On Educational Disadvantage

It is rare that a politician refers to education without pledging to reduce “educational disadvantage”. Yet the same speeches will be made next year as well. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recently reported that the gap in average educational achievement between students from the lowest and highest socioeconomic groups in Australia remains at close to three years of schooling. Why is this? Not because of high class sizes: Australia’s are among the best in the world. And not because of lack of resources: even before the Rudd government’s bizarre “Building the Education Revolution” program began, Australia was high among the nations in educational spending.

There are three main types of possible educational disadvantage: individual, family and institutional.

Individual. Individual disadvantages, such as defects in hearing, sight, co-ordination and the rest, can occur in any family. Their incidence has been reduced over several decades, largely because of better medical knowledge, despite the higher survival rate of babies born with defects. Until the 1970s, “special schools” made important contributions to improving the life chances of children with physical and mental problems. Then many special schools were closed and their students moved to all-purpose schools in order to promote “inclusiveness” and to raise “self-esteem” in students with handicaps.

In all-purpose schools, visiting specialist teachers sometimes assist class teachers in the one classroom, or students move outside their regular classrooms for special help, thereby losing continuity with the regular curriculum.

Many disadvantaged students now feel less satisfaction when they make good progress than they might otherwise, because a gap between their new level of achievement and that of most of their classmates remains. Particularly in mixed ability classes, teachers without specialist knowledge of various disadvantages face unnecessarily severe instructional difficulties.

Family. There are high correlations between family structures and levels of educational achievement and conduct. Although family wealth is important in influencing children’s futures, cultural factors are even more powerful: in Australia coal miners have higher average earnings than schoolteachers, but teachers are more highly educated and their children have on average the higher educational achievement.

Frank discussion of some family attributes is rare. There is fear of being accused of “blaming the victims” if it is pointed out, for example, that children from intact two-parent families have on average fewer emotional and behavioural problems and do better in school than children of single-parent or fractured families. Yet there is also a high demand for extra support for such families because their children are in fact disadvantaged.

Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy argued that expansion of educational opportunity may actually increase occupational and locality disparities in educability. Until three or so generations ago there were very limited job opportunities for most working-class school leavers. Most boys would get jobs in mines, factories, foundries, dockyards, farms and so on, and most girls jobs in factories and “service”. Thus there were many clever people working in manual trades and living in working-class districts. From their ranks came capable trade union and labour leaders, pastors and lay preachers, comedians, singers and actors, as well as skilled tradesmen and women. Now most of our clever children enter careers to which their grandparents had little access. Their upward career mobility is often accompanied by residential mobility, so that disparities between schools in contrasting localities become greater.

As well as the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, there are countervailing factors, such as immigration of able adults and children. The immigrant children start their new lives here in the less attractive neighbourhoods and so energise many of our schools. The clever, enterprising and industrious children among them soon seize educational opportunity and become upwardly mobile, so that the overall trend towards greater area differentiation continues. Immigration of wealthy families with very high aspirations for their children, from whom they expect, and usually receive, concentrated effort, also strengthens area disparities in education. As does the settlement of immigrant groups that find it difficult to cope with very different conditions of life from those in their countries of origin.

Institutional. Increased expenditure and provision of better facilities are likely to increase average educational standards and are thus to be welcomed, but they may also increase gaps between highest and lowest achievers. A grand piano and an array of musical instruments in every classroom will raise the performance levels of the musically interested, but will have little effect on the indifferent. The same goes for language laboratories, sports coaching and so on.

New distinctive “youth cultures” and the penetration into homes of spectacles of ever more extreme violence and sexual stimulation have made parental and teacher guidance increasingly difficult to provide, even by those willing and able to provide it. Furthermore, many teachers, in the belief either that schools are instruments of repressive “social control” or that children deserve greater personal freedom, encourage permissiveness. Yet the conduct of students is a key factor in increasing or decreasing educational disadvantage. In some schools, even in some classrooms within one school, the average teacher has a fair chance of success, whereas in others this is not so.

More and more is asked of schools, but many have insufficient power or authority to fulfil existing tasks, let alone take on more. It is little wonder that more teachers and principals have breakdowns and take early retirements than in the past, or that fewer graduates in shortage subjects are willing to enter a life that includes too much insult and stress, when they could work in more tranquil atmospheres in laboratories and offices.

Before the 1970s it was generally accepted that a prime purpose of compulsory education was to increase “cultural capital”. This aim assumed that some cultures are superior to others. Major radicals opposed this idea, partly because they saw it as an illegitimate form of “social control” and partly because they considered all cultures to be of equal value. The culture of the home was to be replicated in the school, not transformed by education.

Progressive policies such as reducing direct instruction and providing instead more group activities and individual assignments proved damaging for many students, especially those who had limited experiences that they could employ and depended on their schools for initiation into significant knowledge that cannot be picked up through day-by-day experience.

Another type of alleged educational disadvantage is extensively targeted. This attack is often confused: on the one hand it is asserted that government schools are just as good, if not better, on average than independent schools (which once they were); on the other hand that children attending government schools are ipso facto disadvantaged. This issue increasingly concerns teacher unions, as more parents are choosing non-government schools. Many such parents fear turbulent classrooms and slack instruction. 

Reverse discrimination 

If parity of representation is a prime educational priority, then “reverse discrimination” is the best way to achieve it. In Tsarist Russia the numerus clausus limited the number of Jews who could enter the universities, so Jews needed higher entry qualifications than non-Jews. A century later in the United States there were minimum quotas for Black students, who could thus enter universities with lower marks than non-Black Americans, including Asian Americans. In contemporary Fiji and Malaysia one race is given preferential university entry over another.

Unfortunately, reverse discrimination creates significant disparities in performance and drop-out rates between students admitted to courses on different criteria. In order to disguise high “real” failure rates among some groups, marks are adjusted and both academics and students are corrupted.

Several forms of reverse discrimination have operated in Australia in recent years. Female teachers have been granted accelerated promotion and female students given preferential entry to courses in which they were deemed under-represented. Aboriginal Australians and some ethnic groups have received comparable preferential treatment. Students from schools deemed disadvantaged have been admitted to prestigious courses, such as those in medicine and law, rather than students with higher grades deemed to be from privileged homes or schools. 

A multicultural society 

Before 1950 Australian schools were largely homogenous, but are so no longer. A key issue is whether educational disadvantage is more likely to be reduced if parents from minority cultures and religions are given or denied equal rights to open their own schools on the same terms as existing non-government schools. The current test-case is that of Muslim families.

Educational requirements typically made by Muslims include: 

• Single-sex schools after the age of puberty and traditionally appropriate dress for each sex

• Distinctive sex roles taught in accord with the Koran

• Science teaching in accord with the Koran

• Prohibition of representational art, especially of the human figure, and of many Western forms of music

• Provision of Halal food and facilities for ritual absolution 

The full program of Islam requires by early adolescence mastery of the whole Koran and the classical Arabic in which it is written. Many Muslims particularly dislike the sex education prescribed in several states, which provides girls with information on sexual relationships, pregnancy and motherhood without discussing marriage.

Education disadvantage for Muslim children may be claimed on different grounds whichever of the main alternative policies is adopted. If Muslim families are accorded the rights that Christian and Jewish families enjoy, including funding, to open Islamic schools, Muslim children attending them might be disadvantaged by inadequate knowledge of mainstream ways of life. If refused equal parental rights, Muslim parents might well allege disadvantage caused by unfair religious discrimination.

Would the one policy or the other be more likely to fan Islamic alienation and extremism, or on the contrary to foster attachment to our “open society”? No school, publicly funded or not, should be permitted to advocate violation of our laws or to be free from inspection and examination of students’ secular knowledge. If, however, these requirements are met, how much would we have to fear? Or, how much more would we have to fear? If such educational problems seem incapable of solution, immigration policies must be changed.

Parental choice exercised through vouchers would reduce educational disadvantage overall. It is true that some parents are ignorant about educational questions, but they buy their own food and clothing, choose their own cars and fridges, and they vote. Given the record of our educational “experts” in universities and bureaucracies, are parents likely to make worse choices for their children?

The case for Islamic schools will become a central educational issue although, typically, it played no part in recent federal and state elections. The case for vouchers, of which there are several variants, should be tested against tricky problems such as this. 

Solutions 

1. To reduce individual disadvantages, restore specialist institutions and find other ways for their students to mix socially with mainstream students.

2. To reduce family disadvantages, provide higher incentives for marriage and for couples with children to stay together after marriage.

3. To reduce school-based disadvantage, apply the advice of the leading communist educational thinker of the last century, the Italian Antonio Gramsci: 

In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate upon specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts … It is also true that it will always be an effort to learn physical self-discipline and self-control; the pupil has in effect to undergo a psycho-physical training. Many people have to be persuaded that studying too is a job, and a very tiring one, with its own particular apprenticeship—involving muscles and nerves as well as intellect. It is a process of adaptation, a habit acquired with effort, tedium and even suffering. If one wishes to produce scholars, one has to start at this point and apply pressure throughout the educational system in order to succeed in creating those thousands or hundreds or only dozens of scholars of the highest quality who are necessary to every great civilisation. 

4. To avoid future communal feelings of unfair disadvantage, open up debate on the types of school that ought to be available and on the type of voucher system that might extend school choice to all Australian families.

Geoffrey Partington has written on education, in Quadrant and elsewhere, over several decades.