Public money up for grabs

“We’re running a revolution,” Denise Torrey told EA before the government’s charter schools
announcement. “And we’re hoping the ministry will listen to our ideas. As stakeholders it’s up to
us to make that happen.”

Denise, head of the Canterbury Primary Principals Association, and others, submitted
their ideas to the government’s Education Renewal Plan for Christchurch, and hopes were high for
some good to come out of an horrendous year. So much for that.

In early December Prime Minister John Key announced that as part of the coalition deal with
ACT, charter schools would be introduced in Christchurch and South Auckland. He blamed
the policy on MMP saying it was ACT’s initiative, although the policy was announced along with
remarkably detailed briefing papers.

What are charter schools?
The government says New Zealand charter schools will be run by both for-profit and
non-profit providers and funded by the state with contributions from businesses or
organisations such as churches and tribal groups. Students will be selected by ballot
if necessary. Teachers would not have to be trained or registered or receive any training.
There will be no fixed salary-scales and teachers will be paid on performance. They will
be trialled within a year.

Why educators are opposed
Overseas, charter schools have become big business. In South Florida, for example, they’re
a $US400m industry with strong backing from politicians and property developers who like to own
the buildings and the schools, with some rather dire outcomes for students (http://tiny.cc/ucwwc).
Rubert Murdoch has said he sees the American education sector as a $US500bn market that’s
largely been untapped. Education accounted for a quarter of Microsoft’s earnings in 2010.

Locally, the NZ-based US billionaire and former hedge fund manager Julian Robertson seems a likely
candidate to have been promoting charter schools here. His Robertson Foundation works with the
Tindall Foundation and was influential in bringing a version of the Teach for America programme to New
Zealand. Teach First will see new graduates going into New Zealand classes after a six-week block
course. Julian’s son Spencer runs a charter school in New York, which has reportedly received more than
$26USm of public money.

But business in and of itself doesn’t have to be the problem. In New Zealand some extremely
successful sponsorship arrangements and partnerships operate between schools and
companies—for example at Bairds Mainfreight Primary School and Onehunga High School in
Auckland. The current system is already flexible enough to foster productive two-way partnerships.

It’s when corporates usurp the role of the profession that the problems begin. The research
from overseas is overwhelmingly clear—charter schools do not lift student achievement levels.
Where charter schools do succeed this is almost always because of how they select their students.
The KIPP charter schools, for example, which have been cited by National as the type of model
it wants to see here, are reported to have fewer special needs and ESOL students, and will
only take students and families who sign up to extremely prescriptive requirements around long
school days, hours of homework each night, and Saturday and summer schools.

KIPP students report they’re not challenged to think, but instead must focus on passing
standardised tests. Teachers work long hours for lower pay and there’s high staff turnover.
At the same time, resources are sucked from the local schools, where the students who most need
help remain. Greater collaboration and cohesion between schools, which educators in South Auckland
and Christchurch had been desperately seeking to improve performance, is undermined.

The slap
Just when they thought the worst was over, Christchurch educators woke up to discover
they will be the subject of a new experiment with charter schools.

“We’ve been dumped on. We aren’t going to bepart of our own solution—we’re going to be done
to. We won’t get something innovative developed in Christchurch for Christchurch students—we’re getting a failed policy from overseas!” says Denise Torrey.

“We’re punch drunk here. We got National Standards—slap! We dealt with the aftermath of
Pike River—slap! We had the earthquakes—slap!” Part of the heartbreak is that Christchurch
educators had begun to sense a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Denise had been actively
involved in Shake Up Christchurch Education, a coalition of educators including private sector
consultants, who’d been developing exciting and innovative proposals for education renewal in the
eastern suburbs, centred around ideas of greater collaboration, sustainability, e-learning and hubs.

In South Auckland, educators were devastated at the way the government was choosing to play the
“failure” card. Not only did it ignore the battles educators face daily with poverty (sick, hungry,
transient and traumatised children) but also some of the fantastic programmes and successes being
achieved by schools in South Auckland.

Who?
Who then in the private sector might be interested in setting up charter schools here? The initial
reaction was muted, with the only clear enthusiast appearing to be the head of a private Christian
school who immediately started talking about a chain of 50 schools. A few state secondary schools
expressed interest in looking at more details, and the Māori Party’s Dr Pita Sharples came out
against them.

However, the scent of public money up for grabs quickly worked its magic, and by Christmas
a number of potential players had raised their hands, including the Cognition Institute and a
South Auckland Pasifika trust. The Ministry of Education’s new chief
executive Lesley Longstone was involved with the introduction of “free” (charter) schools in the UK.

Warning
At CORE, a private sector education consultancy which has been heavily involved with the new ideas
in Christchurch, director Cheryl Doig is worried that charter schools will be a distraction to the
exciting work that educators are doing. She also warns that the government will have to be extremely
careful in ensuring the ethical base of any potential operators. “The devil will be in the detail.”
Not that educators will know much about the detail for some time to come. It’s already clear that,
as with National Standards, much of the detail around implementation will be worked out behind
closed doors, with the professional voice excluded.

In the meantime, NZEI members were ignited at the end of last year by the high-handed manner
of the charter schools’ announcement, after no mention of it during the election campaign. Traffic
on social media was fast and furious. Join the debate! – Jane Blaikie

Our top
performing
system
New Zealand ranks 4th out
of 34 OECD countries for
education. The US, which
has had charter schools
since the early 1990s, ranks
in the late teens. In Finland,
the highest ranked country,
nearly all children attend
quality local state schools.
New Zealand also rates
highly for education on
the Legatum Prosperity
Index, the Global Peace
Index, and the UN Human
Development Index. The
much quoted one-infive-
are-failing-in-New
Zealand figure, includes
special needs students
and students who can
pass NCEA level 2 but
are choosing not to sit
the tests. Our tail of
underachievement is lower
than in Australia, the UK
and the US.
ACT ’s John Banks
was quoted as saying
30 percent of students
in South Auckland were
below average, apparently
forgetting that in order to
have an average you have to
have numbers below it.

KEY points
• Government plans for
charter schools appear
to have been in train for
some time.
• Charter schools will
be less accountable and
can be run for profit.
Overseas experience
suggests they will
offer narrow 3Rs-type
education.
• Educators must act to
protect New Zealand’s
high-performing
education system.
• Despite the setback,
educators are still
committed to rolling
out innovations that
do work to improve
student achievement
levels.