The Post: Charter schools won’t fix our educational failings

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Is the government about to waste tens of millions of dollars on a schools policy that won’t achieve anything? It’s a question that’s been bothering me ever since the coalition agreements were signed.

The National-ACT agreement envisions setting up an undefined number of charter schools, which would be able to abandon the New Zealand curriculum and employ unqualified teachers, among other dubious benefits. Based on an American model, a few such establishments – unsuccessfully rebranded as “partnership” schools – were set up under John Key’s 2011 agreement with ACT, but brought into the state system by Labour.

This time, though, there’s a big difference: ACT leader David Seymour wants existing state schools to convert to charters. It’s an ambition befitting a larger and more confident party.

The problem, though, is that charter schools are an ideological rather than a pragmatic project. They don’t address any of the actual issues we face. An overly strict curriculum and excessively qualified teachers, for instance, are not the things holding back our education system.

Charter school advocates claim principals need more room to innovate, but there’s already immense leeway for experimentation. We have Māori immersion schools, special character schools, Catholic and Protestant schools. We have one of the world’s most flexible education systems.

The American data on charter schools, meanwhile, are deeply unimpressive. Charters’ unqualified teachers are less effective than their public-school counterparts. A 2016 meta-review – a summary of pre-existing research – found that standard public schools outperformed charters on six of seven major categories of learning, including Year 4 maths and Year 8 science.

Charters probably worsen performance in nearby schools, skimming off the pupils with the most motivated parents and reducing those schools’ per-student funding. Overall, researchers have concluded, charters “are not, on average, producing student achievement gains” compared to standard US high schools, which themselves are not high performers internationally.

Charter schools, in short, won’t turn around New Zealand’s educational failings. But they can rack up vast costs. A recent official information request suggests the Key-era charters cost up to $48,000 per pupil, far above the $9000 allocated to each student in mainstream schools.

Worse still may be in prospect. If, under Seymour’s plan, state-school boards decide to convert, their teachers’ employment situation could change dramatically. For charter schools to be meaningfully different, principals might want staff to transform their work patterns, teaching longer hours or being paid on a different basis. Boards might also want to push staff onto individual contracts less generous than the recent raft of union-negotiated ones, which have started to address the long-term underpayment of teachers.

Things could then get pretty murky. Labour law experts say charter schools could be deemed, in essence, the successor to the teachers’ current employer, the Ministry of Education, meaning that existing terms and conditions would be carried over. So if, as seems likely, boards wanted change, they could end up in messy bargaining with justifiably angry teachers or face even messier industrial action.

If, moreover, someone’s job changes significantly, New Zealand employment law quite rightly allows them to argue they’ve effectively been made redundant and are entitled to a pay-out. Bearing in mind that a teacher’s standard redundancy pay-out could be in the order of $100,000, and that even just 50 converting schools could employ thousands of staff, redundancy costs could easily spiral into the tens of millions of dollars. And this would be money spent to achieve nothing: the purest possible form of waste, delivered by a government supposedly obsessed with efficiency.

Ministers could probably legislate to remove teachers’ redundancy protections. But that would be hideously ironic from ACT, a party ostensibly committed to the sanctity of contract.

As things stand, the situation remains unclear, and hard questions must be asked of Seymour. Either way, it’s all a colossal distraction from the real task of fixing education.

Some of the repairs must be made outside the classroom: we should reduce poverty, for instance, so that thousands of kids don’t have to miss class because they’re working to support their family. And we should lift our financial assistance to poorer schools, which is low by international standards.

When it comes to what happens within the school gates, we have a reasonable idea of what’s needed. Better qualified teachers would help. So too a knowledge-rich curriculum that provides more learning materials, greater guidance to struggling teachers, and enhanced clarity about what they should teach, rather than the overly loose curriculum we have now. We also need better structures to spread successful teaching practices from school to school, just like the old system of advisers and inspectors did.

All this will take time, energy and resources. There isn’t, famously, a lot of free cash lying around. The last thing National can afford is to waste huge amounts of it on something entirely tangential to the educational task at hand.