Failing the schools, not the parents

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has had another wonderfully stupid idea: jailing parents of students who don’t go to school. He’s not the first politician in history to suggest such a policy, but Iemma is one of the few who is stupid enough that he may actually believe it’s a good idea.

My old mentor, something of an acknowledged world expert in juvenile delinquency, had a standard response whenever this came up. If kids aren’t going to school, it’s the principal of the school who should be jailed, not the parents. That may sound a bit extreme (and I don’t think he ever seriously meant it), but bear with me for a moment and it might make more sense.

Certainly, parents have a role to play in ensuring their children get an education. Parents need to create a family environment supportive of education, and obviously need to provide the financial and psychological support to make the most of it. But if they’ve done that, and the child still refuses to go to school, then it’s not the parent which is failing the child, it’s the school. If the child isn’t getting anything out of school, because the teaching sucks, or the class sizes are too big, or their being bullied by other kids, or because they’re too far ahead or behind their classmates, then there isn’t anything the parent can do about that. Moreover, a child can flourish in a good school environment regardless of their home environment, but the reverse isn’t as true.

Unfortunately, however, due to the centralisation of education policy, individual principles probably don’t have that much influence over the suitability of their school. Even the ability to hire and fire isn’t universal in the public education system. So probably blaming the principle isn’t that useful.

More useful might be blaming the education minister, and holding him or her responsible. After all, it’s the policies which they authorise which cause kids to fail. If they’re not adequately funding schools and making sure that teachers are engaged and competent, we shouldn’t blame the schools for failing.

But blaming the minister isn’t much good unless there is some incentive for them to make some positive change, and as far as I can see, there isn’t. If they’re fired or don’t get elected, they’re more likely to take up a job consulting for a merchant bank than joining the dole queue. So you need to give them some incentive that means something. Jailing them isn’t the answer, because you can only do that once, so it doesn’t allow them to learn from their mistakes. Probably better is to fine them, but in such a way that their party or the tax payer doesn’t end up paying.

So, ideally, you set some sort of reasonable performance benchmark. If, for example, 90 percent of 16 year olds aren’t either regularly attending school or in full-time employment or vocational training, by the end of their term as minister, they are fine $100,000 or required to resign their seat in parliament. That would mean that they have an incentive for making the system work. And the beauty of it is that no principal is willing to take the fall for the education minister, so the reporting would likely be exactingly correct.

Of course, such a thing would never happen, and if it did I don’t imagine the queue to be education minister would be all that long, but I think it helps illustrate that almost all of the problem is with the system, and very little of it is with the parents.

That’s not to say that parents don’t have any responsibility, as clearly they do, but that there are certain barriers to a quality education for their child which it is not in their power to overcome. Blaming them for their children not wanting to go to school is too easy, and is not going to solve any of the problems.