Australia

I think this is like admitting defeat. It's saying 'there is no way we can make the public system as good as the private system so we're just going to take over the private schools'. Private education is stupidly expensive. I had a client who used to pay more than my annual salary to send her kids to a private school. Parents are selecting private education because they see value in the calibre of education there.

If you can improve the public education quality to the point where it is on-par with private, parents will cease to see the value in paying up to half a Million dollars sending their kids to private school. Our family has done the equivalent of this. We moved to the catchment of a top-tier public school to give our kids the best public education options available. There is as much disparity between public schools as there is between public/private. I believe there's a good middle-ground to be had where more academic-focused public schools are created. The few that exist now are so difficult to get into that loads of parents who want their kids to get a great education (we applied but our kid didn't make the grade) aren't qualifying.

There will always be a percentage who want some of the things private education offers (like religion), but enough will start sending their kids public that the remaining private students become a rounding error.

I'm also not comfortable with the idea of the government effectively saying either of the following:

1. [To parents] If you decide to send your child to private school, they stop being entitled to the education funding you are paying taxes for.
2. [To schools] You no longer own this school, we are taking over your private property.

If wealthy parents want to pay for an education that’s fine but when more taxpayer money goes to private schools than public it feels a bit off.

This is a really frequently misunderstood topic and there are plenty of people who intentionally cherry-pick the numbers to make the government look bad over it. So, I genuinely understand where you are coming from.

The first bit of confusion is that public schools get most of their funding from their state government. A comparatively small percentage comes from the federal government, usually for major works. Private school government funding comes from the federal government.

The second bit that confuses people is that funding isn't just that 'every school gets $x'. The. Amount of funding is mostly dictated by the student cohort. Rather than thinking of it as every school gets $x, think of it as the default amount per student is $x.

So yes, you get situations where a big private school with 2,500 students seems to get more money than any public school. But average it per student and account for what the state government is providing to the public school and the numbers come out far more evenly.

I sure agree that this should be far more apparent and easy to follow. Maybe the federal government should give the funds to the state education departments and have the states fund the private schools? I'd be on board with that.

I get why private exists and wouldn’t want it to go away overnight but why not properly fund public instead.

Ignoring my personal distaste for private schools for a sec, I find irony in the fact that we're discussing this topic on a post about early child care - where it is almost all private. We managed to get into the local government childcare centre, but it was not easy. And not much different in price.

Child care pits coming soon to a community center near you.