Is NSW Selective Schools Becoming Bastions Of Inequality

I read this article ‘Bastions of inequality’: selective schools increasingly cater to the most advantaged students by Christina Ho on SMH about a month ago and have not had time to write my thought about it until now.

First to summarise what the article had been trying to convey which is roughly the following

As public schools designed to cater for gifted and talented students, selective schools should be accessible to high achievers regardless of family background. The MySchool figures raise serious questions about how accessible or meritocratic selective schools really are. They have become more inaccessible in recent years, almost completely so to the most disadvantaged groups.

Selective schools were set up to provide opportunities to the gifted and talented, not just the wealthy, gifted and talented.

While I agree with the who gains entrance to our selective schools, this is not in dispute by either hard facts and personal experience as well. However what need to be said is that enrolment into the selective high school purely based on examination result is arguably the fairest method of doing so. As the Christina had pointed out in the article that selective high schools as a public school are designed to cater for gifted and talented students. How else can we judge and determine who is more gifted and talented?

We can patch the issue by creating quotas to admit students from different social economic backgrounds. This does not solve the fundamental cause of students from high social economic background performs betters than their counterparts from the lower social economic background. I am a big believer of admittance purely based on examination result which despite its flaws still is the fairest and best way to go. What we should be doing to why this is happening in our education system and what we can do to minimise it. It is impossible completely eradicate this phenomenal, but we can most definitely improve on what we have currently.

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