According to the current government (and the one it replaced) the debate over private versus public schooling is old, we’re over it, we’ve moved past the politics of envy. Rudd and Gillard promised us an Education Revolution, but what they’ve delivered is almost exactly what Howard handed up.

And what was that exactly? I’m not an economist or an educator, and I can’t explain funding models and socio-economic groupings, but I can talk about simple numbers. And the numbers are pretty terrifying.

Before I launch into a great big “fuck the silver spoon rich kids” rant, let me say that I am a big fan of freedom of choice, and people reaping the rewards of their own hard work. If I had the money my daughter would be at a top private school, but I don’t, so she’s at the best state school we could find in the area. And I don’t begrudge people with more money than me spending up big to send their kids to a good school.

What offends me, and should offend you, is how much we, the taxpayers, contribute to the independent system, compared to the public system.

Figures from 1996 to 2006, adjusted to 2006 terms, show that the federal government spends $9,252 per child in the public system. They also contribute toward the education of every child in the private system, to the tune of $11,303. That’s right, $2,000 more per child, per year, for private schools, be they the tiny suburban Catholic school, or Melbourne Grammar.

The funding per child for private students increased by 44% over that period, while funding for the public sector remained static. Remember that private schools charge fees, so the comparison in quality of education and access to resources becomes even more of a chasm.

A kid at Elwood Primary has $9,252 of government money put into his education, plus whatever extra the school raises through donations and market days and whatever. Say a total of $11,000. A kid at Melbourne Grammar up the road gets $11,303 of government money, plus about $15,000 in fees paid by his parents. That’s about $26,000 per year, or more than twice the funding of the kid at Elwood.

I’m not saying that private schools should receive no federal funding – that would just mean that only the very rich could afford to send their kids to top schools, and there would be even more of a chasm between the haves and the have nots. Further, the parents of kids at private school all pay tax (well, most of them), and thus contribute to the commonwealth; their kids are as entitled as yours or mine to some government assistance; their 4WD Lexus has as much right to be on the road the government built as does my 1978 Mini.

One of my problems, however, is that the government simply refuses to discuss the inequity of this funding model. Any research is dismissed as inaccurate at best, or deliberately misleading at worst. Particularly if its author(s) can be shown to have ever walked near an office of the Australian Education Union.

Simple statements like “$26,00 buys you a much better education than $11,000” show that I am nothing more than a classist agitator, who only wants to bring down the best, rather than elevate the rest. Trouble is, I’m not, and nor are a lot of the commentators trying to make this point.

All debate is shut off, much as critics of the Internet Filter are instantly condemned as supporters of kiddy porn, because there’s an argument they don’t want to have to make. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Firstly, let’s have a look at the great “computers in schools” election promise. It would be great if every kid in the country had access to a good computer, and could use the internet for research and so on. What a wonderful promise.

However, the government is only funding the computers themselves. Before a school can receive the hundred PCs it’d be entitled to, it has to show that it has the power capacity, desk space, classrooms and structures suitable for all the cabling, and the money to install, maintain, and service the PCs.

When two-thirds of a school’s classrooms are portables that have already been used for a decade or more past their use-by date, and it takes a month’s worth of cake stalls to pay to get the toilets fixed and the Year Elevens spend every waking minute destroying some part or other of the school, what chance have you got to show you’re worthy of these brand new computers?

Which schools do you think have filled in the forms and laid out the funding for maintenance, and already have the cabling and the dedicated air-conditioned server rooms and are already taking delivery of the new computers that you and I have paid for? Yep, the private schools.

And the public schools in the poor suburbs will never be able to apply for the PCs, because they’re running out of fingers to stick in all the holes in their dams.

So those schools will continue to under-perform, and in the time-honoured tradition of government funding, will be told, well, the twenty dollars we gave you last year wasn’t enough for you to reach targets, so this year you’ll have to do more with fifteen dollars. And the schools will get worse and worse, and the neo-libs will blame this on left-wing teachers and a loss of focus on the three Rs and Donald Bradman, because that’s easier, cheaper, and takes a hell of a lot less guts than saying “Sorry, we’ve been under-funding you for decades now, here’s the extra billion and a half you need just to catch up, we’ve created an extra 2,000 teaching places at university so you’ll have enough teachers, and we’re going to up your pay so you want to stay at it, and here, have a new computer.”

Which leads me to the argument the government doesn’t want to have, because it will force them to actually admit the above.

Take the Melbourne Grammar kid. It actually costs the school $26,000 pa to teach him, because they pay their teachers very well, they have beautiful grounds and sports facilities, and they have a huge range of extra-curricular activities like drama and music and art.

So if the government were to drop funding to Melbourne Grammar, they’d have to put their fees up. Some of the parents won’t notice an extra couple of thousand dollars a year, but a lot will. There are a huge number of people working their arses off, living where they don’t want to live and driving a much cheaper car than they could otherwise afford, and even going into massive long-term debt, in order to give their kids the best education their hard work has made available.

These parents will have to trade down, and competition will become tighter at the second tier private schools, who’ve also had to increase their fees and thus lost students to third tier schools, and so on and so on, until you end up at:

The public system. Suddenly there will be tens of thousands more kids needing places at already over-stretched state primary and high schools. There just won’t be room for them, and we will need to build more schools, and train more teachers, and Spend. More. Money.

We need private schools more than ever because we’ve treated our public schools, like our hospitals - with such contempt for so long that they’re struggling to stay afloat. It’s become so dire that it’s actually more cost-effective to throw an extra two grand per kid at the private sector than it is to put it into the public.

It shouldn’t go on like this, but I have a dreadful feeling that it will. Meanwhile, bright kids all over Australia will sit at rickety desks in damp classrooms, disrupted by troubled classmates for whom there’s no money for classroom assistance, taught by tired and stressed teachers.

That kid from Elwood Primary may not have the money the kid from Melbourne Grammar does, but he deserves just as much opportunity. Right now, he’s not getting it, and in the future he’ll get even less, because we have a crew of gutless ideologues steering the ship from one crisis-avoidance to the next and blaming anyone within range for the problems they refuse to fix.

Here endeth the lesson.

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