Charter Schools are a privatisation scam
Charter schools: David Seymour defends $10 million for 215 students
David Seymour is defending the $10 million budget for charter schools when seven have been operating since February this year with only 215 students enrolled in them.
By averaging the cost across the 215 students, it equates to roughly $46,500 per student and is significantly higher than the core funding per student at a state school, which is just above $9000.
There isn’t a definitive average cost per state student in New Zealand, and funding is determined by a range of factors. But Alwyn Poole, a leading education consultant who obtained the information via an official information act request and was a key figure in charter schools during its first round between 2014 and 2018, said it is a fair way to assess the cost of the system.
David Seymour is doing to education what he did to school lunches, underfund them and let them die!
I personally love this part of the Charter School experiment…
Secretive legal advice argues charter school rules likely to breach FTA, labour rules
A select committee report has revealed previously confidential legal advice that charter school rules will likely breach international labour and free trade agreements.
The advice was sent to MPs and sector groups in a Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS), but they were later told it was a legally privileged draft. Another version was then released with some of the advice redacted.
RNZ did not publish it at the time due to legal sensitivity, but the Public Service Association referred to the advice during its submission to the Education and Workforce Select Committee and RNZ published those comments.
Labour, in its minority report on the Education and Training Amendment Bill published on Thursday, revealed the advice – and the attempts to prevent MPs and the public from seeing it.
…so when the Left ever suggest policy that runs foul of free market Treaties, the Right are very quick to point out this will lead us into legal conflict, but when ACT are suggesting deregulating teaching standards so Charter schools can get cheap deals, a move that puts us immediately in conflict with International Labour laws, suddenly David wants to gamble?
There is no doubt at all that the Unions will mount a legal challenge to watering down teacher standards and they will take this channel of dispute.
ACT are trying to hide this because they know it will draw more scrutiny of their neoliberal experiment in education.
I’m not sure this is the flex David Seymour seems to think it is…
…well Duh! Of course there is huge demand for Charter Schools, THEY ARE A RORT!
So Private Education interests who will be able to rort the system and get more public funding at the cost of the actual public education system are rushing to get their snouts in the trough?
That’s what David is boasting?
Isn’t it funny how it’s ‘wasteful taxpayer dollars’ when it’s going on welfare, yet when it’s going to private interests who back ACT, then it’s suddenly excellent use of public money?
At some stage, Kiwis need to take a hard long look at themselves for the far right climate denying racist beneficiary bashing Government they elected, all because a bitter post-Covid electorate hated Jacinda for having the temerity to save 20 000 lives during a once in a century pandemic.
We have mutated into something very ugly under this new Government while the rich laugh at how easily the angry voters were manipulated into giving them what they want.
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What I love about this is that only 215 parents have decided that sending their child to a charter school is a good idea.
Most parents are a lot smarter than David Seymour. They see it as an unfair rort and a dangerous experiment. They will not have their children used as pawns to prop up Seymour’s fragile ego.
They know perfectly well that unnecessary chopping and changing of schools isn’t going to advance their child’s education at all.
The buildings are seldom purpose-built schools, the playing areas are often small and inadequate.
What parents think will help their children, often causes uncertainty and anxiety for the child.
They lose their friends, some of whom they will have known for years. The parents also lose their local network of acquaintances from school. The other parents see the ‘movers’ as a bit flaky and not quite knowing what they really want.
Then there’s the added possibility that the school will close down because of lack of pupils and they have to go back, tail between their legs, to their old school.
So, only 215 families have made this move to an untried, inadequately furnished school. The high ideals they read about was just bright shiny advertising bumf and the reality is much darker and sad.
To imagine their child is getting $46k worth of better education is delusional.
The problem arises when we use public money to pay these large amounts for these private students and the return on investment is lost. There is no return to the government and that makes it a rort.
Nothing Seymour proposes makes a return for the govt. He’s been a complete failure e.g. school lunches. He thought the old lunch system was a waste and made no return. He was wrong. if he’d left well enough alone, the return in years to come from children being fed properly and able to learn all the time, would have been huge.
The savings from not having those children sick or going off the rails would have made a grand return on investment. Just not right now, when he wants to impress his donors.
He has chased out all the rorts he thought were occurring and replaced them with his own, for his masters’ benefits.
It’s the old ‘socialise the costs and privatise the profits’ switcheroo. We know it well.
Private schools will be rushing to call themselves charter schools won’t they ? If you don’t like state schools and want your kids to go to an elite school shouldn’t you pay ? What is wrong with state schools anyway
$46 K A YEAR hell I could send 2 kids to a full boarding school for that money .A local family send 3 kids to St Peters for $60k per year .