BellyBelly Life Subscriber
It's interesting because I doubt that any parent would express that as being the explicit reason why they were putting their child in a private school. And I don't think it just happens with private schools. I suspect that many parents will move school zones altogether to keep their children from going to a school that may have a high population of immigrant or indigenous students.
Registered User
I think the other thing to note is that, yes parents may be moving or putting their kids in private schools to avoid schools with a high migrant or indigenous population. However, that may only be the reason in a round about way. The sad truth is that schools with a high migrant or indigenous population are often the under performing schools academically. Not going to go into all the reasons for this but it has been true for a long time. I would consider moving or putting DD in private school if our local school was one of the lowest performing schools in the country. It wouldn't enter my head that I was moving her away from children from a different cultural background, (in fact, exposure to different cultures would be a plus point to stay) and the cultural makeup of the school certainly wouldn't be my reason but yes, I would move her to give her a better opportunity academically wise.
Does that make sense?
Registered User
glenny_c - I get it.
I would probably fit into this category. Last time I checked, I'm not racist.
The public schools in Melbourne's West, where a lot of migrant communities have made their homes are not the better performing schools. This is reflective of the areas socio-economic status and the number of parents that completed high school. I'm also a catholic and want my kids to go to catholic schools. There simply isn't the option of secondary boys catholic schools in this area. So it's likely (although very early to definitely say) that my boys will catch the train across town to the inner southern suburbs to go to school.
I'm exactly the type of person that this study reflects, but I would argue that race is not the significant factor here but the academic performance of the schools. The fact that schools that are largely comprised of migrant communities generally perform poorly is a whole new thread!
Registered User
It doesn't take much to look at the actual peer reviewed article.
Here it is...
Immigration and School Choice in Australia - Mavisakalyan - 2012 - Australian Economic Review - Wiley Online Library
And here is a summary of their model, explaining what other factors they took into account:
Seems to me like the study DID take most reasonable things into account, and the "flight" was a legitimate observation after controlling for those factors. The observation was only significant at the secondary school level, and the R^2 of the model was about 0.2... so not a very strong association at all, but it is there, nonetheless.The list of controls includes a wide range of individual characteristics of native and immigrant students, captured by Xil in equation (1). These include their age, sex, religion, natural or adopted child status, the number of children in their family, having a single parent as well as parents’ education, government employee status, occupation and age. Measures of family income, home ownership and mobility history are also included as controls. In addition, dummies for natives of Asian and other origin are specifically included in the native models. Immigrant-specific individual controls include dummies for European, Asian and other immigrants, for immigrants from developed countries and for those who speak English at home.
The variable of central interest is the immigrants’ share of student population in a locality in the native models and the like-type immigrants’ share of student population in a locality in the immigrant models.10Cl in equation (1) further captures a set of additional locality-level measures. These include the logarithm of mean income per capita, the Gini coefficient, the share of unemployed in the local labour force, the logarithm of the number of students and the private school student/teacher ratios.11 In the native models, the minority share (the share of native-born of non-European ancestry) of student population in a locality is included to control for the possibility of a flight from native-born minorities. Finally, state-fixed effects, denoted as Sl in equation (1), are included as controls. Table 1 provides the full list of variables and describes how they were defined.
Moderator
The opposite is also true. There was a big fuss in Sydney a few years ago because former students of a selective school (which is the only Public GPS school in Sydney) felt that their children should be given preference over other students. One of their concerns was that the character of the school was being changed because so many of the students came from non-English speaking backgrounds. Most of the best performing schools in the HSC in NSW are public selective schools which have high populations of migrants. One of the only private schools that is regularly placed highly in the HSC results is a Muslim school with a large migrant population. If you take a look at the photo opp with the Premier every year a large percentage of the high achievers are non-Caucasian.
Moderator
I think there is such a thing as socio-economic cultural quarantining to protect your kids from bogans.
Nothing to do with race whatsoever.
It is likely my DD will go to a private school because most of the public secondary schools in this area are full of ferals.
Am I quarantining her from their influence? Absolutely.
Registered User
I want to do that too, BUT I don't want DD1 to go to a cultural (and religiously [is that a word? lol]) homogeneous school. She needs to learn about the diversity in Australia and around the world. How to achieve that baffles me slightly ...
Moderator
Well, my area is so WASP that it hurts. More likely to have diversity in the private system around here.
Registered User
TBH, this is me. Its either a small public school, or private for me for this reason. I've not lived in an area where there are many emigrants, but I don't think that would sway my decision nearly as much as the type of people who's kids attended that school.
My excuse - I don't want my 9 year old daughter asking to go to so & so's house, then having to come up with an excuse as to why WITHOUT letting my child know the real reasons. Drug dealers/alcoholics etc... I've grown up in area's where parents lock their kids outside while they get high. I've seen a 14 month old & 2 year old wandering the streets coz they were locked outside alone. We knocked on their door, tried to open it. 20 minutes later the father comes out looking for them.
Registered User
You know there can be 'ferals' in private schools too right? I'm not sure what people class as 'feral' - but thinking of my local private school, there are certainly families who don't have alot of money, families who don't always wear shoes in public, maybe aren't the cleanest or most politely spoken.
Drug dealers and alcoholics aren't limited to income or socioeconomic standing exclusively either, I know of several very well off business people who smoke plenty of dope and send their children to very exclusive schools.
I understand where you are coming from with the influences on your children and choices made for schooling to try to avoid this, but I do find the implication that private schools are free from such influence quite, well, snotty. That choice is certainly not racist - but I am sure there is some 'ist' to describe it.
Registered User
we were thinking along these lines - very seriously - but then i got to spending some time with a few of the parents of kids at the school - and they are simply rich bogans instead of poor. horrible, judgmental pieces of work and i seriously don't want DD around that kind of attitude - so i'm at a loss again!!
our local primary school has a very bad reputation. we live in a great area, but feed into the school that services the Bronx - the lowest socio economic group in town. as much as i'd like to say it doesn't enter my thoughts, it does. so we thought about private school. and then got exposure to the "rich bogans" (as coined by another friend with a kidlet the same age) - so we're back in limbo!!
it's not racially motivated (i honestly couldn't tell you the racial breakdown through the schools here) - it's motivated by trying to have DD in the best educational environment possible
BellyBelly Life Subscriber
MD,
the study showed that the higher the population density of immigrants in an area, then higher the LIKELIHOOD that a native born Australian child would be sent to private school if living in that area. Which is not about the uptake of immigrants to the private school. And even without taking in other factors, if it consistently shows that increased immigrant density = increase uptake of native australians to private school, I think it's a fair call to say that it may be significant.
Anecdotally I don't think this is in the realms of fantasy. I think parents do choose schools based on many things, and cultural influence in one significant one. Or the desire NOT to have a particular cultural influence, in this case.
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