On our five-track education system

On money, ethnicity and unnecessary/necessary tutoring

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Australia has one of the most economically segregated school systems in the OECD. On top of this, where I live in New South Wales (NSW), which is home to about a third of Australia’s population, we have a disproportionate number of academically selective public schools. I’m not sure why, and perhaps this piece will connect some dots, but those selective schools draw about 75% of their students from families in the highest ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage) quartile. Pundits talk about Australia’s education system as two-track, but where I live, that’s way too oversimplified.

The two-track label was recently given to the ‘tutored’ vs ‘untutored’ in NSW, thinly veiled as an equity issue in this opinion piece by the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). Pictured alongside the opinion piece was a room full of Asian students and students of colour, being studious. Students with a language background other than English make up about 80% of selective school enrolments, according to publicly available data, and many of these students are Asian. The article argued that private tutoring had the “potential to ... skew the cultural and economic profile of students entering tertiary institutions,” italics mine. By ‘cultural’, I wonder if they mean students from hard-working families who value education.

There’s much to unpack in the piece, but I’ll throw in some anecdote first, having sent my two kids to a school with a skewed cultural profile. When we moved to Sydney from regional Australia, we chose to move to a vibrant suburb, with excellent BBQ Pork, which was deliberately unlike our whitebread existence in the country. We also checked NAPLAN (nationally published literacy and numeracy) results on MySchool before making our final decision about our new postcode; we had the economic mobility to do that. Our kids’ school was made up of around 90% of families with language backgrounds other than English and every year, the school photographer placed our little blondies right in the middle of the shot, so as not to unbalance the grade photo.

I was chatting to a Chinese-Australian mum one day, who explained to me that she would rather her son do an extra day of school each week through tutoring, and then he could enjoy an early retirement. Not for us, I thought, but horses for courses. Our two lazy Caucasians benefited from the influence of high-performing students. We forced them to go to Kumon for a bit, but in the end, the crying got too much, and their lazy Caucasian parents gave up. Both kids turned out to be studious, and have (AFAIK) stayed away from trouble through having slightly nerdy friends. They’re aspirational in a way that I don’t think would have happened if we had stayed in the regions. They’ve had a tutor for maths and one went on to study Maths Extension 2. The tutoring was probably unnecessary, but we didn’t begrudge the ‘edge’ it gave her, or the extra practice.

I tutored for several years and took it really seriously. I cared about the kids and their families. I noticed a few things: I’m pretty sure these kids did more work for me than their teacher. I think that was down to the 1:1 relationship but also introjected motivation — the motivation associated with fear and shame — especially for the boys. If a person asks you to do something and you know you’re going to have to front up to them in person for an hour, that can be pretty motivating. Tutoring allows extremely targeted support and it’s just not feasible for teachers to provide this to everyone¹. Most students didn’t really need my support, but they had very specific post-school goals, their parents spoke English as a second language and didn’t feel they could help them, so they threw everything they had at that final two years.

The SMH piece is flawed in a few ways. The first one is the old chestnut about being able to somehow ‘game’ the HSC. It comes up in discussions about ATAR — comments like, ‘these kids are only good at sitting exams,’ or as I like to say, ‘demonstrating their learning through transfer and problem-solving’. Here they ‘game’ the system by learning content in advance with their tutors (thereby receiving multiple exposures to content and moving to problem-solving more quickly?) The claim is that this somehow damages schools — the schools that a few years ago were getting excited about flipped learning for the same reason. The piece argues that the tutors may be underqualified and yet moral panic persists about the resulting paucity of places for white — I mean untutored — kids. Equal access is said to be ‘endangered.’

I don’t often read sociological research, but Christina Ho’s piece, Angry Anglos and aspirational Asians: everyday multiculturalism in the selective school system in Sydney really grabbed me. I think it’s because I have been both an observer and peripheral to these issues since before I started teaching. She says that Asian families are perceived as instrumentalist, channelling all sorts of decisions and resources into their children’s educational future. She interviews several white families, one who sees tutoring as “child abuse.” And there’s a really odd view of merit, which I have heard several times before:

Our philosophy has been that if they’re going to get into any type of program, they have to do it on their own merits. I didn’t want them in a situation where they were coached to get in the program and then had to be coached up. So we did no preparation for the gifted and talented test.

I’ll admit that this is how I felt about my own kids when they were little, possibly coloured by the fact that I like my Saturdays. But I don’t begrudge another parent for wanting to prepare their children. Further comments in the journal article reveal a view of merit as possessing natural talent, rather than the capacity for motivation and hard work, as though those things are also ‘gaming the system.’ Is the suggestion here that Asian students perhaps don’t possess the ‘natural’ gift of ability? Interestingly, Ho’s article also points out that Asian families are often dissatisfied with the low expectations and progressive education offered in Australian schools and that tutoring gives their children the push they feel they need.

For many families, spending thousands on tutoring from an early age is a pathway that circumvents the costs of private education. It’s a net win. I know that multiple analyses² have shown little value-add for private schools, but peer effects are a real thing and students achieve real absolute results in the private system. Remember that we can’t ‘control’ for income in real life, so the savings are potentially massive for families when they choose this alternative pathway. This point is curiously missing in the SMH article, where instead it is argued with what must be faux naïveté that tutoring is the source of Australia’s two-track education system. Apparently, this is the source of Australia’s vast inequities.

Perhaps a rabbit-hole for another day, but Freddie deBoer argues that until we stop only rewarding intelligence and academic performance as a society, we will always have a multiple ‘track’ education system. In NSW, we have five tracks: private school students with tutoring, private school students without tutoring, selective school students mostly with tutoring, public school students with tutoring, and then the rest. It’s mostly about money because even the public comprehensive system is largely a matter of postcode, not school fees. However, articles like the SMH one are mostly about policing how certain cultural groups choose to spend their time and money.

Given how much cheaper it is to pay for tutoring than private school tuition, I think commentary like this isn’t really about equity at all: it’s mostly about cultural difference. One wonders how Asian students would fare with university entry by portfolio. In the US, affirmative action policies have become a joke, where ‘Harvard gave Asian American applicants higher academic and extracurricular ratings but lower “personal ratings” than they gave white applicants.’ The University of Melbourne thinks that judging merit based on standardised tests is one of the ‘big challenges that face Australian education,’ and has set up New Metrics to include more imprecise and feel-good measures. If this takes hold, what equity safeguards could be put in place when non-white students start ‘gaming’ the system by becoming nice, well-adjusted people? Time will tell.

1. It’s the Holy Grail - how to achieve the effects of tutoring in schools. More here How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology

2. Like this and this.