Beyond the comfort zone
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
AT DEBNEY PARK SECONDARY COLLEGE, there have been two principals in recent years. Michael O'Brien, after teaching at the school for fifteen years, recently took over from Brett New, who has been promoted to assistant regional director. I interviewed them both. They talked about many things – how almost every student at the school had an individual learning program, how wonderful the African families were to work with, the excellence of the teachers, the establishment of a culture of learning and, most of all, how they loved their jobs. "It is simply the best environment to work in," said O'Brien, "the most wonderful job you could ever have."
O'Brien sent me out into the school. In the yard, groups of African boys stared at me curiously as I walked by. They looked scruffy. Debney Park has no school uniform. Many of these students are on provisional visas that mean they could be moved at any time. No school can ask poor parents to buy a uniform under such circumstances and, in any case, any uniform would have to allow for all the varieties of ethnic and religious dress. The yard was full of black and brown faces, boys in baggy pants and T-shirts and girls in headscarves and hijabs.
The week after my visit, federal member Bronwyn Bishop called for a ban on headscarves in Australian government schools. She said school uniforms were "a leveller – a great sign of a society that is working with different cultures". The headscarf, she said, was "being used by the sort of people who want to overturn our values". It was "an iconic emblem of defiance".
Bishop, presumably, would have seen a schoolyard full of defiance at Debney Park Secondary College that day. And she might have agreed that the reason parents choose private schools is values.
Or perhaps her views would not have survived the collision with reality. The headscarves were worn a dozen different ways. Some girls were matching the hijabs with full-length, figure-concealing dresses. Three girls were wearing them with tight jeans and off-the-shoulder tops. These girls sat on the steps to the classroom, giggling and flirting like any teenagers. On the wall above them, there was graffiti not yet washed off. "Mr O'Brien go fuck yourself," it read. Another said: "Police suck."
The school bell sounded. The girls in the tight jeans joined the rest of a Year 8 class for a lesson in map-reading – preparation for an orienteering excursion in the Otways in a few weeks' time. The teacher was young, good-looking and scruffier than any of the children in the class. He wore frayed shorts, a T-shirt with a motto and well-worn sneakers. Yet he had total control over the class. The students calculated the distance between points on a map using a scale. They worked out where the mountains were by reading the contour lines. Quiet, settled. A teacher's aide circulated. She was here, she whispered to me, because quite a few of the students had problems.
Upstairs, Year 10 students were learning about the Australian political system. They knew who the prime minister was. They were less clear on the leader of the opposition. "Is it Mark Latham," one asked, "the man who wrote the book?" They knew about Steve Bracks, the Premier of Victoria, because of his Lebanese heritage. One student carried on about this so much that the teacher joked with him that he must want to be Lebanese.
"No, miss," he replied. "I want to be white."
This class was less settled. The kids talked all the time. The last part of the lesson was spent in groups, planning ways to raise money to fund a scheduled excursion. There was no assumption here that the parents would be able to pay. The only white student in the class was also the most disruptive "I want to sell ice-cream," he said, and again at regular intervals, "icecream". The Muslim girls didn't want him in their group. They wanted to get on with the job. "I don't want to be with them, either," he said. "They aren't interested in ice-cream."
The Year 11 English class included three students who were fasting for Ramadan. The teacher was attempting to go a little easier on them. The class was studying – by their own choice – the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, a modern take on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The old plot has been rendered into a modern high-school film about the perils of dating. It is set in a very white, very middle-class American high school where all the students are beautiful, smart and rich. One of the boys who was fasting slumped over his desk. The rest of the class was riveted. In the final love scene, one girl cried.
Afterwards, their teacher asked them to discuss what the main messages of the movie might be, what values – that word again – it was trying to convey.
The sheet she handed out suggested that the central message might be that we should not judge people by appearances or that parents don't give their children enough independence. But several of the students responded that the main message was that parents have a difficult job raising their children.
The day was over. What values had Debney Park Secondary College displayed? There was the motto over the gate, "Towards Equity & Excellence – Every Child Matters". But for the most part, it looked like any high school – and quite like the one I attended nearly 30 years ago. Nothing immediately visible, other than the ethnicity of the students, marked it out. Only its results, properly understood, told me it was exceptional.
Debney Park Secondary College might be a corrective to the view that a market economy – giving parents power and choice – can by itself lift educational standards. The figures show, and the Victorian Department of Education & Training knows, that on a "value-added" measure, Debney Park Secondary College is one of the most outstanding schools in the state. And yet middle-class parents like me drive our kids all over town to schools that are filling up while Debney Park Secondary College has places to spare.
Those who put their faith in markets tend to assume that the market will always be well informed – that consumers will know everything they need to know to make rational choices. This raises the question of what sort of information should be published about schools. Education unions and teachers have strongly, and mainly successfully, resisted "league tables", arguing correctly that these will be misleading if they are based only on university entrance scores without taking context into account.
Recently, Jennifer Buckingham has argued that this is a reason for more information to be released – not less. She suggests that a range of information should be published, much of it based on sophisticated statistical modelling to allow for variation between students.
The data everyone wants is a measure of "value adding" – what the school actually adds to the students who walk through the gates. This is difficult to get, says Buckingham. Isolating the effectiveness of the school involves complicated statistical modelling and, because schools are small samples, the figures are only reliable at the extremes of good and poor performance. Buckingham argues that, even though it may be that there will be little difference between two-thirds of schools, "it is important for the public to be aware of which schools have been confidently identified as very good and very poor performers".
To add to this, Buckingham proposes the publication of a huge amount of other information, including the socioeconomic mix of each school's intake, the number of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the total amount of money available to the school, whether from fees or government funding, the qualifications of the teachers, the teacher turnover, the class sizes, the ways in which parents can participate in the life of the school, the numbers of suspensions and expulsions and violent incidents at the school, the retention to Year 12 and the attendance rates, as well as raw scores in external examinations and information on where students go after school. There should also be surveys of parental and student satisfaction, she says, and the results of these should be published.
On the basis of what I know about Debney Park Secondary College, it would brush up well on nearly all of these indicators. If Buckingham's suggestions were implemented, and free market ideology truly is an effective method of governing education, then Debney Park Secondary College should soon be full and the children from Flemington Primary should begin to cross the road at the end of Year 6.
PERHAPS THIS IS SO. PERHAPS IT WOULD HAPPEN. But somehow I suspect that the non-market-oriented word in this debate – "values" – is in fact code for something else. Probably it means different things to different people, but I suspect that in some cases at least, it is a word that stands for "not bucking the system". It stands for "people like us", for the status quo, for things as they are or as we would like them to be or as we imagine them once to have been.
Debney Park might fail this test, precisely because it is a school that overturns presumptions. What values had Debney Park Secondary College displayed? In truth, the main thing I carried away with me was the very first unscripted impression. Faced with a journalist in his office and a school crisis on his hands, O'Brien had not tried to hide the problem or run from it. Nor had he panicked about the possibility of negative publicity or even put it first in his list of priorities. He had left me to my own devices while he went out to look after his students and he was secure enough in what he was doing to let me see it all.
I had tried to gain access to some of the private schools in my area. None would let me in to observe.
At Debney Park, it seemed to me that all the messiness and contradictions of youth and ethnicity and poverty were on display. There was no escaping the graffiti, the problems, the rattiness and the rebelliousness. There was no escaping from risk. Debney Park Secondary College felt unsanitised. It felt real.
I met one of the fathers from Flemington Primary School at the traffic lights as I prepared to cross the road. He had seen me come out of Debney Park's gates. Did I teach there? he asked. It told him I was doing research. I said that I had found out that Debney Park Secondary College was an excellent school.
His eyebrows disappeared into his fair hair. "Really?" he said. He had seen the students misbehave – throwing computers over the fence, he said. They looked a very rough lot. "I just assumed that we couldn't even consider it for our kids."
He looked at me hard. "Would you consider sending your children there?" he asked. A trifle too truculently, perhaps, I said that I would.
I think I mean it, but my children say they don't want to go. Their reason is simple. None of their friends will be there. ♦