Global School Funding Debates and Reforms

Abstract

In recent decades, important changes have taken place in terms of how governments debate, manage, and allocate funding for schools. These changes have been strongly influenced by a diversification of actors contributing to the school funding. For example, although governments continue to provide the majority of funding resources for schools across member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), many nations have witnessed an increased presence of nongovernment actors, such as philanthropies and corporations, in contributing to the funding of both government and nongovernment schools. Many nations have also seen increases in private parental contributions, which has contributed to the expansion of private schooling relative to traditional public schooling. Despite significant diversity in funding models across OECD nations, debates about funding are increasingly informed by a transnational field of policy ideas, practices, and evidence. The OECD has been a central force in facilitating this “global conversation” about the complexity of school funding trends and impacts, particularly in relation to the impacts of funding on student achievement and equity. A key question in these evolving debates is whether “more money” alone will improve outcomes or whether the focus needs to shift more toward “what schools do” with money (i.e., a “what works” approach). In response to this question, the OECD has played a leading role in steering global debates away from a historically dominant focus on whether more funding makes a difference or not to student achievement, toward a different narrative that suggests the amount of money only matters up to a certain point, and that what matters most beyond that is what systems and schools do with money. At the same time, the OECD has been central to producing a rearticulated “numbers-driven” understanding of equity, which understands equity primarily in terms of the relationship between a young person’s background and his or her performance on PISA, and which frames equity as primarily important from an economic perspective. Importantly, however, while schooling funding reforms are increasingly informed by global conversations, policy reforms remain locally negotiated. Recent Australian school funding reforms illustrate this well. Over the past decade, two prominent federal school funding reviews have sought to address funding issues in Australia’s federal system. These reports have been deeply shaped by the distinctive conditions of possibility of Australian federalism, but at the same time have been heavily informed by broader transnational reform narratives and the work of the OECD specifically. Yet while both reviews position the OECD at the center of their respective rationales, each does so in different ways that speak to different policy problems. An exploration of the Australian case and how it relates to broader global conversations about school funding offers important insights into how policies are simultaneously globally and locally negotiated.

Imagining “national” funding in the Australian federation: The Gonski Review and the Schooling Resource Standard

“…In the context of school funding specifically, which has been influenced by a diversification of local and transnational policy actors (including non-government actors such as philanthropies, organizations, and corporations), attention to the globally informed but locally negotiated nature of policy is highly relevant. For example, as I write with my colleague (Di Gregorio & Savage, 2020), in examining the production and enactment of school funding policy in the Australian federation, transnational organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) can be understood as a major force in providing the relevant data and "what works" solutions in response to policy problems.…”

“…The Australian Education Act (Australian Government, 2013), and the SRS therein, emerges as central to the mobilization of a broader national policy reform agenda, as the federal government made its funding to the state and territory governments conditional upon their adoption of "core national policies and initiatives," including curriculum, teaching standards, testing, and reporting (Savage, 2020b, 48; see also Bentley & Savage, 2017;Di Gregorio & Savage, 2020). This practice must be understood in the context of the cartography of Australian federalism, which saw the federal government take over income tax-raising power from the states during World War II.…”

“…More broadly, I join scholars who advocate for the closer and continued examination of "subnational settings and domains of practice" in the context of federal systems (McKenzie & Aikens, 2021, p. 313;Wallner et al, 2020), while at the same time being sensitive to global policy flows and how they are shaped by local conditions (Lewis, 2021). This is typified in the Gonski Review, where despite global influences in its production, the Gonski Review and the mobilization of the SRS funding model that it recommends are heavily contoured by the conditions of possibility of Australia's federal system (Di Gregorio & Savage, 2020). These findings also reinforce wellestablished arguments that global policy flows are "amplified, adapted, resisted, or ignored" by various scales "of policy making" (McKenzie et al, 2021, p. 399), as opposed to being simply implemented as "perfect facsimiles" (Lewis, 2021, p. 330; see also Engel & Frizzell, 2015;McKenzie & Aikens, 2021).…”

Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school

“…The release of the Gonski review was a watershed moment in public debates surrounding public education in Australia. Despite significant confusion and political contestation surrounding its actual implementation (see Di Gregorio & Savage, 2020;Gerrard et al, 2017;Kenway, 2013;Thompson et al, 2019), the review brought focus to questions of educational disadvantage in public schools.…”