Public schools will be encouraged to go their own way under a coalition government with $70 million on offer to help schools achieve independence.
The independent public schools fund is one of the few differences between the coalition's education policy, unveiled on Thursday, and Labor's Better Schools plan.
Education Minister Bill Shorten dismissed it as offering no new ideas and no funding certainty.
Launching the policy in western Sydney, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott recommitted to matching Labor's education funding plans over the next four years.
"Mr Rudd's scare that the coalition is going to cut money out of education is simply false," he said.
Independent Schools Queensland said the reaffirmed pledge gave schools funding certainty.
But the Australian Education Union (AEU) described it as "a disappointing sleight of hand" because Labor has signed six-year funding agreements, with the bulk of the money flowing in the last two years.
Under the Better Schools plan - based on the Gonski recommendations - only about $2 billion of a total $10 billion extra commonwealth funding will get to schools in the four years Mr Abbott has pledged to match.
"It is completely dishonest for Tony Abbott to claim the coalition has matched the Labor government Gonski funding commitment," AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said.
"They have only committed just one third of the total federal funding for Gonski."
Mr Abbott said the coalition wanted to give every school the opportunity to make more of the money it got.
That's the reasoning behind the push to make a quarter of the country's public schools independently run by 2017.
It's based on the West Australian independent public schools model, which has led to a third of that state's schools making the change and a subsequent increase in public enrolments.
"We want every school to have more opportunity to be closer to its best self," Mr Abbott said.
Schools would still be bound by overall departmental and government policy and get the same resources as centrally managed institutions, but instead be run by autonomous school councils and principals.
The $70 million fund would give grants to help schools transition.
Education spokesman Christopher Pyne repeated the coalition's pledge to review the national curriculum but not "throw it out holus-bolus".
The coalition would also focus on teacher quality through improved admission standards for courses and more practical teacher training.
Mr Shorten said the coalition appeared to have no real policy to lift school performance or build genuine school autonomy.
"After six years, Australian parents and teachers would have expected a little more than dot points and empty rhetoric on education from the alternative government," he said.
Australian Greens education spokeswoman Penny Wright said giving schools more autonomy can be appropriate in some areas but there was evidence that independent public schools can actually entrench inequality.
