Are private school fees worth it?

The discussion below is fairly reasonable but omits a lot and is too generalized.

What it omits are the SOCIAL as distinct from the educational advantages of a private schooling. Pupils tend to form lasting friendships from their school days and the friends from private school are often VERY advantageous.

And while private schooling may not greatly help every pupil it can be very advantageous as an escape hatch from a bad government school. The latter point is mentioned but needs emphasis

The experience of overseas travel, a new family car or 12 months’ tuition at a top Sydney school?

Private school fees breaking through the $45,000 a year barrier, as reported by this masthead last week, will leave some parents weighing up what is the tangible value of an elite education if it means trade-offs in other areas.

University of New England lecturer in education Sally Larsen said the difference in academic performance of students at public and private schools was negligible.

“There’s no difference in primary school, and it’s just a segregation effect in high school, where kids from more wealthy families are being funnelled into private schools,” she said.

Glenn Fahey, director of the education program at the Centre for Independent Studies, said there was little overall value added from a non-government education once students’ backgrounds, including socioeconomic status, were accounted for.

“What the data tells us is that students’ backgrounds, largely parental education and employment status, make a big difference,” he said.

But Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research associate professor Greg Marks said there were some tangible benefits in terms of ATAR scores for students who attend a private school.

“There is an incremental benefit, beyond that of socioeconomic status, of going to a private school, to an independent school, followed by Catholic schools, followed by government schools,” he said. “Top ATAR students often come from private schools, and they tend to get into university more, which makes a big difference to employment and lifetime income.”

Marks’ research in Victoria found that students who went to a private school achieved an ATAR rank five or six points higher than those who went to a public school.

He attributed this discrepancy to standards of teaching, discipline and a subculture of strong academic performance.

“I think in private schools, they teach at a higher standard and pitch the lessons at a higher standard so that kids are expected to reach them and therefore do,” he said. “There’s probably more of a subculture of doing well at school, and if kids are causing problems, they can get expelled.”

Marks said while the data was sparse, private school students tended to experience less unemployment, earn higher incomes and hold higher status jobs. But he also said it largely stemmed from the benefits of getting a university degree, and that paying a premium for a private school education would not benefit students of different abilities in the same way.

“Ability is quite stable, so if your kid is a top performer or isn’t going to do very well, sending them to a private school won’t make much of a difference and probably will not be worth $45,000,” he said. “For kids in the middle to top of the class, it might give them a bit of a boost to their ATAR to go to a private or selective school, which would make a difference getting into a prestigious course at university.”

While there are some international studies that show private schools can also benefit students in terms of a “peer effect”, Larsen said that impact was probably “smaller than people think,” and that the cost of private school wasn’t worth its benefits.

“The school sector that kids go into is one factor among many that help to explain where they get academically and socially,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think the benefits justify the costs.”

Marks said that eschewing a private school education and investing the money elsewhere could be better for some people, but rejected the idea of spending it on things such as overseas trips.

“There’s a reasonable argument to put the money that you would have used in the bank and get a return on that,” he said. “But taking them on trips overseas to give them ‘life training’ doesn’t make sense.”

In a Centre for Independent Studies survey of more than 1000 parents, those who chose a government school were more likely to indicate that they would have made a different choice (43 per cent) if it weren’t for the cost than parents who chose a Catholic school (30 per cent).

Redfern resident Maria Vlezko saw an immediate improvement when she moved her daughter from a public school to the International Grammar School in Glebe two years ago.

“I was highly dissatisfied with her old school,” she said. “Kids weren’t receiving as much attention in class, they got teased by other children if they did well and my daughter became very uninterested in school.”

Vlezko said the extracurricular offerings and multicultural component of Anastasia’s school were important factors in her decision to move towards private schooling.

“There’s music, drama, chess, coding, and there are kids from lots of different backgrounds, which aligns with my values and how I want my kids to grow up,” she said. “It’s an investment in our children’s future, and we only have one chance.”

Despite cost of living pressures, Vlezko said the fees of nearly $30,000 a year were worth it for 11-year-old Anastasia.

“There was massive progress straight away,” she said. “Teachers were easy to reach, they identified Anastasia’s strengths and areas for improvement straight away, and she made lots of friends with the same interests who help each other with lessons. It’s worth the sacrifice for us.”

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/are-private-school-fees-worth-it-20230111-p5cbuc.html

************************************************************

Democratic follies

Recent years have seen a strengthening dominance of politics over individual and commercial decision-making. This is readily evident in the growth of regulations and government spending increasing from under 20 per cent of the economy a century ago to around (and over) 50 per cent today.

Within democracies, these developments are due to electorates demanding income redistributions and tolerating increased national debt – oblivious to the adverse effects on their own future living standards. There are very few political leaders of stature like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Margaret Thatcher, or Donald Trump who seek to persuade voters of the folly of such demands. Most opt for policies that reflect popular opinion.

Hence, established political parties increasingly promise ‘free’ goods and services, while new parties have emerged, normally offering even more favours than the established parties.

Preventing what many people have been led to accept as catastrophic climate change from burning fossil fuels has become a leading proffered favour. The popularity of these policies derives from the weight of misleading information on the dangers of human-induced climate change together with soothing claims that weather-dependent renewables are cheaper than fossil (and nuclear) fuels. Those claims fail the test of, ‘Why then do wind and solar need subsidies?’ And, ‘Why has their growth coincided with price rises?’ In Australia, two decades of subsidies to wind and solar have resulted in their share of electricity supply rising from zero to 20 per cent and electricity prices rising more than twice as fast as overall prices.

Popular acceptance of impending climate disaster and of the tolerable costs of avoiding it by a forced replacement of fossil fuel energy has radically re-centred the political pendulum. Over the past 20 years, Australia’s Coalition parties and the ALP have shifted from a policy that first sought impartiality in energy supply, to one requiring ‘2 per cent of additional’ electricity supply to be derived from wind and solar, to a ‘Net Zero’ target that expunges coal and gas from energy supply.

Yesterday the government announced it will require the nation’s 215 largest facilities to cut their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. According to Minister Chris Bowen, this new imposition on Australia’s largest firms was ‘carefully calibrated to deliver the policy certainty and support Australian industry needs through decarbonisation’.

The latest announcement is a substantiation that popular sentiment favours an even faster purging of fossil fuels, a sentiment that has turbocharged support for the Greens and their supposedly conservative counterparts, the Teals. In the latest Commonwealth election, six affluent and stylish middle-aged Teals sirens won formerly safe Liberal Party seats. Indeed, only 12 per cent of the electorate supported the ‘freedom parties’ like One Nation that opposed further measures to force the ‘transition to renewables’.

‘Dark Money’ from politicised foundations and renewable supply vested interests has played a role in this. But more significant is the thousands of foot soldiers supporting the campaigns of Greens and Teals and the favourable reception these campaigns have on the electorate – both in directly garnering votes and in indirectly forcing established political parties to modify their programs.

In any event, it is very rare that success of policies like that of products and services is attributable to successful marketing – overwhelmingly, particular products and services prevail in open markets because they best meet the needs of consumers.

John Howard had a great faith in democracy, maintaining that ‘the voters generally get it right’ (even when not electing his party). Yet in Australia and other Western democracies, voters are pressing for policies that take their nations to the edge of the economic precipice.

Rather than clever marketing, this is due to the general success of Woke themes with the leftish ‘march through the institutions’ of learning, media, and government.

In former times, the radical objection to market capitalism was that it has passed its use-by date and socialism would offer greater efficiency and fairness. Despite the Fall of the Wall puncturing that ideal, we have seen a broader objection to current societal outcomes and a jettisoning of time-honoured views. These have ranged beyond disparaging market capitalism’s role in creating present living standards to include a rejection of physical definitions of men and women, and concocting race and sex discrimination even to the degree that this is claimed to invalidate some long-authenticated scientific laws.

Joel Kotkin makes a persuasive case that the multitudinous forms of Wokeness in media and culture are now being rejected by the movie-goers and TV watchers. Perhaps, but if so, it has been a long time coming and it’s hard to see political, educational, and governmental structures imploding.

The problem we face is in the arrogation of roles to political leaders that they are incapable of fulfilling. The gold standard of governance is the American Constitution. Far from envisaging an active role for government, this focussed on protections of individual liberty and property and restraining the powers of government to prevent tyranny (including tyranny of the majority). Democracy was not even mentioned by the US founders who were well-educated on the role of a surfeit of populism in undermining ancient Greek city-states.

Politics forces voters to think ‘holistically’ and while thousands of individual decisions of the same voters as consumers operating in commercial markets have driven modern prosperity, they cannot do so in political markets. That would require assessing complex information on unknowable costs against supposedly shared benefits that are highly uncertain. Moreover, to effect it, would entail selecting political representatives as commercial actors. This is as unworkable in energy as it would be in food supply, housing, or health care.

Our problem is how to disengage government from its increasingly activist commercial role.

https://spectator.com.au/2023/01/dark-money

**************************************************************

Australia's very recent descent into Fascism

It is sometimes said the past is another country. The attitudes, mores and dress conventions accepted in former times seem awkward, offensive or ugly in what we assume is a more enlightened present day.

In the past, housebound women wore corsets, men thought only they could do science, and dragons ruled uncharted waters. People made comedy about Hitler as damaged generations used humour to process World War II trauma and stamp on the evil dictator. Through the inverted telescope of time, all these things become immensely far away and unfamiliar.

But it is not just the distant past we struggle to remember and understand. Our ragged attention spans are poorly equipped to grapple with very recent history.

Think about this: it is only a year since tennis player Novak Djokovic was expelled from Australia for arriving unvaccinated. Not a decade, though COVID years surely deserve a special measure, but a year. Just 52 weeks since our world was so very different.

In January 2022, the Omicron variant was dominating Australian news. We still had daily case number reports. More than 92 per cent of Australians over the age of 16 had received two doses of COVID vaccine, but the high incidence of mild infections kept a population still scarred by lockdown in a state of high anxiety.

For a couple of years people had been banned from popping in to Australia for fun. In fact, Australians weren’t even sure we did “fun” any more – it seemed risky. Then some people dropped by for something as frivolous as a game and the Australian Open became a focal point of COVID dread.

Djokovic, a 34-year-old athlete fit enough to contest an international tennis tournament, was among them. The player had chosen not to get the COVID-19 vaccine. He had an exemption, based on having recently contracted and recovered from the virus, although there was controversy over the timing of the beginning and end of his illness. But it wasn’t his health that was at issue. Australians had adopted a zealous vaccination stance to get to where we were, and the real question was whether we were ready to let go.

Other tennis players participating in the Open were angry that he might be granted a way around the jab rules when they had complied – worrying, that it made “fools” of the vaccinated.

But that was nothing compared with the concerns of the Australian public, whose collective self-concept hung in the balance. In the race to get everyone vaccinated, vaccination had been turned into a moral issue: something you did for the common good.

And when something has become a matter of morality, heresy quickly becomes grounds for hate.

The fury at Djokovic’s heresy was immense, with seven in 10 Australians saying he should be expelled from the country. And from anger at the Serbian tennis player’s medical decision emerged a desire to find everything about the man fundamentally flawed.

The Serbian Council of Australia reports that this included his race. In a report on the matter, it says that during this time there was an increase in comments that were derogatory towards Australians of Serbian heritage. A survey it conducted of Serbian community members found that more than 85 per cent of respondents believed “anti-Serb sentiment has risen in Australia directly as a result of the Novak Djokovic saga”. Respondents reported being told to “pack up your bags and go”, being labelled as “arrogant”, and being told that “everyone hates Serbian people”.

An anonymous letter received by one member of the community said “all you serbians who are here should also be ashamed, embarrassed and feel guilty of yourselves”. It is an astonishing case study of the taboos people will break to smear someone who has broken a new taboo.

As it became one of the most internationally Googled affairs of 2022 – before January was even over – I wrote about the civil liberties implications of governments making and breaking rules on the run. I quipped that the last time a Serbian had triggered this much international angst was in 1914, and for a nation of less than seven million, “Serbs have an outsized knack for causing international strife”. To my regret, Serbs in Australia took my careless generalisation as an attack on them. In fact, I was trying to illustrate the way we as a culture say we celebrate rebels – but only really do so when they conform (very rebelliously) to the prevailing fashion. The famous Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla may have known something of this, as would the creator of a company called Tesla, who now owns Twitter. Non-conformist rebels of all kinds attract hate.

Today the coverage of Djokovic and the Australian Open makes it seem like none of this ever happened, or as though it happened a long time ago to different people. But it didn’t: all of this was us. We are only one year older, possibly no wiser. And the hurt and division created is not yet healed.

While Djokovic remains unvaccinated and has been allowed to enter Australia and play without controversy, many people are mourning friendships lost in the febrile atmosphere.

Neighbours reported on neighbours perceived to be breaching COVID rules; heavy-handed policing of protesters was cheered on by masked (online) mobs. Some people fell out over whether to vaccinate or not to vaccinate, and regret it now they can see both sides were driven by fear. And in the context of a tennis game, one man’s vaccination status became a reason to be hateful towards strangers.

As we embark on other discussions which are necessary to our country, including the one about the form of words with which to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to parliament, it is vital that the attempt to remedy racial division doesn’t result in entrenching hate. The past may seem like another country, but we should still be able to recognise ourselves.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/can-we-recognise-ourselves-only-a-year-ago-we-persecuted-djokovic-20230112-p5cc8c.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

*******************************************************

A big backlash against political correcness

Prize money for greyhound racing in NSW has close to doubled in the five years since the state government tried to ban the industry, as online gambling markets drive record income from punters who have never watched a race.

Betting agency fees – known as “race field information use fees” – paid to Greyhound Racing NSW increased from $24.5 million in the 2017-18 financial year to $68.8 million in 2021-22, the organisation’s annual reports show, while its sponsorship and rights income increased from zero to $10 million.

Ads for online betting services, such as Ladbrokes and Sportsbet, blanket Greyhound Racing NSW’s livestreaming website, thedogs.com.au.

The presence of the gambling industry extends to dogs in each race wearing “rugs” colour-coded to match eight gambling websites, following a sponsorship deal brokered last year.

Greyhound Racing NSW’s overall income increased from $67 million to $121.5 million during the same period, in a financial performance described by CEO Robert Macaulay as its best on record. The sport’s prize money rose from $26.4 million to $46.3 million in a third successive year of record profits.

“The sport of greyhound racing is thriving in NSW and this has filtered through as an economic benefit to the regional and rural communities of NSW,” Macaulay said, noting 75 per cent of participants lived outside metropolitan areas.

“The reality is that greyhound racing would not exist without the massive amounts of money wagered by punters online.”

Joanne Lee, Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds
But greyhound welfare advocates told The Sun-Herald it was shameful that the local industry was thriving off gambling cash when countries abroad had shunned the sport.

Australian races are already attracting gamblers in overseas markets such as in the US and Asia, where the practice has been largely outlawed, with Sydney fixtures featured on betting websites abroad.

Joanne Lee from the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds said arguments that greyhound racing was a community sport seemed weak when so much of its income came from people who only viewed races as lists of odds on betting websites.

“The reality is that greyhound racing would not exist without the massive amounts of money wagered by punters online who will never attend a race. Given the dramatic reduction in racetrack attendance, there is virtually no money made through community engagement,” she said.

NSW recorded its first greyhound racing fatality of 2023 last week: a dog racing at Wentworth Park, in Glebe, was euthanised after colliding with other animals on the track on Thursday. Eight dogs died at the track in 2022, in addition to two at Richmond and one at Potts Park, in Yagoona.

“The rest of the world has seen the writing on the wall and is rapidly moving away from greyhound racing — the grubby greyhound gambling industry in NSW is lapping up the profits as a result,” said state Greens member Abigail Boyd.

“In recent years, we have seen the NSW greyhound racing industry change race times to suit people betting in real time overseas, regardless of the inconvenience caused to participants and race officials and the additional risks it adds from an animal welfare perspective.”

Asked if running races earlier in the morning was influenced by international markets, Macaulay said the organisation was “considering its options” to engage viewers overseas but the bulk of its revenue was from Australia.

Greyhound racing was set to be outlawed in NSW from July 1, 2017 due to animal welfare concerns, but former Liberal premier Mike Baird overturned the decision just three months after it was passed, instead promising to clean up the industry.

However, critics say state government interventions to improve safety and regulation, as well as taxes on gambling, have contributed to greyhound racing’s wealth.

The state government invested $30 million into track safety upgrades in 2021, a cost which opponents say saved expenses for the racing industry.

In 2018, NSW established an independent regulator, the Greyhounds Welfare Integrity Commission (GWIC). Before the 2021-22 financial year, the regulator was funded by Greyhounds Racing NSW, which critics said compromised its independence. It is now funded mostly by the state government’s 10 per cent point of consumption tax on online wagering (while racing’s share of money gathered from that tax has also increased).

“The greyhound racing industry is funded by the gambling industry and state governments. Without these two revenue streams, the industry would be unviable,” said Lee.

In a statement, NSW Minister for Hospitality and Racing Kevin Anderson said “animal welfare is at the heart of the NSW government’s support for the greyhound industry”, declining to answer questions about whether it had facilitated an increase in Greyhound Racing NSW’s income.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/nsw/greyhound-racing-turns-record-profit-from-punters-who-have-never-watched-a-race-20230110-p5cbk8.html

********************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*********************************************