I never understood how a stupid free market brain fart for education by the ACT Party ever made its way into National’s grab bag of policy ideas.
Charter Schools always seemed to be a solution searching for a problem.
The enormous private education industry however desperately want access to NZs public school market and it is their interests that drive the agenda in this country by cleverly manipulating the righteous grievance of Māori who have been grotesquely left behind when it comes to Māori educational achievement.
34% of Māori leave school without a qualification, any attempt, including Charter Schools, looks preferable to social statistics as damaging as that, which is why Māori have been so heavily targeted with Charter Schools to provide the political camouflage to Trojan Horse their way into NZs public education system.
What Charter Schools are truly about is a means to undercut Teacher costs by hiring non-registered Teachers.
That’s all they are.
Now some of the Charter Schools only hire registered teachers, which suits the entry point for the private education industry, but the essence of this right wing social experiment is to devalue and under cut a unionised workforce.
As a country, we desperately need to do more educationally for Pacifica, Māori and children in poverty, but Charter Schools aren’t that solution, they only pretend to be concerned with those groups so as to normalise private education in NZ.
National see Teachers as Taxi Drivers in an Uber world. For them, education can simply be downloaded or taught online, and Charter Schools are a means to slash staffing costs.
Our public education system is one of the best in the world, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a long way to go for those marginalised by colonialism, racism and poverty, but we should see the right wing argument for ‘choice’ when it comes to Charter Schools as nothing more than a cleverly targeted trick to con New Zealanders into accepting them.
We shouldn’t get fooled.
When I saw the placard “first time protestor” by some Act supporting parent (?) I wondered why we should take him seriously. So that person never protested for better housing for the poor? Or to protect conservation lands from mining? Or to clean up our waterways? Their first protest was to support Act policy? Fuck off, why should we take a privileged Act supporter to preserve tax-paid subsidies for a privare school?? Because thats precisely why aAct supporters aee demanding, taxpayer subsidies for private schools. Fucking hypocrites, THEY EXPECT USER PAYS FROM THE REST OF US!!!
Cos in the USA big sums of money are made by charter school owners’ accessing govt funding.
And when they can’t take it as profit, they waste or embezzle it.
Charter Schools are just a scam to steal our tax dollars.
In 2011, the Miami Herald ran a special report called “Cashing In On Kids — Florida’s Charter Schools: big money, little oversight” that reviewed the state’s 15-year charter expansion and found that after spending billions in public funds to support these schools, the educational reform had “turned into one of the region’s fastest-growing industries, backed by real-estate developers and promoted by politicians” with little oversight. It said in part:
Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords — one and the same, in many cases — and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.
In many instances, the educational mission of the school clashes with the profit-making mission of the management company, a Miami Herald examination of South Florida’s charter school industry has found.
For Martin to conclude that New Zealand’s Charter Schools are about saving money on teacher’s salaries couldn’t be more wrong.
Generally the Partnership Schools (Charter) pay at or above state scale, none pay below.
All of the NZ Charter Schools run small classes (c 1:15).
Martin couldn’t be more wrong in concluding that New Zealand’s Charter Schools are about saving money on teachers salaries.
Bulk funding has allowed them to spend more on teachers salaries than comparable state schools.
They generally pay teachers at or above state salary scales.
They generally run class sizes at around 1 teacher to 15 students.
Despite all the rhetoric no one has been able to publicly say where these ‘successful’ schools are.
Alwyn Poole’s schools have booted out way more kids that any state school – this is the ‘lets make it LOOK GOOD’ model.
yeah they have booted out the very ones they are suppose to be helping which is why they were created in the first place. Many Public schools are suffering from white flight where is the one people brigade (Brash and his lot) when we need them.
There is only one reason for charter schools “In October 2015, the Education Ministry acknowledged that charter schools had been over-funded an extra $888,000 more than they would have been allocated had their funding been strictly based on their enrolments.” So the only way to lift scholastic achievement is to fund schools at a level over and above what is presently given! So if state schools were given that level of funding we would see a similar rise in student achievement and engagement.
Charter schools are a way the rich can get richer on the public taxpayer purse…and the quality and equality is not that great either…and it undermines the public schooling system
‘Charter schools: an old, flawed idea and wrong for Australia’
http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=1220
‘Charter Schools Are Reshaping America’s Education System for the Worse’
https://www.thenation.com/article/charter-schools-are-reshaping-americas-education-system-for-the-worse/
The reality is that few Maori support charter schools. Professor Graham Smith, a leader in this field, is strongly against this model and believes it is just sucking Maori into privatised models. There are lots of better options for Maori education. I believe that the Waitangi claim on this matter is a political stunt and will fail. Charter schools do not promote tino rangatiratanga. Maori communities should be putting their energy into campaigning for public education models that work, instead of failed market systems.
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