Contrast Scotch with Brookside College, a public P-9 school in Caroline Springs west of Melbourne. According to the MySchool web page, Brookside has an enrolment of 940 – half the number at Scotch but, unlike that elite school, it draws its students from a wide range of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds with more than half from non-English speaking homes where 88% are in the lower and middle socioeconomic quartiles.
Brookside has 68 teachers and 24 non-teaching staff while Scotch has 191 teachers and 106 assistants. Last year, Brookside had a net-recurrent income of $9 million – equivalent to nearly $10,000 per student and a total capital expenditure of $137,000.
In contrast, Scotch’s recurrent income was $45.5 million – equal to $24,400 per student – and its capital spending came to nearly $4 million.
"An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory. And the kids themselves are seldom consulted about what they're doing, even though genuine excitement about (and proficiency at) learning rises when they're brought into the process, invited to search for answers to their own questions and to engage in extended projects. Outstanding classrooms and schools - with a rich documentary record of their successes - show that the quality of education itself can be improved. But books, articles, TED talks, and teacher-training sessions devoted to the wonders of adopting a growth mindset rarely bother to ask whether the curriculum is meaningful, whether the pedagogy is thoughtful, or whether the assessment of students' learning is authentic (as opposed to defining success merely as higher scores on dreadful standardized tests). "
