Condemned to innovate
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Richard Teese
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Richard Teese's biography and other articles by this writer
Over the past 30 years, the level at which disadvantaged schools have been funded has increased and there has been a greater emphasis on student-learning outcomes, but it is questionable whether there has been a more basic shift in the way we view disadvantaged schools. Perhaps we should now try a radical approach, and recognise in these schools an opportunity not available elsewhere – to experiment and innovate in the interests of the children attending them and the system as a whole.
In the early 1970s, educational disadvantage was seen as something that needed to be compensated for but not eliminated. It is arguable whether we have higher expectations today or whether we still see disadvantaged schools as an inevitable feature of the landscape whose inhabitants can be consoled and made more comfortable, but who will never escape their surroundings.
The Karmel Report, which was released in May 1973, set the framework for addressing educational disadvantage for several decades. The Karmel committee was not optimistic about the prospects of overcoming social disadvantage. It documented the degree of inequality in Australian education and reasoned on the cause. Karmel was determined to bring about much greater fairness and equity and was confident this could be done. But when the committee looked at the position of the poorest 10 to 15 per cent of children, this confidence evaporated.
Karmel pointed to the unpromising experience of the War on Poverty in the United States and the lack of any evidence that intervention programs did or could improve educational standards. The members of the committee saw the entrenched poverty in inner cities and the overwhelming impact of these environments on levels of achievement and participation in school. They knew the research commissioned by the Plowden review of primary education in Britain. That was more positive but in a vein of hope of improvement, rather than evidence, because the decaying inner cities of Britain showed not only crumbling physical infrastructure, but also a culture of despair and low aspirations.
These experiences injected a note of caution, if not pessimism, into the Karmel Report. As a result, supplementary funding was not tied to measured gains in student learning. Additional spending was justified on the grounds of improved quality of school experience, not achievement. Karmel wanted to see stronger links between schools and communities. These were not easily quantifiable outcomes. But the committee was not going to demand cognitive gain from schools that were considered severely disadvantaged. That might never happen or might take decades of patient work to accomplish. So it was careful to pitch its objectives broadly.
Karmel's reservations about progress did not stem simply from the extreme end of disadvantage. As they assembled the evidence of social inequalities, the committee members could not fail to register the low overall levels of educational participation in Australia in the late 1960s and the marked gaps between middle-class and working-class achievement. Certainly, there had been strong growth in retention, but from a very low base, and the divisions between rich and poor after two decades of growth remained very sharp. American reformers, such as James Coleman, were calling for a radical shift from "equality of opportunity" to "equality of outcomes". Looking at the depth of social differences in Australian education, the Karmel committee refused to endorse this. It declared that the "doctrinaire pursuit" of equal average outcomes would be ruinously expensive and, in any case, certain to fail.
So the pessimism about severe disadvantage and the limited impact that poor schools could make reflected a sombre diagnosis of the prospects of social change more widely. Education alone could not transform a deeply divided society. The reassessment of Coleman's data by Christopher Jencks in Inequality (Basic Books, 1972) only tended to confirm this diagnosis. The implications were clear. Governments could compensate for disadvantage by giving additional funds to poor schools, but little more than this could or should be expected.
IF WE WERE ASKED NOW, 33 YEARS LATER, to assess whether the Karmel committee was right to have been cautious, if not pessimistic, from what perspective would we do this? Should we focus on disadvantaged schools and ask whether they have been effective in some or all of the domains that Karmel envisaged? We might marshal our conceptual and technical resources and attempt to measure the historical impact of the poorest schools on student outcomes. It seems a good idea. But it isn't, because we cannot meaningfully examine the impact of these schools in isolation from how other schools have fared.
Suppose we were to have invested heavily over the same period in the high end of schools – to have invested both public and private funds in large doses in selective schooling, both private and public? The poorest schools would have trailed, always being re-created to catch the children falling behind. And, of course, we would set modest objectives for them, knowing they would probably always trail. So the historian coming after us would find little change and might conclude that the disadvantaged schools had failed.
The question we need to ask is not whether the schools serving the poorest 10 to 15 per cent of the population have succeeded, but whether the systems of which they form a part have been successful. For, like it or not, the poorest schools serve the whole system. They look after all the children who are not wanted elsewhere, who cannot move elsewhere, whose parents cannot educate them well, whose parents either don't care or don't understand or have too little time or resources to help. The health of the whole system is reflected in the performance of the poorest schools.
So the test of whether disadvantaged schools, taken as a group, have been successful is whether the school system, taken as a whole, has shifted one inch in equity over the past three decades.
The logic of this perspective is troubling. We want to be able to see the unique contribution made by disadvantaged schools. If equity has improved, people want to be able to attribute it, to identify the source. Many want disadvantaged schools to be the vehicle of equity. They keep slipping up on the same fatal assumption.
Based on what we actually did in terms of funding approaches and other systemic policies, we can't really say we asked disadvantaged schools to produce equity, except in an indirect way. We recognised the need to give additional support to schools serving marginalised populations. We freed the rest of the system of these students so that mainstream schooling could get on with equity. Every year, hundreds of teachers move out of the poorest schools in search of professional advancement. Operating a transfer system like the one we do sends the message that we are not asking disadvantaged schools to produce equity, because we routinely remove the most important resource they need to promote student achievement – experienced teachers. If we have achieved equity, it has been despite systemic policies rather than because of them, and it owes, at least in part, to freeing mainstream schooling from doing the hardest work that equity demands.
So it is growth in equity across the whole system that we must look at to capture the effectiveness of disadvantaged schools, not just what they do in often unquantifiable ways for their own pupils. They contribute to equity as much by what they give up for other schools as what they achieve directly in their own precincts. They give up trained teachers through high turnover, they give up their best pupils through drift to other schools, they give up more advantageous staffing through the formal equity of class size – reductions that have benefited mainstream schools disproportionately to need.
This is not a comfortable conclusion, but it really is time we stopped looking at the work of disadvantaged schools in isolation from how the rest of the school system operates. The first illusion that we have to give up is that disadvantaged schools do not contribute to the success of the rest of the system, partly by what they do for the most demanding pupils and partly by what they surrender in the form of teacher resources, pupil mix and operating conditions.
To develop a more productive policy orientation towards disadvantaged schools, we have to come to terms with the complex ways in which disadvantaged schools contribute to equity. To justify supplementary funding of these schools solely on the basis of measured, but purely relative, gains in the learning of their students is too narrow an approach and fails to recognise the wider role these schools play.