Charter schools: when the government gives money to a business or organisation that wants to run a school however the hell they like. And they get to choose what they teach.
Again, more clearly: the government will take money straight from public schools, and give it to religious or profit-based organisations, to teach children whatever they like.
Teaching staff don't have to be registered teachers, or even trained teachers.
Honestly, nobody's said anything about this in any media I can see in New Zealand, but this is really bad for the teaching staff themselves.
They can't join the unions, so get no protection from predatory principals who overwork them - they will get severely taken advantage of. They will largely be young and idealistic and will burn out even sooner than most teachers do. (The burnout rate in New Zealand is five years. Unhappily, the lenth of time it takes for a teacher to hone their craft is also five years.)
And it will be bad for real teachers, who are undermined, undercut financially, and have the professional reputation of their career harmed by untrained imposters.
Yeah, I'll bring in the medical analogy - I don't want an unqualified doctor treating me, and while unqualified teachers aren't necessarily bad teachers, they simply haven't been taught the necessary skills to do as excellent a job.
The real gears-grinding comes in when people realise that churches will get money from the government to run schools.
There is no place for religion in schools! Religion and education are polar opposites! How can this be legally possible in New Zealand?!
One is evidence-based and assists children in understanding real, true content that helps them decipher the world and surrounding universe, and the other tries to make children believe weird old Middle-Eastern fables, then uses the content of the fables to try to control how other people live. Whee!
Proper-thinking humans should resent the idea that education in New Zealand, which is already so seriously underfunded, will lose money to prop up these ridiculous experiments.
Everyone in countries who have tried it say don't do it.
There isn't even any credible evidence that charter schools, religious ones or otherwise, are good for kids' achievement.
This is a good article on charter schools in Seattle, and they point out that it is only excess funding from billionaires gives the better charter schools their upper hand.
The churches here don't generally have billionaire backers (evidence shows most successful professionals aren't religious), but you can bet your butt that there will be a lot of parents trying to get their kids into church-based charter schools (think Destiny: a successful business with a massive church following).
One of the biggest criticisms of charter schools is that they cherry-pick the best students. Hekia Parata assures us that they will use a ballot system to "ensure fairness."
Sounds great! But with such high demand (why why why, Delilah), lo and behold, they don't end up with very many special needs students, or ones with huge behavioural problems, or ones that simply don't want to learn.
Students end up applying for places through a lottery (the actual processes within the system is usually undisclosed) with ratios like 135 students for ten positions. And charter schools tend find a way around the ballot system.
Then, to further decrease the number of nuisance low achievers, you get kicked out of a charter school if you don't perform.
These high expulsion rates are very helpful to a school who wants to keep its results nice.
This data, released in September of this year, shows that a large number of charter schools expel and suspend at ridiculous rates - in a couple of schools they suspended more than half the student body. One KIPP school (and KIPP are widely regarded as one of the more successful experiments) permanently expelled 17 students in one year. That may not seem like a lot, but in a decile 1a school I worked at in a severely struggling area of South Auckland, we had zero expulsions in two years.
Many of the students suspended in US charter schools are being punished for things like school uniform infractions, which is hugely humiliating for students whose families are struggling financially. I imagine many would leave the school just to save face.
Only one in five charter schools gets the results they all aspire to.
Here's some of the huge parcel of evidence about charter schools' actual achievement:
A 2003 national study by the Department of Education (under George W. Bush) found that charter schools performed, on average, no better than traditional public schools. This conclusion has been confirmed by a range of further studies. The largest study to date was conducted in 2009 by two Stanford economists and financed by the Walton Family and the Eli and Edy Broad foundations (staunch charter supporters). It involved an enormous sample, 70 percent of all charter students. It found that 37 percent of charter schools had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools, 46 percent had gains that were no different and only 17 percent were significantly better. Thus an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better or actually worse than traditional public schools serving similar populations. Indeed, the authors concluded that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly two to one.
Good teachers are important, and nobody denies that. Noooobody. But, says University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, around 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. Holy shit! Countless further studies demonstrate a statistically significant link between test scores and income. Somebody tell Hekia.
Furthermore, it is widely accepted among critics (and hooo boy, there are a lot of furious critics out there) that charter schools generally enroll disproportionately small numbers of children who are English-language learners or have disabilities. So a charter school in, say, South Auckland, will be selecting the very best students, while the state schools will be left with more kids from families which can be classified as the proverbial dregs of society.
Meanwhile, Hekia Parata and John Banks are drumming up a crisis in education so everybody thinks SOMETHING'S GOT TO BE DONE, WHAT ABOUT THE GODDAMN CHILDREN?!?!?! and they can claim a mandate for charter schools. And the poor kids are just going to keep being poor.
Exceptional children can rise above poverty, but you can't ignore the effect it has on a child's education. Hekia has to do her job, but the government, by ignoring poverty, is setting her up to fail.
New Zealand education simply isn't the problem - that underachieving tail of brown kids is just an indicator of deeper, nastier, very alarming underlying issues.
And anyone saying charter schools will help kids in low socio-economic areas either hasn't done their homework, or is lying to you.