The Eclipse of Equality of Opportunity

Equality of opportunity has been the most important organising principle in education policies in postwar Australia. Equality of opportunity was central to the expansion of publicly-funded education: the promise of upward social mobility through education had broad appeal. Equality of opportunity objectives are now being displaced by the newer and more limited concept of market equity. Equality of opportunity usually implies equality of the educational resources provided to each child, and sometimes goes further to mean positive discrimination in favour of the disadvantaged. However, equity is usually understood only as the right to participate in education. Whereas economic objections used to work in tandem with equality of opportunity policies, the two are 110W often in contradiction. Further, the failure of the older equality policies to deliver on their promises has partly eroded people's support for the equality of opportunity perspective, especially middle-class support. There is a growing emphasis on relative individual advantage through education. This new policy environment threatens to result in significantly greater inequality of opportunity. THE ECLIPSE OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY? Introduction: equality versus economics In Australian education there has been a longstanding tension between the policy objective of equality of opportunity and economic policy objectives that governments have sought to implement within the education sector, such as those related to efficiency and to the development of education's contribution to economic growth. The equality / economy conflict is by no means an absolute one, and at times both sets of policies have led to the same practical conclusions and have been implemented harmoniously. At other times equality objectives and economic objectives have been in conflict. Generally, this has led to the modification of one or other sets of objectives: one has usually won out over the other. Vol. 16, No. 1,1991 The issues involved are central ones; for teachers, for those who train teachers and for those who study Australian education. Much education policy and politics is fought out around respective claims about equality and about education's economic contribution. This tension is endemic to education as a social process. Education is about open-ended human development, but education is also funded because it is meant to build a better labour force . Teachers face equality/economy tensions on a daily basis. To what extent should the teacher's work be directed to all pupils in common? To what extent should the teacher spend time with those students who appear most capable, most receptive to teaching and learning and likely to make the best use of their education? At a system level, to what extent should we focus on raising universal standards and to what extent should we concentrate on a minority of 'gifted' students identified for higher achievement? Ultimately the shifting policy balances between equality objectives and economic objectives affect everyone working in education. They affect what we are required to do, and they affect what is possible. Policy objectives are matters of day-today pragmatics part of the conditions of possibility of our work but they also connect to the deeper level of commitment to that work. As policy objectives change, teaching practice tends to change (although not usually as much). Teacher training may also change. New policy objectives may suggest that different sorts of people Should be recruited as teachers. This article argues that we are now experiencing a major shift in the governing policy objectives in Australian education, affecting both schools and post-school education. This shift results from a new resolution of the equality / economy tensions, one less favourable to broad equality objectives than before. The paper begins by outlining the nature of that shift. It then goes on to explain the causes and the dynamics of the change, draWing on recent developments in Australian education. Australian Journal of Teacher Education From equality of opportunity to market equity One person who knew more than most about the equality / economy tensions was Professor Peter Karmel. Karmel himself was an economist but he was also an educator. The founding ViceChancellor of Flinders University, he became the principal national education policy-maker as chair of the Interim Committee for the Schools Commission (1973), the Universities Commission between 1971 and 1977 and the Tertiary Education Commission (1977 to 1982), and the Quality of Education Review Committee in 1984 and 1985. On 18 May 1962 in Melbourne, Karmelthen a professor of economics at the University of Adelaide delivered what was to become an influential address on Some economic aspects of education. Karmel was responding to the then new and important arguments of the human capital economists, who claimed that there should be a major expansion of education on the grounds that education directly created economic growth (Schultz 1960, 1961; Denison 1962; Becker 1975). It was assumed by most economists and policy makers although not all (Friedman 1962) that such an expansion would have to be funded by governments because reliance on private finance would result in a level of demand for education that would fall short of society's needs. Karmel agreed with the conclusion of the human capital. theorists. He said that the expansion of educahon was a high priority. He noted that in international terms, Australia's participation rate and Australia's level of spending on education were both too low. He also agreed with some of the human capital reasoning. He endorsed the claims that education could contribute to improvements in economic productivity, and said that international comparisons showed that there was a "high correlation between the educational efforts of different countries and their annual ra! es of production" (KarmeI1962: 3), although thIS was not conclusive proof of a causal relationship. Later in the speech he became more emphatic, asserting that: 2 . I believe that in Australia we can and should spend much more on education than we are presently doing. Education has directly benefici~l effects on production and the rate of economic growth, so that there is a sense in which it pays for itself by future production, just as any ordinary investment in capital equipment does. (KarmeI1962:19) But unlike most of the human capital economists, for Karmel the argument for educational expansion did not stop there. To him the overriding objective was not economic productivity or economic growth, but the equalisation of educational opportunity. At bottom, he saw the case for education as a democratic one rather than an economic one: You will say here is homo economicus in his most extreme form. Here is a fellow who measures the value of education by its effect on national production and its rate of growth. May I therefore say straight out that I do not hold that the main virtue of education reposes in its economic consequences. Quite the reverse. I should tonight advocate a greater educational effort in Australia, even if its sole economic consequence is to reduce national productivity by withholding more young people from the workforce for more years. I should do this since I believe that democracy implies making educational opportunities as equal as possible and that the working of democracy depends on increasing the number of citizens with the capacity for clear and informed thought on political and social issues. (KarmeI1962: 4-5). In the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, this was the philosophy of many of the teachers and administrators working in the expanding public system of schooling, higher education and further education. Equality of opportunity justified the development of' individualised teaching strategies, the recognition of special needs and the differentiation of the teaching service into specialist positions, the demands for reforms to systems of assessment and tertiary selection, as well as the growth of enrolments in the postcompulsory years. Equality of opportunity understood mostly in terms of access to careers, to opportunities for upward social mobility also fitted well with popular aspirations. In the long postwar boom from 1945 to 1975 there were widespread and growing expectations about the education as the route to better jobs and a better life. Between 1950-51 and 1975-76 government spending in education in Australia rose from 1.3 per cent to 5.7 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (Karmel 1966: 4-6; ABS 1982). The situation has now fundamentally changed. Investment in human capital is on the Federal Government's policy agenda. But in educational policy-making, in the politics of education and in Vol. 16 No. 1, 1991 ublic discussion of education, equality of ~pportunity is bein? reduced to the m? re limite.d and market-specifIc concept of equity, and IS becoming marginal. As in the 1960s education for national economic interest is occupying centrestage but, unlike the 1960s, it is no longer coupled with a strong version of equality of opportunity. The tensions between equality of opportunity and education for human capital are being resolved in favour of the latter. And the human capital is increasingly to be privately funded government spending on education fell to 4.9 per cent of GDP in 1987-88 (ABS 1982). A greater proportion of education and effort is being privately financed, through school fees, the HECS, postgraduate fees and sale of services to companies. This means that, to a greater degree, the benefits of education go to those who can pay for them. This increases inequalities in the distribution of education. This is not simply a matter of changes to government policies. There has also been a shift in the popular mood. An increasing number of parents and students now believe that investment in private schooling or in fee-based postgrad