Parent Power - should the free market decide school curricula?

In December 2004 Andrew Refshauge was backed into a corner. Because of the poor academic performance of Indigenous students he could no longer insist that the “one size fits all” approach to school curricula was the best model. Instead he proposed to relabel schools with high concentrations of aboriginal students as “community schools” and allow them to develop individual, personalised study plans. He agreed that “Aboriginal parents [should now] have a say in selecting teachers and managing public schools”. He also acceded that “teachers may be paid based on their performance, rather than the union award”.

This raises the question of who is best qualified to choose the curriculum and the teaching methods employed in Australian schools. As each child is different, and therefore has different educational needs, and as parents know their children most intimately, it is parents rather than educationalists, who should choose the best education for their children. But parents will only be able to do this if school funding is placed in their hands and there is sufficient diversity in the educational marketplace to allow them to make meaningful choices. These two factors - the ability for parents to choose where they spend their education dollar and a system which gives schools the freedom to tailor their wares to the needs of parents and students - are the most effective means of improving education in Australia.

The present system of centralised curriculum development by the states reflects the view that education is a highly specialised subject that should be the exclusive domain of experts. There is no effective method for the general population to influence school curricula. In an environment where the curricula are “fractured and distorted by competing ideologies”, the only way proponents of a particular educational philosophy can secure a footing is to have the curricula developed exclusively by experts who share their views.

Each state has an organisation responsible for curriculum development. In New South Wales, for example, the Board of Studies (BOS) is responsible for developing the state’s curriculum. The BOS appoints a Board Curriculum Committee (BCC) which carries out development on a particular subject. A BCC (pdf file 177Kb) comprises members of the BOS, representatives from the tertiary sector, government educational bodies, education unions, the Catholic and Independent sector, and parent bodies such as the NSW Parents Council.

The BCC reviews the current syllabus, consults with teachers and other professionals, researches current trends in curriculum development and then recommends changes to the BOS. Proposed changes are then distributed to schools with a consultation and development timeline. Following this, the BCC publishes a brief on which teachers and other education professionals have a chance to comment.

Apart from one NSW Parents Council nominee there is very little participation in the curriculum development process by anyone other than education professionals. The consultation process (pdf file 177Kb) is supposedly open to the general community but in reality very few members of the public know which curricula are under review and have an interest in participating. There is very little parental input to the NSW curricula, which are in effect the product of a panel of expert educationalists.

It is a dangerous move to take the decision away from ordinary people and give it to educationalists. It is the duty of a parent, not the state, to oversee the education of children. The power of citizens to think, consider, assess and decide on the education that their children are to receive is being usurped by the government and consequently these abilities are diminishing.

Centralised curricula are also demoralising for some teachers, forcing them to teach material they consider to be substandard.

If parents were able to choose where they spent their education dollars, via tax breaks or school vouchers, and the market was able to respond to diverse parental requirements by offering a range of different schools with different curricula and leaving exams, parent interest in and input to curriculum development would skyrocket. School vouchers and a diversified education market would allow parents to “vote” continuously, via the market, for whatever system of education they thought best. If the government is really serious about parent consultation, why not let parents vote with their cash?

But even high levels of parental involvement in curriculum development would not bring about significant improvement while curricula are monopolised by the state governments. No single curriculum can possibly reflect the educational vision of Australian parents. Take the current English syllabus for example with its emphasis on deconstruction and postmodernism. In an open educational market would such a curriculum dominate the marketplace as it does now? Does it really reflect the philosophical understanding of Australian parents? I think not. While there should be a place for such a curriculum, its extent and influence should be proportional to its acceptance in society, not to the influence of a small group of ideologues on the BOS curriculum committee.

As we have seen, the NSW curricula are determined by a small homogenous panel of experts. When they meet they are trying to solve a very complex problem that has many possible solutions. The exact nature of the problem that the curriculum ought to solve is itself open to debate and will reflect one’s world view. Materialists will develop quite different curricula to those who believe that a human being is more than a physical body. Christian’s will educate their children quite differently to utilitarians. Those who believe that the most important aim of human life is to support one’s society and nation will emphasise different aspects of history and character building to those emphasised by rugged individualists.

A single syllabus formulated by a committee must inevitably be the result of compromise. As James Surowiecki points out in his recent book, The Wisdom of Crowds:

An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms - like market process, or intelligent voting systems - to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent not what any one person in the group thinks, but in some sense, what they all think.

Committees are susceptible to many shortcomings which negatively influence their decision-making ability. They are liable to work from unquestioned assumptions. If there is a lack of diversity and independence in the committee, assumptions can go unexamined for long periods and the committee reinforces its own views. Group think takes over and possible alternatives recede into the background.

A further argument against curricula being developed by homogenous groups is the ease with which fads can be introduced into the curriculum. Over the last 30 years a plethora of innovations - such as the whole language approach to reading, fuzzy maths and functional grammar - have been foisted upon unsuspecting children and the long-suffering taxpayers of Australia who have to fund these experiments.  Because the NSW education system is governed by a centralised board, these are not small, localised experiments tested to see if they actually work in practice. They are implemented in every school across the state. Considerable resources are invested in training teachers to adopt these new ideologies, resources that are wasted as soon as one fad is replaced by the next. A whole generation of school children becomes the guinea pigs upon which the latest fad is tested.

I suggest that the collective wisdom of parents would do a much better job of answering the question, “What ought high school students learn today in order to be well prepared for life beyond school?” than any committee. A parent body drawn from the whole population has three characteristics, it would be diverse, independent and decentralised.

By independent I mean that parents are relatively free from the coercion and influence of others when deciding on what education their children will receive. Parents do discuss schools with each other and are influenced by friends, family and advertising, but ultimately the decision is their own and, since it is so important, they are likely to rely on their own judgement rather than the judgement of others.

The benefit of having a large diverse parent body working actively to solve the problem of what makes a good education is that some parents will take a punt on unusual and radical ideas. Most of these will not work, and the market will quickly recognise this and these experiments will die a natural death. But a few of them will succeed and flourish. This is exactly how innovation happens in other markets, but it is virtually impossible for it to happen in education when curricula are developed by a small committee of educationalists who must attempt to be answerable to everyone.

Having established the many benefits that would accrue to students if parents were granted the means to directly influence the content of school curricula, let us now consider what would be necessary to give parents such power and how such a system might operate. There are two indispensable prerequisites if parents are to have direct influence on the quality of our schools. The first is that parents have control over where they spend every cent of their education dollars. The second is that the educational marketplace is such that providers of education have the freedom to offer a variety of educational products.

How would this work in practice? The scenario I propose gives parents the choice of where they spend their money and facilitates an education marketplace that allows providers to offer a range of educational solutions. In this scenario, schooling remains compulsory. Parents must send their children to a government accredited school. But the criterion for accreditation is not that the school fulfils the NSW government curriculum. Schools are accredited if they meet the following two standards: first the school is obliged to make its curriculum available to parents and to explain in plain language what it intends to teach students; second the school must demonstrate that it is in fact teaching its curriculum to its students.

Some opponents of transparent reporting of student achievement claim that less well-funded schools, or schools that teach children from underprivileged backgrounds, would be shown in a poor light if student assessments were made public. Obviously the results of a school that caters for students with learning difficulties or special needs will be far below a school that specialises in gifted education and so comparing absolute levels of student achievement is not always meaningful. But there are forms of student assessment that measure progress rather than achievement and this can be very meaningful for parents wishing to compare schools.

The second important aspect of this scenario is how schools are funded. The easiest way to give purchasing power to parents is through a system of school vouchers or tax credits. These measures have the advantage of lending assistance to low income families without removing the spending power from parents.In this scenario, government and non-government schools would compete to attract parents on a level playing field. All schools would be accredited in the same way. Schools would be free to go it alone and seek to sell their brand of education on the open market or they could group together to adopt the services of an independent examining body. Such examining bodies would develop a leaving exam and associated curricula, and then make these available to schools and provide training and guidance in the implementation of their curricula. A system similar to this has been discussed recently in the UK. This would be applicable across the country and would also go some way to solving the problem highlighted by Brendan Nelson, of parents moving interstate and encountering incompatible state education systems.

Another issue is how tertiary education providers would cope with greater diversity in primary and secondary school curricula. Universities already have mechanisms to evaluate students who have studied the International Baccalaureate or sat leaving exams in countries other than Australia and they have devised comparability scales to accept students from any of the states and territories. This indicates that universities are willing to accept students with various forms of secondary education.

Under this scenario of curriculum competition and school vouchers or tax credits, the collective wisdom of the parent body would be brought to bear on the question of what constitutes the best education for Australian children. The net effect would be that educational outcomes would improve, parental interest in and engagement with education would increase, and innovation and development in education would be stimulated.