21 April 2015:

Our Board member Jane Caro writes about why public funding of private schools hurts us all.

What do women and public schools have in common? We pay them less but expect them to do more.

“I have often mused over the parallels between the way we see public schools in Australia and the way we see women.

We pay women less but expect them to do much more. Public schools are chronically underfunded, yet teach the vast majority of kids (the poorest, the disabled, indigenous, rural, remote, refugees, new migrants and the behaviourally and emotionally disturbed).

We congratulate fathers for doing absolutely anything for their own children but blame mothers if they neglect the smallest thing.

This always reminds me of how we go into paroxysms of admiration when fee charging schools offer a scholarship to a couple of poor kiddies compared to how we routinely sneer at public schools for struggling with the thousands left behind.”

Read more here.