Opinion: The Government took another step towards reviving charter schools this week. Researcher Maryanne Spurdle and PPTA Te Wehengarua president Chris Abercrombie weigh up the pros and cons of that move.
The application process for charter schools has officially begun, with Associate Education Minister David Seymour saying there’s been “significant interest” in either opening new schools or converting existing state schools.
Charter schools were disestablished by the Labour-led government in 2019, but are being brought back as part of ACT’s coalition deal with National.
While some are praising the move for bringing diversity to the education system, others are concerned about the independent schools being able to set their own curriculum, hours, and staff pay rates.
Here, both sides present their cases for and against charter schools.
Maryanne Spurdle, researcher at Maxim Institute
How do you feel about the return of charter schools in New Zealand?
This proposal is so different that it’s more of an introduction to charter schools than a return.
I’m optimistic; allowing educators in all communities to provide schools that children can freely attend should raise standards and help our educational ecosystem become both more diverse and more equitable.
The optimism is warranted. Last year a long-running study of charter schools in the US reached a clear verdict: “against a backdrop of flat performance for the nation as a whole, the trend of learning gains for students enrolled in charter schools is both large and positive.”
The most encouraging takeaway from this work by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) is that disadvantaged students are the ones who are most likely to do better.
The Government is pushing ahead with plans to have charter schools back next year, after they were ditched under Labour. (Source: 1News)
What do you think charter schools will bring to the education system?
It will bring us into the 21st century.
A 2010 OECD report said that “many of the world’s best-performing education systems have moved from bureaucratic ‘command and control’ environments towards school systems in which the people at the frontline have much more control of the way resources are used, people are deployed, the work is organised and the way in which the work gets done.”
New Zealand has resisted this trend. We’re now in the company of countries like Mexico and Greece, restricting most education funding to schools that are also run by the Ministry of Education. Those schools have constraints on everything from curriculum to salaries.
Sweden has a voucher system. England funds free schools and academies, which now serve more students than state schools do. Australia heavily subsidises tuition to both private and Catholic schools.
But in New Zealand, school autonomy begins and ends with local school boards, which can’t control levers powerful enough to shift the educational dial.
Charter schools are an elegant response to another OECD report’s conclusion: “Innovative change cannot happen in hierarchical and bureaucratic power structures that reward only conformity to rules and regulations.” The ideal conditions, rather, include “school autonomy, teacher professionalisation and school choice for parents”.
In other words, the Government doesn’t need to dictate how schools operate; it can simply guarantee universal access and make funding dependent on student progression.
And student progression is the point, right?
Nearly all of the Ministry of Education’s performance indicators are static or going backwards. Barely half of all students and only 23% of Māori students attend school regularly. More than one third of 15-year-olds struggle to read and write.
Charter schools will be required to meet attendance and performance targets to keep their charter.
They will also allow families from all postcodes greater educational choice. Choice correlates with greater equity - a weakness in New Zealand. Among English-speaking countries, we have the strongest relationship between socioeconomic background and educational performance. It shouldn’t be this way.
Do you think $153 million over four years to establish charter schools is a good spend on the Government’s part? Why/Why not?
That would depend on where it’s spent, but at face value—yes. It represents less than 1% of the Ministry of Education’s operating expenses, and it’s time limited.
In the United States, charter schools received US$3,509 less per student than public schools in 2014. CREDO also found they were more likely to serve disadvantaged students and twice as likely to have better outcomes.
International evidence supports the argument that greater school autonomy, when paired with accountability, results in more efficiency and better outcomes. This is a safe investment.
What impact do you think charter schools had last time New Zealand had them?
Only 11 partnership schools serving fewer than 1,500 students were operating at their peak in 2018. Their rolls also had to include a minimum of 75% priority students.
Not only did they exist on a teeny scale, but the potential for learning what worked well and what didn’t was limited—the Ministry of Education failed to implement evaluations to compare students’ progress to similar students in public schools.
We do know that many schools exceeded their targets in the brief time they existed. They also had plenty of fans, including Te Pāti Māori. In 2017 it said that Vanguard Military School “has achieved outstanding academic results and has been particularly effective for Māori students”. Overall, the party said, “Partnership Schools/Kura Hourua are delivering strong NCEA results despite working with students that have been previously underserved by the state system.”
Those schools continue to operate and most are still publicly funded as designated character schools. This is at odds with the narrative that they “failed”—a popular line for those committed to maintaining the status quo.
Over 35 groups expressed interested in taking part, Associate Education Minister David Seymour says. (Source: 1News)
What would you say to people who don’t think charter schools have a place in NZ’s education system?
I’d ask them to listen to Raewyn Tipene.
She’s the principal of Te Kāpehu Whetū in Whangārei, one of the original partnership schools. She told RNZ that her experience running a charter school was “one of the first times I have experienced what freedom felt like. You were given resources, you were told, ‘Here’s what you need to achieve, how you do that’s your business,’ and we overachieved.”
Te Kāpehu Whetu is now a designated character school, allowing it more independence than a public school while retaining full funding. Even so, Raewyn calls returning to the state system and its bureaucracy “horrendous”.
Charter schools should have a place in our education system because they allow people like Raewyn the freedom to do their job well. That, in turn, provides far better options for children who are currently in schools with UE pass rates in the single digits.
Protecting the status quo is to accept that some kids and some schools just won’t succeed. This doesn’t just go against our egalitarian ideals—it isn’t backed up by the evidence.
PISA studies show “no automatic link between social disadvantage and poor performance in school,” and that education systems could be made to improve because “there was nothing inevitable or fixed about how schools performed.”
Rather than defend the establishment, I hope that our educators, parents and communities will realise that this is our opportunity to build something better.
Chris Abercrombie, PPTA Te Wehengarua president
How do you feel about the return of charter schools in New Zealand?
We feel disappointed that charter schools are returning.
There is no evidence that they were successful when they were introduced last time, despite the huge amounts of funding they received compared with state schools. Every local state school could enjoy the benefits of smaller class sizes, more subject specialist teachers, more learning support and more pastoral care staffing if they were given sufficient resources.
Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the most highly devolved school systems in the world so there is already a lot of flexibility and innovation in the system – for example, kura kaupapa Māori, religious schools, and Montessori.
The fact that all but one of the former charter schools have been re-integrated successfully into the state school system shows that charters schools are not needed.
We are seriously concerned this time around about the conversion of existing local state schools to charter schools and the potential forced conversion of schools deemed to be “failing”.
There are significant implications here, for example, for parents who do not want their child to attend a charter school – what rights do they have?
What access do communities have to schools that convert or are forced to convert? What about teachers who don’t want to teach in a converted charter school?
The Government claims that teachers employed in converted charter schools will have terms and conditions of employment that are no less favourable than they were before conversion, though what this means in practice remains to be seen. However, further down the track charter schools can change those terms and conditions – likely for the worse, we suspect.
What do you think charter schools will bring to the education system?
The main feature charter schools will bring to the education system is that they will open the door for privatisation of education in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The experience of charter schools in the United States and United Kingdom has been that charter schools choose and reject students based on cost, not the needs of the student.
Charter schools will also introduce a de-professionalisation of teachers. Charter schools are not required to employ trained and registered teachers – they can employ anybody they like, regardless of whether that person is a trained and registered teacher.
Do you think $153 million over four years to establish charter schools is a good spend on the Government’s part? Why/Why not?
Absolutely not.
Pouring $153 million into an unproven experiment at a time when many state schools are bursting at the seams and students are being sent home because there aren’t enough teachers is morally reprehensible.
The Government should be committed to resourcing state schools fully instead of frittering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on an ideological experiment designed to enable a small number of individuals to run schools for a profit.
The money being poured into charter schools could and should be spent in our local state schools, providing the staffing, the classrooms, and the equipment that are all needed desperately.
Some rural schools are regularly having to ask students to stay home. (Source: 1News)
What impact do you think charter schools had last time New Zealand had them?
They didn’t have any impact.
However, it would be very interesting to find out where all the money that was poured into charter schools last time has ended up.
Last time, charter schools were funded to the tune of about six times more funding per student than state schools. What have we got to show for that? There was very little transparency or accountability required of charter schools previously. One of the few things we do know is that the Auditor-General investigated one charter school sponsor, Villa Education Trust, over nearly half a million dollars of ‘management fees’.
This is not how most New Zealanders want their education tax dollars to be spent.
What would you say to people who think charter schools have a place in NZ’s education system?
We would urge these people to think again.
The public school system in Aotearoa New Zealand has a lot of choice and innovation already - we do not need charter schools. Their only real purpose is to use public funds to run schools for a profit.
The vast majority of New Zealanders value our public education system and uphold the rights of children and young people to attend their local state school where every teacher is trained and registered, where a consistent high-level curriculum is taught and where senior students work towards gaining a national and internationally recognised qualification.
That’s what we want our education taxpayer dollars spent on – not on unproven ideological projects designed to turn schools into businesses where students are chosen or rejected based on how much they are likely to cost. It is not the Aotearoa New Zealand way.
Public submissions on the Education and Training Amendment Bill, which would provide for charter schools, are open until July 25.
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