Parochial Schools and Education Reform

The London Guardian today discusses claims about the relative performance of parochial schools, in what could be a response to efforts by the Bush Administration to force public shools into "competition" with religious schools through voucher programs.

You're a parent with a 10-year-old who's starting at secondary school this September, so you've been looking at local schools. In your borough, three out of the four secondary schools are Muslim. You are not a Muslim. Two of them only admit Muslims, though one of them holds out the hope that, if not oversubscribed, (which it generally is) they could give a place to a non-Muslim child if the child attends a Muslim primary school. The third school will take non-Muslims, but only if they demonstrate "an aptitude for the visual arts".

Looking outside the borough, you find another school which seems promising until you discover that it, too, is a Muslim school which requires not only that prospective pupils and their parents have gone to the mosque every week since the start of primary school, but also that parents must sign a statement saying that "they have not applied or taken steps to apply (including the sitting of a selective test) to a non-Muslim school". (Guess that rules out Eton then.)

Does something look wrong? Surely a society where government departments are too tactful to mention Christmas on their greeting cards wouldn't sanction such blatant discrimination? Well, in real life, the schools are Roman Catholic rather than Muslim, but otherwise you're looking at examples of current admission policy in London. (The borough so enthused by Catholicism is Kensington and Chelsea.)

Obviously, that is a concern here as well - at least among those who don't think that parents should be forced to choose between a public school that is failing in no part because of poor public policy, and a school operated by a religious order to which they do not adhere. And I believe the editorial properly highlights the different reaction inspired when a Christian parent might be faced with having to choose a Muslim school, as opposed to the collective yawn that seems to arise from Republican factions when Muslim or Hindu children would be forced to choose Christian schools.

The editorial raises another point - which should be obvious, but is often lost in the rhetoric about school performance - school performance is tied to "intake advantage". "Schools which can select (and perhaps more importantly "deselect") their pupils will therefore do better on [standardized] measures than schools which can't." The article also points out that where there is competition for a limited number of seats in a school (and this would also apply to better performing public schools), parental choice dissolves into an expression of preference, which may or may not be realized.

When politicians intentionally mislead the public about the goals of the school "reforms" they propose, or the "voucher" systems they endorse, they do not do so for the public good. And for those of us who expect words to be backed up by action, Bush's primary goal appears to be to damage and underfund the public school system so as to divert public resources into parochial schools, and to leave a dismal wreck of a school system behind for the children of the inner cities, and for the children of the working poor and lower middle classes. Meanwhile, the rest of us will face a "voluntary" tax in the form of additional school tuition on top of the school taxes we continue to pay - but the wealthy, whose kids are already in private schools, will receive yet another subsidy.

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