Schools in many parts of Australia are a study in self-segregation

So what?  People are still free to choose the company they keep as far as I know.  It is enforced or legal segregation that is problematical.  The big beef below is that parents avoid sending their kids to schools with big African populations.  That happens in the USA and UK too.  Why?  Because of the high incidence of aggressive and criminal behaviour among Africans.  Even Leftists avoid Africans

Public and private schools in Sydney’s north epitomise a broader racial polarisation within our school system, an ethnic divide that has academics and community leaders concerned we are creating schoolyard monocultures that fail to reflect the increasingly diverse society in which we live and work.

Demographic statistics from My School demonstrate how this polarisation affects academically high-flying as well as low-performing schools, rural schools and campuses in progressive suburbs in inner Sydney and Melbourne. Moreover, researchers warn this ethnic segregation parallels a drift towards private schools and academically stronger government schools that is creating a rump of "residual" public schools in which profoundly disadvantaged students, among them indigenous, refugee or non-English-speaking children, are often concentrated.

All of which raises the question: as the nation becomes more multicultural, are our schools ­becoming more racially segre­gated?

"I think our schools are ­becoming more segregated," says Christina Ho, a University of Technology, Sydney, academic who has investigated ethnic segregation at inner-city public schools, private schools and selective government schools.

Referring to Sydney’s lower north shore, Ho says: "I find it quite staggering that you can have schools that are so (ethnically) different from each other, and yet you can probably walk between two of them in 10 minutes. Why are families self-segregating?"

A senior lecturer at UTS’s faculty of arts and social sciences, Ho says this segregation is also found in gentrified, bohemian ­enclaves in Sydney and Melbourne. In these inner-city areas, the economic and racial divide is not nec­es­sarily the familiar one separating private and public schools; often the gulf is between white-dominated public schools with a privileged parent cohort and highly diverse public schools with economically disadvantaged parents.

During the past year, an incendiary debate has erupted in Victoria about "white flight" from disadvantaged public schools in Melbourne’s trendy inner north. Here, social housing towers built in the 1960s, home to a large population of mostly African refugees, loom sentinel-like over tastefully renovated Victorian terraces worth ­between $1 million and $2m. Fitzroy and Carlton are renowned for their 19th-century architecture, cosmopolitan food cultures, alternative arts scene and ardent support for the Greens — the area’s federal MP is the Greens’ Adam Bandt. Two schools that feature prominently in the white-flight ­debate were polling booths at the July election, and returned the ­nation’s highest two-party-preferred vote for the minority party, which has pro-refugee and asylum-seeker policies. At Fitzroy Primary School, the Greens attracted 82.4 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, while a short distance away at the whiter, more ­advantaged North Fitzroy Primary School, the Greens won 81 per cent of the two party preferred vote.

The local council, City of Yarra, says the district has been a proud "Refugee Welcome Zone since 2002". Yet in Fitzroy, Carlton and surrounding suburbs, progressive, middle-class families have been accused of shunning public schools with high refugee populations.

"They are fleeing!" African community leader and former refugee Abeselom Nega says of white, inner-city families who apparently are rejecting diverse schools. This year, in a Melbourne newspaper, Nega accused families who avoided inner-Melbourne schools with large African-­Australian student cohorts of ­racism.

"The white parents don’t send their kids to these schools because all they see is black kids," he claimed. Nega admits to Inquirer that this allegation is "a big call. But in the absence of proper explanations as to why this has taken place, it can only be explained in the way I have said it." He chuck­les ruefully as he notes:  The irony is, in these places, the residents can be described as progressive; that is the contradiction."

The latest (2015) statistics from the My School website tell a story of stark ethnic segregation in these Greens-supporting precincts. Low-fee Catholic and public schools located near housing commission apartments in Fitzroy, Carlton and Flemington are clearly out of favour with Anglo parents. Between 90 per cent and 94 per cent of the students who attend Fitzroy Primary, Carlton Primary and Sacred Heart primary are from non-English-speaking or ­indigenous backgrounds. Only 3 per cent of Sacred Heart’s parents are in the top SES quarter, a measure of parents’ social and educational advantage.

Yet at nearby schools Fitzroy North Primary, Princes Hill Primary and Carlton North Primary, about 70 per cent of parents — ­almost three times the national ­average — are in the top SES bracket, while less than one third of students across these schools have LOTE backgrounds.

This ­entrenched racial and class division continues into high school. At the high-performing Princes Hill Secondary College, which hand-picks two-thirds of its student body, just 15 per cent of students are from LOTE families, while 68 per cent of parents are drawn from the top SES quarter.

Roughly 4km away is Mount Alexander College, where Nega sits on the school council. This recently renamed high school is within 500m of the Flemington public housing estate. Last year 71 per cent of Mount ­Alexander’s students were from LOTE backgrounds and 12 per cent of its parents were in the top SES quarter. In 2008, 60 per cent of the college’s parents were in the top bracket, suggesting a radical flight of higher-income families from the school.

While parents jostle to get their children into high-achieving inner-city public schools such as Princes Hill Secondary and Melbourne Girls College, Mount Alexander is only half full. The good news is that under a dynamic new principal, enrolments have risen 15 per cent this year, while the school’s top graduating students regularly achieve Australian Tertiary Admission Rank results in the 90s. Even so, Nega says the risk of the white exodus is that migrant children — in this case, African-background students — graduate from school with no contacts or friendships within the Anglo-Australian community, thus creating a deep sense of isolation.

Nega is the founder and chief executive of iEmpower, an organisation that aims to steer young ­African-Australians away from the justice system and into jobs. Many of his clients are young men who arrived in Australia in the 1990s as orphaned refugees and still live in housing commission flats in inner Melbourne. He ­believes that if the present generation of African school students are confined to schools filled with fellow refugees, while living among other Africans in social housing, "they are missing out. These kids will go into the labour market not having the opportunity to deal with (a diverse environment). I think it’s highly disadvantageous to those communities. We are also hearing some anecdotal evidence that even some exclusive public schools are excluding some sections of our community."

Princes Hill Secondary, one of Victoria’s top-performing government high schools, enrols out-of-area students on the basis of "curriculum grounds". To gain admis­sion, out-of-area students must have studied at least two musical instruments or been immersed in French — the kind of skills a refugee child from a single-parent home is unlikely to possess.

Nega says, "Everyone wants the best for their children; I get that." On the other hand, if even progressive parents avoid diverse schools, "knowing who is going to be left behind, I don’t know whether the response stacks up. You can’t have a voice saying, ‘Well, I am a progressive and I ­believe in multiculturalism and I want to be inclusive,’ and then not practise it."

For Vinu Patel, the decision to send his children to the solidly middle-class North Fitzroy Primary School was "very simple. It was the closest school to our home, so it was the obvious and natural choice, and it had a good name." Patel is president of North Fitzroy Primary’s parents association and he says the school is diverse in ways the My School data fails to reflect — there are same-sex parents, single parents as well as African and Asian parents with children at the school.

"It’s not just racial backgrounds, it’s all types of diversity," he says, adding that this was one of the key factors that drew his family to the campus. "It’s like licorice allsorts around here," jokes the management consultant who is of Indian and Malaysian heritage, and whose children are in Year 3 and Year 6.

Nevertheless, Patel does know of some parents who are in the catchment for the underprivileged Fitzroy Primary but have made a "conscious decision" to go to wealthier, less diverse North Fitzroy. He says accusing such parents of racism is "unfair. To call it ­racism is a big stretch. We are all trying to find the best education and best environment for our kids, and parents will do anything to achieve that as an outcome. It’s a rational response for many parents."

While Ho has documented class and ethnic segregation in Sydney schools, she says "the scale of that division (in Melbourne) did surprise me. I’ve been looking at that in terms of inner Sydney and I haven’t seen it to the same extent." Still, she says the trend is occurring in Sydney’s inner suburbs where, again, many progressives and Greens voters live.

Last year the academic co-authored a study on diversity and gentrifying school communities, focusing on two schools, Glebe and Forest Lodge public schools, in the city’s inner west. These schools, says Ho, are walking distance apart but Forest Lodge is "much wealthier and much more Anglo-Australian" while Glebe, closer to public housing, "is much more disadvantaged, more Aboriginal and has more kids from non-English-speaking backgrounds".

"So you definitely have that segregation, and I think you’d see that in a lot of suburbs, but especially where you have a concentration of public housing in an area that is gentrifying," Ho says. "You literally have these people buying up $1m, $2m houses that are next to social housing."

My School statistics reveal a pattern of racial and economic division across other inner-west public schools in Sydney. Only 16 per cent of students at Annandale North Public School have LOTE backgrounds, while 75 per cent of the parents come from the top SES quarter. It’s a similar situation at Newtown Public School — located in a suburb with a distinct bohemian vibe — where 80 per cent of the student body is white. Contrast these schools’ demographics to that of tiny Catholic school Our Lady of Mount Carmel Primary at Waterloo, which is near a cluster of social housing towers similar to those in inner Melbourne. Of 120 students at Mount Carmel, 71 per cent are Aboriginal and a further 25 per cent are from LOTE backgrounds. Although 90 per cent of this school’s students live in public housing, their academic results are improving significantly.

Ho argues that gentrifiers’ support for multiculturalism rarely extends to school choice. "When we interviewed people who had moved into inner Sydney, sometimes from more suburban areas, they would say, ‘Oh the restaurants and the diversity and we just love the gritty, urban feel,’ but that stops at the school gate," she says.

"They’re happy to eat at ethnic restaurants but they’re not neces­sarily happy for their kids to go to school with minority kids who might be ‘rough’ " — she says this in a sarcastic tone — "or who might be pulling their kids down or who don’t speak English. So there’s an acceptance of diversity that stops when it comes to ‘my own kids’. We saw that a lot."

Is this white flight a form of ­racial prejudice, as has been claimed? "I think that’s simplistic," responds Ho. "Sometimes I think it is overt racism but most of the time I think it’s a lot more complex than that."

She says school segregation is the result of ethnic and class factors that "work in different ways. There are some ethnic minority groups that people see as disadvantaged and dragging down their kids potentially … At the other end of the spectrum, you have avoidance of schools that are seen as Asian because they’re too successful. The students work too hard.

"There’s a strange combination of race and class which operates at different points on the spectrum. I’m quite saddened by both of those (trends), particularly in the inner-city areas where people have moved because they say they like the diversity.

Trevor Cobbold, a Canberra-based economist and convener from Save Our Schools, a lobby group for public education, says segregation in the nation’s schools "creates larger achievement gaps between schools because generally it’s the upper-income people that move. When you have schools with high concentrations of high disadvantage, that makes it really difficult to improve results."

He also warns that "for a highly successful multicultural society this is a very worrying trend ­because it has strong social implications about how our society works in the future". If students don’t grow up with other children of different ethnicities and class backgrounds, "it is going to be hard to expect people to do that in the workforce and in society more generally. In the past, Australia has been pretty successful at that."

What is driving this racial and economic segregation? Cobbold and Ho cite factors including rising parental anxiety about education; government policies en­couraging parental choice and the growth of private schools; ­income inequality; and a loosening of some public school catchments — again, to facilitate parental choice.

Ho says we have long been aware of a racial divide in rural areas between heavily indigenous schools and other schools. But since 2010 the My School website has provided information about the ethnic composition of every Aus­tralian school. "It was a revelation to me when those statistics came out," says the outspoken ­researcher, as the website exposed economic and racial gulfs across the nation. Less positively, she says, the website is "feeding into that culture of school shopping".

Recent research by think tank the Centre for Policy Development reveals a significant shift in enrolments away from disadvantaged public schools towards private schools and higher-perform­ing public schools. The re­searchers, retired school principals Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, found that parents were using National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy results (also ­recorded on My School) to seek out better-performing schools. They warned this was creating a two-tiered education system comprising advantaged private and public schools and struggling public schools.

Cobbold contends that "unfortunately, I think a certain part of our community wants their children to go to school with kids that look alike or have similar cultural backgrounds. That is a factor, that there are some families who want to get away from the mob — the mob may be low-SES families or families from different ethnic communities." He says that apart from My School’s demographic statistics, "we’ve got no real overview or systematic study of what’s happened with ethnic segregation. I think it involves both race and class and the two factors interact."

When it comes to multiculturalism and independent schools — the least diverse school sector — Sydney Grammar principal John Vallance insists that "you can’t really generalise. Even the most expensive private schools are often far more diverse than you might expect." Even so, he believes "the more diverse a school population, the better the school. This is not just a matter of occupying the moral high ground. A ­diverse student body makes for a richer experience.

According to My School, the academically selective Sydney Grammar has a more diverse student population (25 per cent of its students have LOTE backgrounds) than most other elite private schools and some public schools. This reflects an intentional policy on Vallance’s part. "I have been keen," he says, "to stress the school’s status as an inclusive, secular institution — something unusual amongst traditional private schools — and I think this makes us more attractive to a wider range of people … Throughout its modern history, we have ­always had a high population of migrant families or the sons of ­migrant families." Every year the $32,000 a year school offers scholarships and most of those who sit for the scholarship test are from Asian backgrounds. Does this tell us something about how such migrant families value educational opportunity? "Yes indeed it does," replies the headmaster.

This year, self-described "book whisperer" and "PC lefty" Alice Williams bought into Melbourne’s heated schools and ethnicity ­debate and was surprised to find herself the target of "Twitter hate" from other PC lefties. Williams was called a racist — a charge she vehemently denies — after she took issue with the claim white families bypassing multicultural schools were racist.

The author, blogger and mother of one had argued in a comment piece published in The Age that it was "obnoxious" to argue that high-achieving students should remain in disadvantaged schools and "sacrifice their own education to somehow drag up the level of their peers".

Williams tells ­Inquirer she is no "white apologist". Rather, her point was "that it’s far too simplistic to cry ‘racism’ when parents choose not to send their children to underperforming schools. It ­ignores the fact that some schools are under-performing … (because) the kids there are starting from a lower educational base." She adds: "Of course parents aren’t going to want to send their children to schools where they’re not going to get a good educational outcome. That’s not racist. That’s about them wanting what’s best for their child."

Williams feels strongly about this issue partly because her left-wing parents sent her to a low-­performing Melbourne school with a majority migrant student base and a culture of low expectations. She dropped out of univer­sity "because I didn’t know how to study, I’d never had to study" ­before eventually returning to tertiary education and completing a communications degree. "In my experience, any school that has high levels of non-English-speaking students will have low literacy outcomes, and it’s not because of any race," she says. Some schools handle this challenge well, but "we can’t pretend it isn’t an issue".

Williams’s home is in the catchment for the in-demand Princes Hill Primary. Although her son is only five months old, she finds this school off-putting because it is "so incredibly white" and has a low vaccination rate. "It’s all these Greens voters who don’t vaccinate their children," quips the committed Greens voter. This year, two Princes Hill students contracted measles and a further 21 unvaccinated students were sent home — demonstrating how this overwhelmingly Anglo school attracts many nonconformist parents.

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Independent inquiry needs to look at Gillian Triggs’s 18C farce

Gillian Triggs finds it difficult to explain to senators her unforgivable botch-up of a racial hatred case against students for their Facebook posts.

So let the head of the Human Rights Commission explain it under oath to an independent ­former judge in charge of a short, sharp independent inquiry.

It should be an inquiry Malcolm Turnbull can set up now to run the ruler over the many ­inconsistencies, fabrications and denials of natural justice from the commission when it comes to the Queensland University of Technology case and, no doubt, other 18C cases-cum-financial shakedowns that we never hear about.

The well-intentioned but stop-start Senate committees that question Triggs and the parliamentary inquiry established by the Prime Minister to ­inquire into 18C in coming months suffer from being, and being perceived to be, politically partisan.

They lack focus and forensic examination skills.

If Triggs and the commission have been wronged, as she says, by a “high level of misinformation in some sections of the media” (code for reporting by The Australian), she will welcome a fiercely independent investigation of the travesty on her watch.

The more likely reason for Triggs not wanting to explain the QUT case to the ­Senate, in the glare of the public eye, is that it ­exposes shameful negligence and probable institutional bias.

Most rational people should find it hard to explain how highly paid public servants at the commission could give weight, for 14 months, to a racial hatred complaint lacking in merit.

Most rational people who ­believe in natural justice would find it hard to justify why, in the 14 months in which Triggs had the complaint, no one from the commission ever picked up the phone or wrote to the students to tell them a few basic facts they needed to know if they were going to have any chance of a resolution.

Such as: “You are accused by an indigenous staff member of QUT, Cindy Prior, of acting unlawfully — racial vilification under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. It is a serious allegation. It could escalate to the Federal Circuit Court unless it is nipped in the bud. My job as president when a complaint is made is to investigate and, if necessary, conciliate to try to stop it going to court. You are young and intelligent students who want to be ­career professionals. You may suffer grave reprisals and harm if unfairly branded as racists. What happened?”

Or to Prior: “It is not racial vilification for a student, against whom you had discriminated by asking him to leave the Oodgeroo Unit because of his whiteness, to write ‘Just got kicked out of the unsigned indigenous computer room. QUT stopping segregation with segregation?’ Why are you running this complaint, Ms Prior? We should not waste taxpayers’ money with frivolous cases about students’ Facebook posts, none of which named or disparaged you personally.”

These are the conversations that never happened.

They did not happen because the commission and Triggs failed to do their functions properly — they didn’t “investigate”, and they negligently left it to QUT to ­advise the students of the case against them.

It was always the job of Triggs to “investigate” and tell the students — that’s what her own guidelines state. She wrongfully abrogated these responsibilities.

She and the university kept the students unaware of the existence of the 14-month-old case until three business days before the critical “conciliation conference” run by the commission, which refused to reschedule despite its failures to give fair notice.

Triggs now wants the Senate to believe her reasons for not wanting to talk about this incompetence in the QUT case are ­directly due to legal process — she cited a possible ­appeal by Prior, of the Federal Circuit Court’s ­November 4 decision to throw out the case.

“Were I able to discuss it, I would be pleased to do so because of the high level of misinformation in some sections of the media,” Triggs said. ­

Incidentally, one of the reasons she was in the Senate was to ­explain her misinformation — she had falsely ­accused another media outlet, The Saturday Paper, of dis­honestly verballing her in an interview earlier this year.

This self-imposed gag by Triggs is a disingenuous cop-out. Currently, there is no “appeal”. Prior’s lawyers missed the opportunity to appeal because they failed to lodge it within 14 days of the court’s dismissal of the 18C case against Alex Wood, Calum Thwaites and Jackson Powell.

The lawyers, having tried to sheet some of the blame for their missed deadline to the judge (who last week awarded costs against Prior), are returning to court on Friday to try to persuade it to grant an appeal.

It is not a foregone conclusion.

In the meantime, there is no reason for Triggs to refuse to answer questions about it. In any case, does she really believe that anything she says in the Senate could influence a Federal Court judge in a future appeal?

These are the facts. The spectacular farce that has been the commission’s handling of this 18C case — and doubtless others — needs to be properly exposed in a serious inquiry.

Let a former judge determine the misinformation and its source. How about it, PM?

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Unproductive? Go figure....

The Federal Government has asked the Productivity Commission to spend 12 months figuring out how to make Australia more productive.

If the government or the commission wanted to enhance their own productivity, they could get to work on the to-do list left by Gary Banks, the last head of the Commission, in 2012.

Instead, the Commission says "The slowdown in Australia's capacity to 'do more with the same' is puzzling because scientific and technological knowledge advanced rapidly after the early 2000s..." giving us the internet and apps and social media.

Perhaps no-one at the PC has spent hours updating their Facebook page or watching YouTube clips of cats playing drums -- or they might know the internet can empower procrastination as much as productivity. In fact, the real puzzle is why Australia's productivity growth isn't even lower.

Consider. It took six years to approve one new coal mine and dozens of mines are caught up in this regulatory nightmare.  Modelling in 2014 found reducing these delays by just one year would add $160 billion to national output over a decade and create 69,000 jobs.

Billions have been wasted on unnecessary desalination plants that have been mothballed.  Billions more on the construction of wind turbines, even though they are one of the most expensive and unreliable ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Still more has been wasted building a fixed broadband network which is rapidly being made redundant by technological advances in wireless broadband.

Ever more is spent on education per student while their performance plummets against international benchmarks. Asian competitors spend half as much as we do on health but have the same life expectancy.

Extortion and thuggery increase the cost of construction by up to 30 percent but the cop won't be on the beat for two years and has one arm tied behind his back.  Stamp duties, planning controls and regulation have pushed up the cost of housing.

And this is just scratching the surface of government mandated waste and inefficiency. If the boffins and pollies thought about this for 12 minutes, let alone 12 months, they would realise that in almost every case government intervention is the problem; it's high time they were part of the solution.

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Africans add multicultural enhancement to St Kilda beach

No police action -- as one expects in Victoria

Up to 30 people were involved in a brawl at St Kilda beach which left five people in hospital.

A teenage boy and two teenage girls were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Two men who tried to assist the teenagers also received non-life threatening injuries and were taken to hospital.

Witness "Brad" told radio station 3AW that two groups of teenagers of African appearance were pushing and shoving each other on the beach before the fight erupted.

The brawl then moved towards the Stokehouse restaurant, he said.

He said one of the youths appeared to be carrying a slingshot and was being held back by a female friend. "All of a sudden, boom, a brawl took place and we bolted," he said. "It just ruined our night."

Brad said his family was enjoying the nice weather by visiting St Kilda beach for some fish and chips.

"To be be honest it's disappointing, I've got my kids asking 100 questions," he said. "My nine-year-old said 'Dad, can you make sure all the doors are locked'. He's never asked that."

"No one has been arrested in relation to the incident and the investigation remains ongoing," Acting Senior Sergeant Kris Hamilton said.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here