John Howard and Vouchers

DOGS notes the following interesting information, particularly for supporters of public education in Australia:

John Howard is opposed to vouchers. Why? The Australian May 16, 2007, reported the following:

" After his education speech in Sydney this week, the prime Minister took some time to explain why he didn't like the idea of vouchers for schools.

He said they 'undermined the fundamental value and strength of public education as the safety net and guarantor of a reasonable quality education in this country'. He said choice could not work effectively without that fundamental underpinning.'

What do we hear from the ALP on vouchers? They have something even worse in the wings and that is ' shared facilities".

Public Education could survive vouchers, but it will not survive "shared facilities". The integrated" system (read privatisation) is the ultimate poison invented by those who have refused to confront the private sectarian sector for political or personal or even  family (tribal) reasons.

Never Safe from Vouchers

If you think  that a State with 96% of its children in public schools and 21 counties with no private schools at all, would be safe from successful Voucher legislation, you think wrong .

In the United States Legislators in the State of Utah, passed a voucher law early in 2007 after a lobbying campaign underwritten by a right wing group, "The American Legislative Exchange Council" . This group favours the privatisation of public education.  The law that was passed provides private school patrons with vouchers worth between $500 to $3000 and there is no income cap.

Utahns for Public Education, a group pulled together to oppose the legislation gathered 131,000 signatures in about a month to put the measure on the ballot. Only 92,000 signatures were needed, meaning the referendum question is almost guaranteed a slot.

What a pity Australia does not have a citizen initiated referendum process!

The voucher advocates accused teachers' unions of orchestrating the signature drive  but opponents of private ;school aid noted that people were motivated to sign because vouchers are not popular in Utah. The state has few private schools and 96 percent of the state residents send their children to public institutions.

DOGS note that Utah residents are not silly. They understand that

vouchers = privatisation and

privatisation = possible lack of access to education for their children.

Shared Facilities

For many decades DOGS have warned supporters of public education that shared facilities and integration spells the death knell and takeover of public education by private school operators. We have always maintained that it is even worse than the voucher system. It has led to the neutralisation of public education as we know it in New Zealand.

The ALP have recently adopted shared facilities in their policy. DOGS will deal with "Shared Facilities" and the methods by which public schools are taken over by this method at a later date.

Captured Schools

One of the outcomes of "shared facilities" are what can be termed "captured schools". Examples of these schools are surfacing in Victoria. They occur in various ways. For example,

• when promoters of strong values create a core of "believers" and persuade struggling State schools to accept a "dual" stream.

• when a particular interest group is imposed on our State schools from above by bureaucrats and political apparatchiks.

DOGS have written, warning about the captured schools method of privatisation in the 1980s.

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