While
briefly tracing a school funding policy chronology, this paper also concentrates on the current policy moment in relation
to school funding, that signals the end of distinctive public and private education sectors, and in the context of which it
argues that private schools should be funded equally to state schools, a trend in evidence since 1996. The focus on the current
policy moment entails an abbreviated analysis of the Fitzgerald Report (‘Governments Working Together: A Better Future for
All Australians’ 2004), which makes a number of recommendations to the Victorian and other governments in relation to the
public funding of all Australian schools1. The paper addresses the impact of this trend especially on the funding of Australian Catholic schools. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|