Mary’s Story
Mary (not her real name), a check-out attendant
in the Queensland ‘education city’
of Toowoomba, wanted to enrol her children in a Catholic school. Her account
came as no surprise - she and her siblings had attended Catholic schools
in an earlier era all their lives – but her partner’s pension in addition
to her part-time income could not bridge the gap between funding and fees
that Catholic schools have come to rely on since the resolution of the state-aid
debate in the 1970s.
Mary approached her parish priest, as her
mother had done in previous times when hardship struck, only to be told
by him that the school would be unaffordable by her. He stated that while
a fee remission was possible in some circumstances, such a thing was purely
temporary as the pressures to resource schools could not allow for some
to attend free of charge while others paid for them.
Consequently, such a remission depended on
the estimation of the school principal, whose responsibility was to assess
the potential of needy parents to pay fees in arrears. Where such fees could
not be paid and threatened to become a bad debt to the school, there was
a possibility of the matter being referred to debt collectors, whose solution
was to confiscate domestic assets, such as cars and furniture, that could
be sold to clear the same bad debts.
Mary reflected that while she understood the
rationale behind such an arrangement, she was not prepared to entertain
it because it placed her children and family in the position of being ‘second-class
citizens’ at the school, dependent on its benevolence in the short-term
and subject to conditions not dissimilar to those ‘deserving poor’ who came
under the scrutiny of bailiffs in Dickensian times. Mary also reflected
that car and furniture ownership of itself constituted an inadequate measure
of wealth and poorly reflected on Catholic education’s capacity to address
complex questions of school funding and resourcing.
Mary likened her position to the ‘persistent
others’ of the gospel accounts who plainly irritated Jesus and his audience
for not fitting within the conventional parameters of their general discourse
on power, its use and abuse. She argued that she and her constituency also
belonged within the cultural cosmos of Christians and others – ‘a little
bit like Aboriginals and homosexuals’, she said – located on the periphery,
and therefore deserving of a voice, as the justice narratives show.
Meeting Mary
Not to be deterred, Mary responded to an invitation
of mine to be part of a doctoral study (The University of Queensland, 2001)
geared to unfurling the labyrinthine knots and other peculiarities that
pass for Commonwealth school funding policy, so as to better understand
and perhaps eventually overcome the terms of what seemed at the time to
be a harsh situation for her and her family, keen on exercising educational
choice but without the financial means to do so.
As the months went by Mary introduced me to
several of her friends and acquaintances, Catholic and otherwise, many of
them in the same predicament. Meanwhile, she observed that up to seventy
percent of places in Catholic schools in the Darling Downs region of Queensland,
and about thirty-five percent nationally, especially in rural Australia,
were ‘taken up’ by non-Catholics.
She noted, in conjunction with my findings
that many of this latter cohort in rural Australia, new to accessing Catholic schooling
for their children, were ‘white-flight’ refugees and others dissatisfied
with the automatic transfer of their children from state primary schools
to public secondary schools.
She reflected that several of these new entrants
to Catholic schooling regarded Catholic schools and similar low-fee others
as being at the more affordable end of the private school market, and that
religious factors played almost no part in their decision to enrol their
children in a Catholic school.
She showed me survey evidence, commissioned
by the Catholic Education Office of the Diocese of Toowoomba, ratifying
such a view. She had no objection to the enrolment of non-Catholics in such
schools, reasoning that her understanding of Catholic schooling was that
it did not equate with ‘schools for Catholics’, and therefore deduced that
their capacity to pay fees was the only difference between her and them.
Mary’s persistence is a little bit different
from most other’s. When I advertised for participants to my research, I
could not have been more blind to the variety of reasons offered by respondents
for choice of secondary schools, and especially the residualising effect
of current policy on those, Catholic or otherwise, dissatisfied with the
absence of secondary school choice for their children, because of their
financial circumstances.
This topic, not central to my own broader
doctoral research (2001) on the resourcing of Catholic schools - a focus
driven by my work over many years into the links between social justice
and Catholic schooling - is currently the focus of a major investigation
by a social anthropologist, Dr Martin Forsey (i), of the University of Western
Australia.
Interpreting Mary’s
story: some social policy questions
Not surprisingly, social policy researchers,
in relation to the links between school improvement and school funding around
the world, are fascinated by the pervasive existence of groups of parents,
keen to access what they regard as a parental right to school choice, but
without the financial capacity to independently exercise such a right.
Mary’s allusion to gender identity was not
after all so far-fetched. Nature, in the particular form of the equilibriating
effects of the free market, does not appreciate or find absolute explanations
for such groups, but to construct them as anomalous, idiosyncratic and opposed
to the increasingly deregulated conditions supporting equal opportunity
and access that currently underpin effective social policy is, in the opinion
of Mary and some of her cohort, a smokescreen for justifying bad or inefficient
and unjust policy and the support of the monopoly power of those, from both
the private and public sectors, who exercise undue influence and control,
disproportionate to their numbers in a democratic society, over the school
funding agenda.
Mary’s judgement makes the current means of
apportioning funding policy between government and independent schools a
temporary one, and begs the question about the longer term removal of existing
protective mechanisms for some funding recipients as people like her search
for more equitable directions in school funding policy.
In this regard her theological position could
be equated with those, like Clifford Longley (ii), Editor of The Tablet,
who see in the advancing free market agenda, an opportunity for Christians
to re-evaluate their role in relation to ameliorating the conditions of
the poor and deprived in an open market economy.
Why, she enquired, had those responsible for
resourcing Catholic schools failed to treat questions of equal educational
opportunity and access within the framework of inclusive education policy?
After all, no school could afford to enrol a disabled child without reference
to appropriate public funding for accessible toilets, ramps, teacher aides
and the like. As with disabled and indigenous learners in relation to special
needs funding, so also with others without the financial means to pay for
a schooling of their choice.
Confronting Mary
The answers to Mary’s question are complex.
Firstly, there is the matter of denial as many onlookers are intent on saying
there is no problem with implementing sound inclusive practices in non-government
schools and thus conspire to keep the topic and its links with school funding
off the agenda of social policy discourse.
For instance, when I took up Mary’s case I
was asked to reveal who Mary was and when I declined, as per the advice
of my university’s ethics committee, who had independently identified and
verified her information, she was referred to variously as a ‘concoction’
or a ‘malcontent’!
Secondly, that there has been some progress
in awareness-raising in this important policy area cannot be denied, but
clearly, in terms of state-aid continuing to be a vexed question, not enough
has been done at a moral and political level to resolve problems of inequitable
state-aid distribution in terms of assisting non-government school providers
meet inclusion policy requirements.
For example, while the provision of schooling
is a states’ right, the Commonwealth’s revenue collection and disbursement
powers, as exercised under Section 96 of the Constitution, create a bifurcated
and forbidding challenge for those who hanker after a national approach
to core social policy with socially just outcomes in health and education.
Thirdly, what has been done has sometimes
not simply delayed arriving at a just solution to the problem but has created
others of its own. The history of Catholic school funding in Australia has shown it to
be startlingly incremental, devoid of long-term re-evaluative strategy and
without benefit of a review of the expression of first principles, especially
those intertwining the moral, theological and economic domains.
My research investigation and attendant data
fell neatly into each one of the above three categories, showing what can
be done if there really is a public will to promote a fair and equitable
solution to the now firmly re-emerged state-aid debate in Australia.
In regard to the second and third points especially,
it became obvious to me from my reading of the literature and interviewing
of several persons involved in the state-aid solution of the 1970s that,
had the tide of public opinion not turned in such a way as to force the
vexed state-aid question onto the social policy agenda, nothing would have
been done at the time to resolve it.
From the mid-Sixties Labor politicians opposed
to state-aid came to realise that their hitherto anti state-aid attitudes
would keep their party out of office in perpetuity and so the healing of
rifts was a necessary solution to the eventual and pragmatic transfer of
Labor into Federal office in 1972.
In other words, the path to good funding policy
was strewn with pitfalls and opportunities, all of them relating to changing
agenda and contexts in Australia and globally, some of them evidently
extraneous to the day to day issues of running a Catholic school, but inadvertently
and sometimes directly influential in funding them!
As a social ethicist I wondered about the
role of Catholic Social Teaching and Vatican II in all of this, but Mary’s
plight and my respondents’ answers alerted me to the probability that morality
had played no role in this arrangement, while pragmatism and the forces
of enlightened self-interest had instead triumphed on all sides.
In this connection Professor Ken McKinnon,
who chaired the Commonwealth Schools Commission in its early years, showed
me evidence that both Prime Minister Whitlam and Education Minister Kym
Beazley (Pere) were fully aware of and understood that a time would come
when ‘needs-based’ formula funding would eventually lead to the ‘full-funding’
of Catholic and similar schools.
I asked if the ethical, policy and economic
implications of such a situation had ever been researched or investigated
to which his reply was that they did not need to be since needs-based funding
policy did not preclude such an eventuality being reached. Indeed such an
offer had been made by the Ryan education ministry during the Hawke prime
ministership but had been turned down.
Amazingly, there are some in Catholic Education
Offices who seek to rewrite history by casting doubt on this event! Instead
they gave me a reply to a question I had not yet asked on Mary’s behalf,
indicating their fear of government control and professing to a belief that
so long as their claims to state aid were restricted to a proportion less
than the cost of administering government schools they were assured of their
independence. They called this safeguarding subsidiarity, but I think its
potential for exploitation and employment as a political strategy did not
deserve this lofty Leonine accolade.
Several pointed to a situation in New Zealand where Catholic
schools had been integrated as part of the fully funded provision of a diverse
public education system, which did not suit the Australian Catholic state-aid
position at the time. I was told that Catholic education in New
Zealand had got a ‘bad deal’ and that evidence relating
to this had been ‘researched and published in Australia’.
I assiduously searched several theological and other compendiums for evidence
of assessments of the moral aspects of this position but to no avail.
Taking up Mary’s cause:
investigating ‘contexts’
I sought to establish if any published research
had been done into the socially just aspects of the New Zealand state-aid settlement but found none,
so I obtained research funding to travel to New Zealand to find out what had happened. Extensive
interviews conducted with New Zealand Education Ministry as well as Church
authorities established that no such research had been done. In investigations
undertaken by people professing good will and, moreover, involving Church
officialdom, high moral principle and a search for solutions, it was proper
that no prisoners be taken and so my findings revealed the following information.
Investigative trips undertaken by various
persons from Australia
had been made but none had assessed the social, political, economic and
moral contexts through which ‘integration’, which has been the New Zealand state-aid solution, had been successfully
brokered. Such contexts locate the brokering of state-aid solutions
within the changing nature of the New Zealand state and its
clear and unambiguous commitment to enhancing deregulation and promoting
consumer choice. There is an illuminating, critical and highly scholarly
literature, some of it theological, for Catholics yet to come to terms with
on this theme.
It made sense therefore for me to regard the
essentially Catholic state-aid dispensation of the 1970s as a temporary
and pragmatic one because no political solution could pretend to be permanent
without regard to similar imperatives sweeping through the Australian body
politic and following global trends thereafter. I deduced that the contexts
in which the ‘integration’ solution or model had been dismissed were inadequate
and restrictive, informing a entelechy that was presumed to be permanent,
whereas no context can ever remain preserved in aspic and devoid of cultural
influence and momentum without risk of atrophy and stagnation.
As a result of this mistake, perhaps itself
a product of theologies driving the National Civic Council and the Democratic
Labor Party, both of which controlled the state aid agenda of the Catholic
Church at the time, the Commonwealth and the Catholic Church had set in
place an arrangement through which the quadrennial apportionment of state-aid
budgets proceeded from a position of bargaining about the margins rather
than from a commitment to reviewing new policy contexts, reflecting
deregulation and impacting on funding for all time.
Meanwhile, the state-aid ‘virus’ had, so to
speak, mutated and new policies of funding and school provision were needed
to ensure the continued and improved health of the Australian school system.
For instance, it became unsustainable to fund Catholic schools at substantial
levels of need and not other independent schools. Policy positions based
originally on meeting narrow, sectional advantage goals such as healing
the rift in the Labor Party and advantaging Catholic schools were clearly
inadequate to deal with the global economic reform agenda!
Why Mary’s entitlement
is yet to be met
Sadly and unsurprisingly, the fragile and
evanescent nature of funding policies of the 1970s, which sought to contain
state-aid to independent schools by advantaging mainly the Catholic sector,
became an inadequate basis on which to address future fiscal realities and
contexts.
Quite simply, pressures to fund other school
providers could not be ignored but could not also be adequately addressed
given the Catholic refusal to budge from their needs-based and somewhat
economically and morally superceded Keynesian wealth-redistributive funding
position. This, in turn, has triggered pressures by systemic Anglican schools
and others to be treated equivalently.
The resulting policy changes, while honouring
some aspects of deregulation, operate within a funding policy context
and structure that the original plaintiffs in the state-aid wars, the Catholics,
and now several others, have insisted on retaining for themselves, viz.
needs-based funding.
Economic deregulation makes nonsense of needs-based
funding, according to Mary’s logic, because it debars Catholic schools from
exploring opportunities to espouse the gospel value of inclusion, dramatically
in contrast to that underpinned by current restrictive mechanisms enforced
by public and private schools and funding policy aficionados on policy and
its effects on what constitutes a caring and inclusive school.
In a day and age in which deregulation would
provide a sound context for honouring parental choice, Mary’s position
shows that the restrictive nature of needs based funding is a mistake because
it ignores the very real advantages deregulation and its attendant imperative
of equal opportunity and access has to offer disenfranchised people like
Mary, who are without benefit of choice because they cannot afford to pay
school fees.
Mary’s rationale for such a position might
appear more Graeco-Roman than Judaeo-Christian in its appeal to democracy
and a theology of human rights but I think her theology is less assailable
than she imagines: deregulated schools and the free market, according to
her, would give all Australians access to a level school playing field,
with funding denied to those rejecting such a democratic, common good notion.
Consequently Mary’s case illustrates how the
hybridised policy solutions of the Coalition and its predecessors have extended
what amounts to aspects of the Catholic schools dispensation to other schools
but without insisting on universal common good requirements of those recipients
to make their schools available to students who cannot afford them by removing
fees.
The reason tendered by the Coalition for not
doing this is that needs-based funding policy supposedly rewards schools
with inadequate resources and the public mood has evidently shifted to assisting
schools that raise a considerable amount of their revenue through fees.
Mary regards this as a narrow Calvinistic position, economically viable
perhaps but without much other virtue: ‘a preferential option for the rich’,
so to speak.
In effect Mary’s predicament is that she falls
between two stools, viz. the needs based / ‘charitable’ / Catholic position
and the enterprise-rewarding / economistic / Treasury attitude, both of
them based on dogmas that do not compare favourably with a contemporary
justice / entitlement-based funding rationale.
Thus, parents like Mary cannot hope to avail
of school choice in such a scenario, which forces them to patronise a state
system that is constructed as deficient in funding policy terms and from
which increasingly substantial portions of public revenue are now removed
to follow students whose parents can afford to enrol them in independent
schools.
How Catholic parents,
like Mary, deserve a better deal
There is now a heightened awareness on the
part of all parents that they have rights and that such rights when exercised
in respect of school choice notionally lead to better schools with improved
educational outcomes for all children. However, as my investigation on Mary’s
behalf shows, the exercise of such rights is currently only available to
those parents with the capacity to pay fees. This is both a political as
well as a moral issue.
Where independent schools cater for the needs
of those sections of society for whom educational attainment is long overdue,
such as Indigenous Australians, my investigations on the basis of Mary’s
claims reveal that such cohorts do not have equal rights of access to educational
choice but instead must rely on benevolence and charity and therefore on
dispensatory arrangements that do not provide pathways towards inclusion
within the mainstream culture of Catholic and other independent schools.
Notwithstanding the recent suggestions of
Mr Noel Pearson, Professor Marcia Langton and others, there is no evidence
that Catholic and other independent schools would be able to cope with enrolments
from large numbers of Indigenous students without significant alterations
to their funding, their resource base, their curriculum and their culture.
In itself, such a proposition poses a huge theological challenge to the
inclusiveness of Catholic schools.
Indigenous students, where they seek a Catholic
education in large numbers, are consequently catered for in Youth and Community
Learning Centres in parts of Queensland
and other alternative schooling arrangements, sometimes located alongside
or in close proximity to established mainstream Catholic schools but with
no connection to them. This highlights the selective and exclusive nature
of Catholic schools, despite their protestations to the contrary, according
to Mary.
My sleuthing further showed that, notwithstanding
the generous and rewarding work that such Centres do, they do not attract
mainstream educational funding support, constantly struggle to be cyclically
funded from other sources, and offer no possibility of inclusion within
mainstream Australian Catholic or any other form of schooling. In other
words, they constitute a charitable foundation, unsuited to the modus operandi
of Catholic schooling in new contextual times.
Such a modus operandi, demonstrating the replacement
of a social policy-literate view by an stop-gap one, committed to band-aiding
rather than mainstreaming in this important aspect of Catholic educational
provision, opposed to major trends in the development of an inclusive education
of the last decade (on grounds of undue hardship), and insufficiently reflective
of plural and diverse developments in Australian culture as well as of the
important public value in equal opportunity Catholic school provision, is
plainly ill-equipped to serve the needs of Catholic parents as well as the
polity.
In Australian state-aid terms this means that
while people with modest incomes are now more able to exercise school-choice
rights for their children, countless others are not able to do so because
the logic of the deregulatory process has not been implemented far enough
to assist them on account of there being no requirement for recipient schools
to lower their fees in proportion to their public funding.
The resulting funding policy hybridisation
ensures that only a few pick up the funds the government has to offer and
use them to change from the public to the private sector where they perceive
that they get a better deal. Whether they will or not is not the point,
insists Mary. It’s the policy, according to her, that is ethically as well
as economically flawed.
That parents would then have the choice to
break the monopoly power of school providers is profoundly morally important
for Mary as no one knows better than parents what they want for their children.
Equally, that some people like Mary have no choice other than to move from
one shop, so to metaphorically speak, to another but within the same
monopoly-provider chain, is unsatisfactory and a denial of their entitlement
to decide what constitutes a quality education for their children.
What Catholic parents
can do to influence funding policy
There are some global precedents in place
through which this choice-based entitlement is honoured within a framework
of public accountability. In large parts of the OECD, Catholic and other
‘universal-provision’ type schools are fully funded so as to give people
like Mary access to school choice without their having to agitate about
it as they invariably must do every quadrennium and before elections in
Australia.
However I found that in Australia there are still
people, ostensibly supportive of free choice, who believe that such an entitlement
would only come with strings attached, such as government control of Catholic
schools, which can only be off-set by the regrettable resort to payment
of ‘top-up’ fees to meet costs. Even Mary could see that this was an excuse
because it had little or no understanding of changing contexts in
relation to deregulation! ‘It’s that word you said’, she insisted, reducing
me to untypically monosyllabic silence!
In my testing of Mary’s claims I also discovered
that there were some Catholic schools, who used to state that their forms
of means-testing meant that fee-affordability should never be a sole reason
for enrolment in Catholic school, now claiming that the enrolment of substantial
number of non-Catholics made Catholic schools affordable for Catholics in
several parts of Australia. To Mary this was a dishonest use of what I term
‘extrinsic rethink’ to justify an abandonment of capped ‘non-Catholic student
enrolment’ policies of yesteryear!
In fact, within the substantial Catholic school
sector my research records the facile use of free-market practices in school
provision and resourcing, such as the tendency of some order-owned and congregational
schools to invest their social and cultural capital to establish their positional
advantage over diocesan systemic schools, through increasing enrolments
and expanding into middle-schooling, thus making a nonsense of their averred
firm collective commitment to the common good of all, and in particular
that of neighbouring parish schools.
Worst of all, the slow pace of deregulation
ensures that the slight suffered by aspirant parents who genuinely believe
that the state school of their preference is the best and who have made
considerable sacrifices to travel or shift into its catchment remains manifestly
unaddressed because good state schools are often located in suburbs that
are outside the reach and affordability of others. Furthermore, living as
she must in a low socio-economic location, Mary has no access to such a
facility.
In effect, all public education comes to be
tarnished with the undeserved and graffiti-daubing brush that the Prime
Minister has sometimes employed to deface the reputation of public schools
for not teaching ‘values’, instead of investing his energies in the construction
of a better and more equitable school funding policy for all Australians,
itself the necessary foundation for the critical values transmission
that underpins all quality education (Hill, 2004).
In short my findings depressingly show that
there’s nothing more distracting than digging deep into the armoury of useless
and debunked myths from a classist past to avoid a commitment to exercising
good policy sense and just and courageous leadership to address one of Australia’s
most suppurating policy sores, viz. a permanent resolution to the state-aid
debate, which risks the emergence of a kind of confessional politics that
most Catholic theologians would resist as inimical to the alignment of faith
and culture.
The use of the policy cycle approach to doing
this every four years is a hindrance because it coincides with elections
and polarises an issue on which all citizens of goodwill, from all walks
of life and at all governmental levels, should otherwise be able to reach
agreement. Dr Vince FitzGerald, in his seminal Report to the Victorian Government,
‘Governments Working Together: A Better Future for All Australians’ (2004)
has developed a blueprint for how this can be done.
In fact Mary and her confreres were deeply
disheartened by what she described as a ‘blatantly partisan’ use in the
2004 Federal election of a joint Anglican-Roman Catholic Episcopal statement
from Sydney and Melbourne on school-funding questions, while the Australian
Catholic Bishops’ stunning reflection on several other issues facing the
electorate was palpable ignored by the media.
A theological context
for changing funding policy to include Mary
And yet in many senses the journey towards
inclusive and choice-driven school provision cannot be aborted because it
is the only way to apply the principles of equality, inclusiveness, liberty
and democratic entitlement to the resolution of the historic state-aid debate
in new times.
And the way to proceed, as Mary insists, is
to bring Catholic systemic schools and similar others into a fully-funded,
fee-free, school funding arrangement, available to all parents from all
walks of life and to have no truck with current monopoly providers in the
public sector who are intractably opposed to state-aid, as well as privileged
groups in the private sector who won’t use their funding to make their schools
more accessible.
In Mary’s terms, the current partisan battle
over state-aid policy between the private and public sectors, with insufficient
attention as to how major recipients on both sides plan to use funding to
honour the equal entitlement of all Australians to an inclusive education
of their choice, is a scandal, restrictive of the entitlements of all Australians,
and a social injustice crying out to be redressed.
Seen in this light, the continued struggle
for good funding policy for her is a matter of social justice, and, as Mary’s
illustrious namesake tellingly prophesied, for such a justice vision to
be realised, ‘the mighty will be toppled from their thrones, the lowly exalted,
the hungry filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty-handed’!
Notes:
(i) Martin Forsey’s research attempts to test assumptions
underpinning changes in school funding policy by deconstructing parental
reasons for school choice. In the ABC
Radio National Life Matters Program called 'Changing School Systems' Dr
Forsey and a parent of children at Catholic schools was interviewed by the
program producer, Julie McCrossin, Wednesday, March 16, 2005
(ii) Clifford Longley is the principal author of ‘Prosperity With
A Purpose: Christians and the Ethics of Affluence’, produced by Christian
Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, and in connection with which he
was interviewed by Noel Debien of ABC Radio National’s Religion Report,
March 16, 2005
References:
FitzGerald, V. Governments
Working Together: A Better Future for All Australians, Report to the
Premier and Cabinet of the State of Victoria,
The Allen Consulting Group, McLaren Press, Abbotsford, 2004.
Furtado, M. Funding
Australian Catholic Schools for the Common Good in New Times: Policy Contexts,
Policy Participants and Theoretical Perspectives, Unpublished PhD
Thesis, University of Queensland, St Lucia, 2001.
Hill,
B. Keynote Address: www.curriculum.edu.au/values/news2004.htm,
National Values Education Forum, Melbourne, April 28, 2004.
furtadoml@yahoo.com.au
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