Charter schools will fail again, here is why - Dr Shannon Walsh

Dr Shannon Walsh is strategic researcher for NZEI Te Riu Roa and a former lecturer at the University of Auckland.

OPINION

Charter schools are officially back, this time with a sizable price tag of $153 million over four years, and the novel option for public schools to transition into charters as early as next year.

But it’s not going to work. That is because the two key things charter schools promise to deliver – greater school choice for parents and diverse and innovative approaches to education – are not problems our education system needs to fix. In fact, we already do well on both counts.

With aggressive cuts to the public sector now coming through, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the National Party are clearly dedicated to reducing government spending. This makes the charter school policy a major outlier given the high price tag they come with. That $153m could go a long way in an education system such as ours that struggles to meet the basic learning needs of children. As the Government prepares to start spraying cash at the failed model, schools face major barriers to accessing learning support and specialists for our growing cohort of students with additional and complex learning needs.

Prime Minister and National Party leader Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell

In this tight fiscal environment, charter schools are an expensive diversion of funding that would otherwise start to address these real problems. With the former experiment, costs blew out quickly, hitting $48,421 per student annually in one charter school. The average annual operational cost per student across all charter schools was over $18,000, almost triple the average of about $6600 for public schools over the same period. There is no reason to believe this won’t happen again.

The first experiment with charter schools was the result of the Act-National confidence and supply agreement after the 2011 election. From the start, it wasn’t clear how charter schools were supposed to achieve the innovation they promised to deliver. The working group tasked with developing the model was criticised by one commentator as doing so without any evidential basis. It seemed as if the small group simply dreamed up the policy without seriously considering any of the existing – and in my view checkered – evidence from overseas.

The Ministry of Education is currently refusing to release advice given to Minister of Education Erica Stanford on the international evidence behind charter schools, likely because it shows what most in education already know: they don’t work. But we don’t need to look that far. Evaluations from the last time the policy was in place showed little educational innovation happening in charter schools. Their performance was at best on par with well performing public schools, at worst they were complete failures and shut down. There is no reason to think things will be any different this time around.

New Zealand’s public education system is celebrated for its ability to foster educational innovation, in part due to the decentralised self-governing Tomorrow’s Schools model introduced by David Lange in 1989. One of the biggest problems our system has encountered since then has not been about the freedom of schools to experiment and innovate with their approach, but about the system capacity to scale up and diffuse successful innovations. Innovation is never just about clever ideas but about the ability of our system to disseminate and implement them.

The argument that parents need greater levels of school choice is likewise farcical. We already have a wide range of offerings, from kura and public schools to private schools, public-integrated, special character, correspondence ... there is something for everyone. In research published in 2020, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research found 89 per cent of parents said their youngest child attended their first choice of school. The Government is wasting money fixing a problem that doesn’t exist.

New Zealand’s public education system is celebrated for its ability to foster educational innovation. Photo / NZME

Luxon, who has placed both education and fiscal responsibility at the centre of his brand, jeopardises both in supporting the charter school policy. Incoming electorate MPs might also be nervous about their community’s reception of the policy. Local schools are at the heart of their communities, for example during Cyclone Gabrielle when communities rallied around their local school in the initial response and recovery. The Government’s intention to use the policy to take schools out of local control and put them into private hands is an insult to the generations of people who built them up. Think of all those school working bees, fundraising efforts and that deep sense of pride in your local school being suddenly subsumed by a private company that shuts the community out.

New Zealanders who have an interest in the future of our public education system should be watching this scheme very closely. Just like last time, we can expect it to be an expensive experiment that fails to deliver on its promises.