Equity in Victorian education and ‘deficit’ thinking

Australia, in common with both developed and developing economies, continues to reconstruct schools and schooling. The past five decades have seen dramatic social and economic changes in Australia. Within these contexts, the State of Victoria, has seen large increases in secondary student and teacher numbers, accompanied by constant changes and experiments to curriculum direction and content. The concept of equity was challenged on a number of fronts and changed in response to these differing contexts." During the 1990s, for example, there were severe reductions in the numbers of government schools and teaching staff. Government financing did not keep pace with previous expansions.The general drift in government schooling policy these past decades has been satisfying political and economic demands. Economic demands have seen the emergence of entrepreneurialism within and between schools; at the same time, the Federal government has given more financial support to private schooling. The purpose of this article is to outline the changing definitions of equity, to analyse the place of'deficit' thinking and its domination of past and present educational policy, the parallel effects of the modernisation of selective curriculum, and the emergence of 'at risk' theory as a 'repressive label.' In conclusion, democratic education is presented as an alternative to deficit thinking, and a necessary adjunct to equity. Explanations for poor school performance during the early twentieth century were linked to genetic causes.This was a conservative view of student pathology that argued student performance relied on alleged strengths and weaknesses in genetic intelligence. Educationalists also faced the difficulties caused by the expansion of student numbers. This meant that early education research attempted to develop efficient tests to classify students , especially those preparing to enter secondary education. Bessant et al, commented on an aspect of student selection applied at the time: