Things that this book reminded me about:
- What makes Australia extraordinary, and not in a good way, isn't the extremely high rate of public funding to private schools per se, but the lack of any reciprocal public obligations accepted by those schools as a result
- The achievement / outcomes gap between public and private schools is almost entirely attributable to peer effects
- The immense power of the vested interests of the status quo - combined with the huge blind spots that many carry about the influence of privilege - has done huge harm to attempts to enact evidence-based reform post (and for the matter pre-) the first Gonski report
- What a difference genuinely needs-based funding would make across the whole education system
- The social justice imperative of focusing on school funding and school education policy more broadly.
