KEY POINTS:
John Langley's recent article 'Time to change way we judge schools' was highly critical of funding schools by socio-economic decile. His criticisms are undeserved.
School funding by decile is a very good approach in most respects and the kind of compensatory funding it represents has to be at the heart of any fair school funding system.
Langley's concern is that schools should not receive a bulk sum of money because of their socioeconomic status regardless of performance. But it is inescapable that socio-economic issues affect performance.
First, it is a well-established global pattern that children bought up in impoverished circumstances are less likely to achieve than middle class children. Some people from disadvantaged backgrounds do excel at school but they remain exceptions rather than the rule.
Second, a low socio-economic student intake creates all kinds of difficulties for schools. Social stresses and strains related to poverty create more pastoral issues and less efficient school routines. Children need more support and resources in the classroom. Low decile schools typically have more problems fundraising and their boards of trustees rarely include parents who can volunteer their professional expertise as happens in more middle class settings.
There is a huge body of research which illustrates and explains this. It is the reason why school effectiveness researchers try to develop 'value-added' analyses of education which take account of students' individual and collective socio-economic backgrounds when determining school performance.
Decile funding is a way of partly compensating schools for socio-economic disadvantage. It provides low socio-economic schools with extra funding to buy resources or employ support staff. It should not be linked to performance outcomes. Decile funding is not about helping schools win races. Realistically it is more about helping them get off the starting blocks.
Langley suggests the decile indicator stigmatises schools but we should not imagine things would be so much different without the decile categories. Parents, especially aspirant middle class parents, have long used 'the grapevine' to gain a socio-economic ranking of local schools. Deciles often just confirm what parents know about the social geography of their area.
The upside of the decile indicator is that it allows policymakers and researchers to monitor the effects of the socio-economic differences between schools.
It makes social inequalities in education harder for governments to overlook and this is no bad thing. Another strength of the decile system is that its draws on a range of census data to develop an understanding of socio-economic status. We might question some of the detail of how the Ministry of Education distributes funding across the deciles.
We might also ask for the overall funding distributed by decile to be increased. Nevertheless the general principle of decile funding for schools is sound and something New Zealanders should be proud of.
Financial compensation for inequalities between schools is not the whole story. While students can make progress in any school with good teaching and plentiful resources, high decile schools also provide their pupils with access to middle class networks of power and information (the 'old school tie').
Many researchers also argue that more demanding curriculum offerings and group dynamics at middle class schools push up student achievement more than for similar students at low decile schools.
Consequently it can be expected that even with fairer funding between schools parents will continue to want to pay extra to buy 'in the zone' or pay for their children to attend middle class private schools. Yet these actions will hardly lead to a fairer society. We need to find ways of reducing levels of social segregation between schools.
The ethical challenge is to draw a line between advantaging our own children and doing so at the expense of others' children.
As John Dewey put it more than a century ago: "[W]hat the best and wisest parent wants for his [sic] own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely: acted upon, it destroys our democracy."
* Martin Thrupp is professor of education at the University of Waikato.
