In the second coming of charter schools, Act leader David Seymour plans a much bigger roll-out. But what evidence is there that they do any better than state schools?
It could happen very quickly. In 2011, Britain’s newly elected Conservative government introduced 16 charter schools (they called them free schools) to the public education system. These were staunchly opposed by the teachers’ unions and the Labour Party, which attacked them as inefficient and ideological. Today in the UK, there are 650 free schools that have enrolled more than 350,000 students, and more are in the pipeline.
In New Zealand, the re-establishment of charter schools was a major policy win for Act in the coalition agreement. Leader David Seymour holds an associate education portfolio and he’s won $153 million in this year’s Budget to establish 15 new charter schools and transition 35 state schools to the charter model. He aims to have the first contracts negotiated by the end of the year so the first charters can begin teaching in term one next year. Labour leader Chris Hipkins has pledged to re-abolish the charter school model when Labour returns to government.
Seymour has been here before. In 2014, he entered Parliament as Act’s leader and sole MP, becoming parliamentary undersecretary to the Minister of Education with special responsibility for charter schools in John Key’s National-led government. These had been established two years earlier in a coalition arrangement with Seymour’s predecessor, John Banks. When the government changed in 2017, Hipkins as Education Minister quickly disestablished the charters, folding the 11 schools established under Act and National into the state system.
Teacher Nina Hood worked at Auckland’s Epsom Girls and Mt Roskill Grammar Schools before completing a PhD at Oxford, studying educational theory. The researcher and Education Hub founder has forthright opinions about nearly every aspect of the New Zealand education system – except charter schools, about which she’s deeply ambivalent. Hood served on the charter schools establishment board before standing down.
“Charter schools is the topic that has caused me the most back and forward in terms of what I think. It’s because there’s no easy answer to it. And I also think that a lot of it comes down to personal philosophy.”
No magic fix
She is sceptical of the evangelical fervour of some charter advocates. “It would be wrong to think that charter schools are going to somehow magically fix all our educational woes. I don’t believe that any one intervention in education is going to make that much of a difference.”
But she does favour the creation of new charters that deliver greater choice than the current system. “I also don’t believe that any one school is going to be able to adequately serve every child and there are children in New Zealand whose needs aren’t being met by our traditional schooling system. So charter schools offer an opportunity, particularly for those children who are not being well served at the moment.”
The charter model comes from the US, and from the beginning, the goal was to introduce choice and innovation into public education. They would be privately owned but publicly funded; free from the laws and regulations that governed public schools, able to experiment, innovate, flourish if they succeeded and fail if they failed. They were trialled in Minnesota and California in the early 1990s. Now, there are more than 8000 across the US, teaching an estimated 3.7 million students. Canada, the UK, Australia, Chile, Sweden and South Korea all have some version of the charter school model and, in each nation, there’s an acrimonious debate about whether they’re the best or worst thing to happen to the education sector.
As Hood notes, this is usually an ideological divide: charter schools are typically right-wing projects, opposed by much of the left – especially the teaching unions. Teachers in state schools must be qualified and registered, and this is not the case in charters, which almost inevitably negotiate individual contracts rather than sign up staff to collective agreements. So the charter model threatens to erode the value of teaching qualifications and union membership.
The loudest voices in New Zealand’s debate are Seymour and Hipkins. For Act’s leader, the case is simple: the quality of the state system has been deteriorating for decades. In that time, there have been a number of innovations in teaching methodology but they’re almost impossible to introduce into the existing system, which he believes has a built-in resistance to meaningful reform.
Seymour points out many communities have record rates of home schooling and school refusal, and no other options than the public system – but if a local state school is failing, it’s hard to fix.
“Right now, the remedy is a commissioner goes in. Statutory management theoretically revitalises the school. They put another board in. You basically have this cookie-cutter governance framework, which fundamentally relies on a community having enough social capital or cultural capital to reinvest in its children. I’m sitting at my office, which is halfway between Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls Grammar, where they have formidable boards of trustees. But where I grew up in Northland that’s not always the case.”
For Act, charter schools introduce choice and accountability in education to communities that lack them.
Back of the class
One of the schools established in the 2014 rollout that Seymour oversaw was Te Pūmanawa o te Wairua, located on a farm in Whangaruru, northeast of Whangārei, and operated by the Ngā Parirau Mātauranga Charitable Trust. During a two-year period, the trust took in $5.2 million from the government in establishment and operating fees. It bought a farm and built classrooms, and at its height had a roll of 60 students.
But there were reports the school operated out of a paddock using Portaloos as toilets; only one teacher had a practising certificate; there were suggestions of high absentee rates, drug use, poor governance and persistent student underachievement. In 2016, the school’s contract was terminated by then-education minister Hekia Parata.
Hipkins is scathing about the charter model in general and cites this as an example of what can go wrong when schools are operated via state funding but without proper oversight.
“We never got the money back and we never got the farm back. So that was basically taxpayer money that was used to fund a farm that the taxpayer never saw any advantage from. So those are the sorts of risks.
“We had a situation when I became Minister of Education: a charter school’s lease was about to expire in the middle of a school term and the landlord didn’t want to renew it. So we had to get the Ministry of Education to find the school new premises or they were going to close and the kids were going to have nowhere to go because they had a lease. You can’t run a school like that.”
Hipkins has education policy in his blood. His mother, Rosemary Hipkins, was chief researcher for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research; he was student president of Victoria University of Wellington and an adviser to Education Minister Trevor Mallard during the Clark government. He became an MP in 2008, gaining the education portfolio in his second term. He led a sustained attack on the charter schools policy, introducing a private member’s bill in 2016 to abolish the charter model. It was defeated at first reading, but when Labour regained power in 2017, Hipkins became Education Minister and quickly abolished the charter policy.
By 2018, all 11 of the charters created under National-Act had been absorbed back into the state system, classified as “designated character schools”.
Hipkins has many criticisms of Seymour’s policy. He believes there’s an incoherence at the heart of the coalition’s education system: Education Minister Erica Stanford is standardising curricula and putting in place new rules and regulations that all state schools have to follow, while Seymour’s charters sit completely outside any of those constraints.
“What is the problem that the government is trying to solve here? If they’re saying that they want schools to have more flexibility, more ability to innovate, then why are they doing entirely the opposite of that?”
He also notes the cost of the previous charters and the analysis of their performance (the Ministry of Education’s close-out reports of the charters were not glowing. Seymour prefers to cite a report by consultancy firm MartinJenkins, which was far more positive about them). For Hipkins, the decline in the state system happened after the devolution of schools in the late 1980s. Charters are just a further move in that direction – and he intends to reverse it yet again.
But do they work?
There are thousands of contradictory studies on this subject, promoted or dismissed by supporters or opponents. The best-known, heartily endorsed and bitterly denounced is an ongoing investigation conducted by Stanford University, California’s Centre for Research on Education Outcomes, or Credo. In 2009, Credo published a mammoth report on the performance of charter schools in the US, comparing longitudinal student‐level achievement data between the charter and public systems. It found that, on average, the results of students at 46% of charters were no different from students at state schools. Also, 17% of charters delivered significantly superior results – but 37% of charters were significantly worse than public schools. Overall, charters were worse than public schools.
The study quickly became the tip of the spear for critics of the movement. Hipkins cited it to Seymour during question time in 2013 as proof the policy was doomed to fail. Advocates for charters denounced the study, accusing it of statistical bias (Credo provided robust responses to its critics). A second study, in 2015, showed some positive movements in charter outcomes, then, in July 2023, Credo published an updated study finding, on average, students in charter schools outperformed students in public schools.
The report says, “More than 1000 schools have eliminated learning disparities for their students and moved their achievement ahead of their respective state’s average performance. We refer to these schools as ‘gap-busting’ charter schools. They provide strong empirical proof that high-quality, high-equality education is possible anywhere. More critically, we found that dozens of CMOs [charter management organisations] have created these results across their portfolios, demonstrating the ability to scale equitable education that can change lives.”
Most of the critics or champions of the study simply switched positions: pro-charter lobbyists gleefully heralded the findings, teaching unions now warned that Credo was partly funded by Bill Gates. Asked about the study’s most recent findings, Hipkins says it’s “not an apples-to-apples comparison” because the overall models between countries are so different.
But some think tanks and commentators on the centre-left took the findings seriously. Writing in New York magazine, the liberal columnist Jonathan Chait noted that a large number of charter schools had developed teaching methodologies that allowed black and Hispanic students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods to access the same quality of education enjoyed by white children growing up in the suburbs. He wondered whether preserving the collective bargaining strength of teaching unions was an acceptable trade-off for left-wing political parties opposing charters.
The most famous charters are, arguably, the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools in the US and Michaela in the UK. There are 278 schools in the KIPP network, serving low-income communities, primarily in inner cities. School days run from 7.30am to 4pm, there are often classes on Saturdays and fewer holidays than public schools. They’re notoriously strict – there’s lots of emphasis on building character: self-discipline, resilience, “grit”. There’s extensive personal development for teachers and principals and a relentless focus on results. But there’s also a lot of private philanthropy funding the longer hours and leadership training, raising questions about how scalable the KIPP model is.
Michaela Community School operates in Wembley in northwest London. It was founded in 2014 by Katharine Birbalsingh, a teacher who leans into her media profile as “Britain’s strictest headmistress”.
Michaela operates out of a run-down converted office building next to a train station. The children are drawn from disadvantaged backgrounds and are of predominantly black, south Asian and Caribbean ethnicities. (Birbalsingh is of Jamaican and Indo-Guyanese descent, although she was born in Auckland. She was named after Katherine Mansfield; her middle name is Moana.) Her school is famous for its discipline: children march in silent rows in between classes and leap to their feet when their head enters the room. By some measures, it is the best school in the UK, with 82% of A-level students being offered places in research-intensive universities in 2021.
Conservatives love Michaela – it lets them say everything they want about the failures of modern school systems and left-wing educational theories. But it is just one charter school among many.
Hood says although some charters and multi-academy trusts do extremely well, some significantly underperform. “So, I don’t think you can apply a blanket rule and say, just because a school becomes an academy or a charter school, they’re automatically going to do better.” And for Hood there are significant risks.
Forced into it
One of the provisions in the Education and Training Amendment Bill before Parliament gives the minister discretion, in “appropriate” circumstances, to direct a state school to convert to a charter school.
This is a reprise of a deeply controversial element of the UK’s charter school rollout: “forced academisation”. In the early 2000s, PM Tony Blair introduced the academy schools model – basically charter schools lite, funded by central government and run by non-profit trusts.
In 2010, the new Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, allowed existing schools to convert to academy schools, and in 2016, the minister gained the power to compel schools deemed to be underperforming to become academy schools. But many of them failed, and thousands of children found themselves in so-called zombie schools – waiting to find a new sponsor after being abandoned by the trust that managed them.
Now, 40% of the UK’s primary schools and 80% of its secondary schools are academy schools.
Will underperforming state schools in New Zealand be compelled to become charters? For Seymour, the answer is yes.
“If the alternative to that merry-go-round of commission management and boards of trustees is for the local iwi to come along and say, ‘Well, we would like to operate better than the current model’, I think we should be prepared to give that a look. If the authorisation board decided that the proposed sponsor was more credible than the alternative, why not?”
The power to transform a state school into a charter sits with Erica Stanford currently. The Listener contacted her office to query her intentions around this law, and a spokesperson replied that the minister would not comment on any aspect of charter schools policy – not even the legislation that empowers her to convert state schools into charters.
Labour and the teaching unions are aghast at the prospect. For Stephanie Mills, national secretary of the NZ Educational Institute Te Riu Roa, it’s an indicator of a more radical agenda than the previous iteration of charters.
“This policy has shifted dramatically from last time and ... there is a much bigger agenda in terms of privatisation and undermining of the state system.”
Big plans
Seymour says he’s learnt much from his previous attempt to establish the charter model here, although most of the lessons were political rather than pedagogical. This time, he’s going big and going fast.
“There’s probably going to be a couple of hundred of these schools by the time Labour gets back into power. And it’s going to be big, powerful communities with lots of capital and lots of lawyers.
“It won’t be a small group of poor brown kids that Labour can shamefully and disgracefully ignore like they did last time. And the contract is going to be much tighter and harder to buy. They’re going to be 10 by 10 by 10. Thirty years, with break points every 10 years.”
He’s had 78 applications. Only 10 are from state schools, and while the list will not be made public, it’s a safe assumption some are former charters returning to the fold. He’s cautiously optimistic that more state schools will look to convert down the line.
For Hood, this is the most dangerous aspect of Seymour’s policy.
“I don’t believe our state schooling system has performed particularly well over the last little while, but I still fundamentally believe in the importance of a state education system.
" Schools are our last institution where we actually really have the ability as a country to influence and [help] children. The ability of allowing state schools to convert does potentially undermine that.
“And I think we need to look at the legislation really carefully about the potential – how far you could take it – because you could essentially remove the state schooling system from New Zealand through this. And that terrifies me.”
NZ School: A primer
PUBLIC
Most schools are state funded and teach the national curriculum. Until 2019, most schools asked parents for donations, but the Labour government effectively ended donations for decile 1-7 schools by offering $150 per student to schools that signed up. Decile 8-10 schools can still ask for donations.
Kura kaupapa
Māori schools are state schools that teach in te reo Māori and follow their own curriculum.
Outside mainstream schools
More than 28,000 students are enrolled with Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu, formerly the Correspondence School. There are three regional health schools for students who are chronically ill, who suffer from an acute psychiatric illness or cannot attend a local school for other health-related reasons. Separate from these are the specialist schools, for children with high needs.
PRIVATE
Independent (private) schools own their own property and are governed by independent boards. They charge fees to parents but still receive some government funding. There are about 80 private (including faith-based) schools in the country, compared with about 2400 state and state-integrated. The state partially funds them, paying about 25% of the cost per student. Enrolment fees run to about $25,000 per child per year on average.
STATE-INTEGRATED
About 335 schools are former private schools that have become part of the state system. Most are Catholic, which functioned as private schools funded by local parishes until the 1970s, when the costs blew out. The government agreed to fund them so long as they taught the national curriculum.
CHARTER
Charter schools can set their own curricula, methods of teaching and school hours, and can hire unregistered teachers. But they will be constrained by the contracts they negotiate with the Ministry of Education, which will include performance targets. If they fail to meet them, the ministry has broad powers to intervene, including closure. Act says it is interested in establishing schools that reflect communities and values not represented in mainstream system: for example, cultural, religious, sporting, STEM focused or military schools.
HOMESCHOOLING
This has experienced a surge in growth during the past few years, rising from about 6000 homeschooled children in 2017 to more than 10,000 last year. Children need a certificate of exemption from the Ministry of Education.
ABSENTEEISM
In 2023, just 47% of students met the minimum “regular attendance” target of 90%, or nine days out of 10. This is slowly getting better: latest statistics had 53.2% of students at 90% attendance for Term 2.