Funding school graduation equity in Victoria

Drawing on the distributive justice ideas of Rawls, Sen, and Roemer, every teenager in an advanced market society should have an equal opportunity to graduate from school with a senior secondary certificate, which embodies a basic competency set for future functionings in society. Society’s government, then, has a moral obligation to ensure sufficient funding for the purchase of adequate recurrent resources by each school. Evidence of unacceptably high levels of non-graduation suggests that governments are not fulfilling this obligation.

The aim of this thesis was to develop and apply a model for determining the recurrent funding sufficiency for adequate resourcing of the three school sectors (Government, Catholic and Independent) providing senior secondary programs in one advanced market society, the Australian State of Victoria.

A resource policy cost model, highlighting resource policy variables and, in particular, the senior secondary student-teacher ratio, was derived from the logical decomposition of total recurrent spending. Data pertaining to successful Government schools in 2010 were used to specify, using power regression, the minimum-cost adequate student-teacher ratio needed for any school to attain the target. It was found that, in Victoria in 2010, many schools did not achieve the target minimum graduation rate of 80%, and that their mean student-teacher ratio was below that of the successful schools in each sector, even though there was sufficient funding to each sector. While funding was allocated efficiently in the Government sector, it was not in the Catholic and Independent sectors.

The findings contradict a recent Australian Government Review of school funding which used a global cost model. More generally, the findings support, in a context outside the USA, the Hanushek view that more money does not necessarily improve student performance. Further, the thesis demonstrates an appropriate approach to school recurrent funding policy is establishing the moral obligation of government, setting a minimum school performance target, using a resource policy cost model highlighting the adequate student-teacher ratio, and estimating future funding need to assess sustainability of the policy.