First, let me ask you a question - Are you a teacher in any Australian school?
Secondly, you have just pontificated on schooling in Australia - so, my second question is, if an article came out with different conclusions (with which you disagreed) would you be amenable to being force to read it as you are in the class of people who pontificates on schooling in Australia.
There are good private schools and there are good public schools. There are bad private schools and there are bad public schools. What makes them good or bad is a function of the school administration, teachers and families involved in those schools.
All are interrelated and how they handle "problem" students is very dependent on the three groups. I have seen both private and public schools that do not handle such matters well and the result is that everything (in time) goes to hell in a handcart.
But I have also seen schools completely turned around by a change of administration, change of teachers and a more involved family community. This has affected both public and private schools.
You negativity toward private schools (comment about partial government funding) doesn't seem to recognise that if private schools closed down the public school system would be so overwhelmed that it would no longer have any hope of coping.
My own children have been at both public and private schools. I have even been on the school committee for the public school so I got a direct management insight into the operation of the school and the processes required for dealing with "problem" children. At times, it was more problems with parents than children, at other times it was problems in the families which could be mitigated by giving them appropriate help and at other times it was just related to recalcitrant and stubborn children that their own families had difficulty with and the families were supporting the school actions in relation to their children and finally there were problems with the teachers themselves and their interactions with specific children.
If there is no cooperation between schools and the families involved in wanting to develop the children to be their best, then failures will increasingly occur.
Your comment about selective schools misses one salient point, children are not all the same. In Victoria, we used to have trade oriented schools, which were done away with. We now have little opportunity to have students who are interested in practical fields to be specifically educated in those areas. The education model is to have all students head for higher education and big debts.
I have a grandson who is autistic and is being educated in the private school sector where there is facilities for him to progress. The local public schools don't have those facilities and hence he would be on the scrapheap. However, there are public schools around who only take the "best" students and pride themselves on having great education standards. If you don't qualify, you'll have problems getting in.
What the solutions are is contentious and many just blame one sector or another for the problems (private/public) without thinking about the broader community aspects and the benefit to students. Teaching is not a highly regarded profession and that in itself brings about structural problems of all sorts. We then have various political interferences that want to control the specific social education across all schools, irrespective of any school community feedback.
I don’t think it’s negative to private schools to say the statistics reflect selection bias rather than apples-to-apples comparisons. I generally take people saying ‘I wish I could force people to read X’ as ‘I’m frustrated I always have to deal with people who don’t understand important concept from X’ and not ‘I actually want to hold a gun to someone’s head until they finish reading this.’ I agree on good and bad public and private schools, but I think the key point is that they aren’t the order of the schools ranking on some standardized test or statistical measure.
The negative bias was the apparent opposition to some government funding. Whether government funding is appropriate is a matter for discussion, but for another day.
When I see or hear people saying "I wish I could force people to do blah blah blah", it has always been an indicator to mean that they only regard their own opinion as having any worth. If on the other hand, they say something like "this is well worth reading for the following reasons, blah blah blah", then its an indicator to me that there is a viewpoint that can be looked even if you don't agree.
As I do on a daily basis, I may encourage people to look at specific things and I can argue with the best/worst of them. But if someone has no inclination or desire (for whatever reason) to look at specific subjects that is their choice. I'll state my piece and if they are not interested then that's where it ends.
Ranking of schools has been attempted before and as far as I can tell, it hasn't really amounted to any valid standard test or measure. When I was in senior secondary school (many decades ago now), our deputy principal was heavily involved in the development of a standardised testing regime for all schools (private and public) in the state. As students, we had the opportunity to pin him to the wall and find out how it was supposed to operate. The upshot was that the system could be gamed in both positive and negative ways and that its sole purpose was to provide a measure by which students in the state could be culled from the higher education market. The comparison he gave was to compare what was happening in the USA at that time and how to prevent the worst aspects of the USA education from ever occurring here. In some senses that has been successful, but only in some areas.
Your remarks seem like a collection of things you'd like to say, a bit of abuse ("pontificated", reiterates the guy who replied to my 5-liner with a rambling mini-essay about a large array of random education issues not connected to my post), and an appeal to authority (I'm not a teacher -so what?)
I am not proposing the private schools shut down. I would like to see them funded less (and suspect that we would continue to have a private school sector if they were not funded at all). I would like people to stop attributing the success of privates/selectives to the fact that they can admit who they like and kick out their problems.
I am not appealing to "authority" but to experience. How much do you know about the working of either private or public schools. Public schools are not free - parents pay all sorts of "education" fees, been there done that. Similarly in the private schools system, there are possibilities of getting financial help for school fees if you me certain criteria, been there done that.
A discussion also includes sharing of "random" stuff since this is generally experience and gives some input into various matters.
In regards to your very last comment about kicking out their problems is a feature of both public and private schools. Both can do it and both do do it.
Secondly, you have just pontificated on schooling in Australia - so, my second question is, if an article came out with different conclusions (with which you disagreed) would you be amenable to being force to read it as you are in the class of people who pontificates on schooling in Australia.
There are good private schools and there are good public schools. There are bad private schools and there are bad public schools. What makes them good or bad is a function of the school administration, teachers and families involved in those schools.
All are interrelated and how they handle "problem" students is very dependent on the three groups. I have seen both private and public schools that do not handle such matters well and the result is that everything (in time) goes to hell in a handcart.
But I have also seen schools completely turned around by a change of administration, change of teachers and a more involved family community. This has affected both public and private schools.
You negativity toward private schools (comment about partial government funding) doesn't seem to recognise that if private schools closed down the public school system would be so overwhelmed that it would no longer have any hope of coping.
My own children have been at both public and private schools. I have even been on the school committee for the public school so I got a direct management insight into the operation of the school and the processes required for dealing with "problem" children. At times, it was more problems with parents than children, at other times it was problems in the families which could be mitigated by giving them appropriate help and at other times it was just related to recalcitrant and stubborn children that their own families had difficulty with and the families were supporting the school actions in relation to their children and finally there were problems with the teachers themselves and their interactions with specific children.
If there is no cooperation between schools and the families involved in wanting to develop the children to be their best, then failures will increasingly occur.
Your comment about selective schools misses one salient point, children are not all the same. In Victoria, we used to have trade oriented schools, which were done away with. We now have little opportunity to have students who are interested in practical fields to be specifically educated in those areas. The education model is to have all students head for higher education and big debts.
I have a grandson who is autistic and is being educated in the private school sector where there is facilities for him to progress. The local public schools don't have those facilities and hence he would be on the scrapheap. However, there are public schools around who only take the "best" students and pride themselves on having great education standards. If you don't qualify, you'll have problems getting in.
What the solutions are is contentious and many just blame one sector or another for the problems (private/public) without thinking about the broader community aspects and the benefit to students. Teaching is not a highly regarded profession and that in itself brings about structural problems of all sorts. We then have various political interferences that want to control the specific social education across all schools, irrespective of any school community feedback.