Page 3116 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 August 2005
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bureaucratic as well as curriculum demands. In particular, larger schools require more administrative and maintenance staff rather than teaching staff. In other words, there is an optimal size. After that, economies of scale turn into their opposite.
But it is not only diseconomies of scale that militate against generalised school enlargement. When Professor Conant wrote his unfortunate classic, the middle class dominated large, urban American schools. His was a model for a particular affluent segment of society at a particular time. Subsequent developments have seen middle class students protecting their interests, either by migrating to private schools or by forming de facto elite public education ghettos determined by high-income catchment areas.
In the meantime, most bigger inner city schools turned into dysfunctional institutions marked by depersonalisation, alienation, violence and increasingly low achievement. That further disadvantaged the already disadvantaged: the poor, most ethnic minorities and those with intellectual and physical disabilities. One providential reaction, based on overwhelming research, has been the recent smaller schools movement in the United States. Amongst its backers is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose manifesto states in part:
Today’s large comprehensive high schools are obsolete: they prepare a privileged fraction of students for college while placing many students on tracks to nowhere ...
The manifesto goes on to state that the foundation:
is committed to the concept that students should be able to choose from several small, innovative public high schools that offer a highly personalised, rigorous education and prepare every student for college, work and citizenship.
I mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as Mr Stanhope is fond of saying that the proposed mega school will be a state-of-the-art twenty-first century school with twenty-first century facilities. On the contrary, it would appear that so far as educational theory and practice are concerned Mr Stanhope is still in the cassette era while everyone else is using MP3 players. To the extent to which the Conant model applies in the ACT today, it is to larger selective schools like Marist College and Canberra Grammar whose catchment is the whole territory. It does not apply to community-based schools such as those under threat from the mooted redevelopment.
Leaving aside this bogus claim that mega schools reflect the latest educational wisdom, what do Mr Stanhope and Ms Gallagher have to gain from this ridiculous imposition on west Belconnen? One obvious answer is that it facilitates conformity and uniformity. It suits the bureaucratic imagination, or almost complete lack of it. It is a technocratic and corporatist solution, which suits Ms Gallagher in particular. As a child of the 1960s she is imbued with all the pedagogical nonsense—
Ms Gallagher: The 1970s.
MRS DUNNE: Yes, I suppose it is. Sadly, it is only the 1970s. All the pedagogical nonsense that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s thwarted educational reform in western schooling. Her process of curriculum renewal, of which I have been critical in the past, is being undertaken with what appears to be the express intention of emulating every hair-brained, pedagogical fad over the past few decades.
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