Page 3115 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 August 2005
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all this duplicity and furtiveness? When we are dealing with this Chief Minister we know that it is often to do with hubris. That certainly explains a lot, at least in the style of Jon “Supersize Me” Stanhope who cannot help himself when he is meddling in other people’s affairs.
But is there anything else to it? Is there any reasoning at all behind this rush to break up communities and impose an educational monolith in the whole of west Belconnen? I suspect that there is. Minister Gallagher has been reported as saying that the preschool to year 10 school model is the government’s preferred model for new schools. The preferred model is not the parents’ model or the model for students or teachers; it is the government’s model. The Chief Minister said he is on top of international research, which demonstrates the obvious superiority of his government’s views, presumably over the views of parents, children, teachers and the wider community. Why would he bother asking opinions before ploughing ahead with his grandiose design? What would they know about the latest international research and would he care?
Those of us who are not part of the Stanhope court might be tempted to ask what he and his retainers know about it. One should always be careful about citing research. In this case, however, it is possible to state with confidence that the overwhelming bulk of studies over the past 20 years broadly concur—to quote from a recent academic literature review—that small schools are superior to large schools on most measures and equal to them on the rest.
There is one significant qualification. Students in communities with a high socioeconomic status perform well in larger schools. Everyone else is far better off in a more intimate learning community. There are several reasons for that, one of which can be put down as being the opportunity for small schools to operate as autonomous, distinctive institutions with a well-defined culture.
Specific advantages include: less anonymity, with students being personally known by their teachers and peers, which assists in their learning; there is less probability of disruption and violence; teachers have a better knowledge of individual students; small schools are more effective in closing the achievement gap between high-income and low-income students; and there is a higher rate of participation in extra curricular activities.
As eminent educationalist Michael Klonsky put it, large schools generally correlate with inefficiency, institutional bureaucracy and personal loneliness. Smaller schools function more like communities. Community is what we are about today. As with many regrettable intellectual fashions, the school consolidation movement can largely be traced to the influence of one misguided book: Professor James Conant’s 1959 The American High School Today. In it the then president of Harvard—who, incidentally, played a major role in the Manhattan project, so he obviously always thought big—contended that the economies of scale provided by larger size schools would provide more comprehensive educational programs at a lower cost per student.
Even as economics that has only ever been partly plausible. More detailed empirical research has conclusively demonstrated that while average student costs initially decline as enrolments increase this is followed by quite dramatic rises. That is because after reaching a certain size larger schools require more resources to handle the increased
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