Business plans 'free market' high schools
By Sean Malloy
The Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the National Industry Education Forum (NIEF), of which the BCA is a founding member, are proposing to extend economic "rationalism" into secondary education. High schools are the next logical step, after universities and TAFEs, for restructuring along company lines.
An article in the January/February 1993 Business Council Bulletin summarised NIEF's policy documents and invited "company support" for NIEF's "initiatives".
Key elements of the proposals include: school principal control of budgets; teacher employment based on enterprise bargaining; "connections" between business, industry and schools; development of student "competencies" relevant to the work force; and the establishment of "international best practice" in schools.
Pat Simpson, an assistant general secretary of the NSW Teachers Federation, explained to Green Left Weekly how the proposals would affect Australian schooling.
Simpson argues that business practices cannot be applied to schools. "Schools are not small businesses; they are educational institutions."
The BCA proposals "rest upon a technocratic view of education that says you can test anything that moves and that public education as such has to deliver in measurable and quantifiable terms".
Quality education, says Simpson, "means resourcing, it means management that is based upon the educational role of the principal and teachers, not on a business view of profit and loss, or measurable outcomes.
"What the BCA is proposing in a number of projects is corporate managerialism and an economic rationalist view of schooling and education."
Explaining the effect of introducing profit motives to English and New Zealand schools, Simpson says, "There has been a doing away with the centre as both an administrative and financial unit. Schools have been left to fend for themselves ...
"Schools have had to look elsewhere for a lot of their funding and they have had to go and 'buy' staff.
"There has been a rise in sponsorship, a rise in the schools having to put efforts into fundraising. In fact, in England some schools have had to hire people specifically to do fundraising."
In England and Wales schools have been operating on the basis of "local management" since April 1990. This has increased the polarisation between well-funded and poorly funded schools.
English and Welsh schools receive funding from the government based on a formula amount for each student. These schools are market oriented, in a race to win the maximum amount of students and hence of funding.
School funds are spent on public relations consultants, market research, glossy brochures and other promotions to win parents over.
"Unpopular" schools that are run down or in areas with a high proportion of non-English-speaking or working-class students recruit smaller numbers of students, which means a smaller budget. The overall effect is that students with the greatest learning needs have fewer resources.
Schools are compelled to ensure that they continue to enrol new students. Academic records become linked to better funding. Students who perform badly or misbehave become financial liabilities.
Local management schools employ teachers directly and have the right to set pay levels. "Popular" schools can offer higher wages to highly qualified teachers while "unpopular" schools have to rely on younger or less experienced teachers.
While the ALP government has implemented the Finn and Mayer reports on education, which were supported by the BCA, Simpson argues that the NIEF proposals are different — "mainly because [they have] been done by business alone, whereas the Finn and Mayer reviews were done as a collaborative and collective view of education ...
"The BCA's report is done by the BCA alone, with its own outcomes in mind."