Opinion
Beginning journalism students are warned about the danger of becoming too sympathetic to their sources, thus colouring their objectivity. At worst, journalists are told, they may fall prey to “source capture”: privileging the interests of their sources and pushing a biased narrative. Especially when the source’s interest too-closely align with the journalist’s own.
Having dutifully warned their students, though, it all gets thrown out the window.
And so we get the passionately ignorant modern “journalist”. This mendacious creature is a gross caricature of an actual journalist. A nasty combination of activist, “churnalist”(one who simply re-packages press releases as “news”), and supreme ignoramus. They are especially prevalent in the left-media (a tautology, I’m sorry), and near-dominant in such fields as environmental, science, and education reporting.
Education reporters […] bang the drum for the education unions, teachers and university leaders rather than for students.
Too much coverage centres on false narratives: governments underfund education and high-fee private schools take money from disadvantaged children at state schools. Yet spending on education has never risen faster while our students go backwards in international testing.
Some years back, I was accosted in the street by a gaggle of striking teachers, demanding I sign a petition for them to get higher wages. Why, I asked, would I want more of my taxes to go to people who are clearly not doing their jobs properly, given the precipitous decline in educational results? In what other field would workers get pay rises for doing a worse job? It did not go over well.
The great irony, too, is that even then, schools were operating under the left’s much-vaunted Gonski model. This was a funding model designed by businessman David Gonski, at the behest of then-Education Minister Julia Gillard.
Under the Gonski funding model, the primary Schooling Resource Standard last year stood at $13,060 per primary student and $16,413 for secondary students. That’s how state schools are funded.
Funding to non-government schools is reduced from the SRS standard using a formula calculating median parental income and capacity to pay.
Poorer, outer-suburban non-government schools can receive 90 per cent of their SRS funding per individual while elite schools may receive just 20 per cent. Last year Catholic and independent schools received just over half the funding per student paid to state schools.
Which is not, of course, how ignorant and biased journalists read it. Their endlessly-repeated complaint, parroted from teachers’ union press releases, is that private school students receive X amount of funding per capita, while public schools only receive Y. Which is yet another demonstration of the principle that journalists cannot grasp the difference between government and private enterprise.
It’s really very simple — too simple for a university-educated journalist to understand: private school students receive more funding because their parents pay for it.
Non-government schools top up with school fees. So parents who pay very high fees also probably pay lots of income tax that supports the public system. Conversely, some wealthy people choose the public system, while some families in both systems pay no net tax after family tax benefits.
But the burning question is: did Gonski work? Well, come on — it was a Julia Gillard project. We all know how the answer.
Because, just like the NDIS, Gillard decided to throw a bottomless pit of other people’s money at a problem and assume it would magically fix it.
In 2022, looking back on the 10-year anniversary of the report, Sydney Morning Herald education writer Jordan Baker quoted several Gonski architects lamenting the fact the reforms were not prescriptive enough about how the extra funding should be used. No educational KPIs were attached to the extra money, expected to be $29.1bn this year.
Bella d’Abrera, in The Daily Telegraph on Friday, discussed Australia’s poor performance in international student testing, despite rises of 75 per cent in federal funding and 32 per cent in state funding between 2012 and 2022.
Under the Albanese government, things are going from bad to worse. To be fair, Education Minister Jason Clare has talked some sense around topics like basic reading education, and dumping useless, left-wing “theories” that have left generations more illiterate than their parents and grandparents (who often had much fewer years in school). But then Clare goes off on leftist brainfarts such as aiming for over half of all school leavers to get a university degree.
As if the world needs more Arts/Law grads (i.e. the average Labor politician) and fewer tradespeople (who are entirely absent from the ranks of modern Labor).
But Clare appears to be completely ignoring the core problems with Gonski: it pours money into the wrong solutions and fixes nothing. In fact, it’s seen things go steadily worse.
Glenn Fahey from the Centre for Independent Studies […] “The evidence shows about 70 per cent of funding goes to teachers and of that about 60 per cent has gone to lower class sizes and about 40 per cent to higher teacher salaries. What’s not understood is there is major inequality in access to effective teaching, which is not distributed to where it’s needed most.
“The only way to truly deliver needs-based funding … is for funding to drive the very best teachers to the neediest students. At the moment the system brings more teachers to the neediest schools but not necessarily those teachers best equipped to help those students.
“The greatest factor influencing student outcome is the quality of teaching. In the best school systems in the world there are very high expectations about the skills of teachers.”
Such systems encouraged mentoring and upskilling of existing teachers while in Australia teachers were expected to front-load all of their training in their undergraduate degrees.
The Australian
Unfortunately, university teacher training is heavily — indeed, almost entirely — focused on questionable, left-wing theories. Teaching students are drilled in garbage like “confronting your Whiteness”, and crank psychology, and sent into the classroom never once having been taught something so fundamental as lesson planning, or classroom management.
And so we find ourselves in the situation of paying more and more money into a system that delivers less and less.
And our children get dumber and dumber.
You’d almost be excused for thinking that was the plan.