There's Blood on the Streets

Gangs of New York

New York is a happening place--provided  you enjoy watching internecine warfare.  The newly elected Mayor, Bill de Blasio is an automaton of extreme left wing progressivism.  The overwhelmingly progressive city is becoming uncomfortably discombobulated.  It a "progressivism, but not as we know it" kind of reaction.

One of the friction points is a battle between the previously burgeoning charter school movement and the teacher unions.  Big Bill favours shutting charter schools down in favour of bog standard government schools because everyone should get the same.  Egalitarian folly, but its what leftist ideology adoringly celebrates, until it experiences it.

The Wall Street Journal recently provided some colour.

Firstly, charter schools have been going ahead in leaps and bounds in New York, against a backdrop of under performing, failing government schools districts.

Half the kids in Harlem today attend charters, among them KIPP, Democracy Prep and Harlem Children's Zone. Across New York, 70,000 students go to a charter.  The other night, at a private loft in Tribeca, Ms. Moskowitz was speaking before a roomful of donors and supporters. The mood was somber. Ms. Moskowitz said that Success Academy's soon-to-be 10,000-strong student network makes it one of the 10 largest school districts in New York state. At the current rate of growth, in seven or eight years, "we'd be the 15th largest school district in America," she said. "But that's obviously highly in doubt."

That is consistent with what is happening across the United States.

The schools are also mushrooming nationwide. Nearly half the public schools in Washington, D.C., and virtually all in New Orleans are charters. One reason the friction in New York is especially bad comes from the city's practice during the Bloomberg years of having charters share space with regular schools. The charters then often proceeded, embarrassingly, to outperform the other schools.

One would have thought that government schools would celebrate the out performance of charters on their premises, and would use it as a reason to adapt, change, reform, and develop.  But no.  Why?  Well, firstly its not egalitarian.  All schools should be as bad as ours.  That's what egalitarianism means--or at least what it inevitably produces.  Secondly, teacher unions hate charters with a passion.  They are intimidated by merit pay.  They envy their flexibility and want to see it destroyed, rather than they themselves arguing for more liberating flexibility in their own closed shops.

Meanwhile parents, particularly those living in dysfunctional, underperforming state school districts, would do anything to give their kids a shot at a better education.  But Big Brother says, no.  Actually Big Bill is reported to be a rank hypocrite on the subject.

As long as Mr. de Blasio was making it personal, she [charter school proponent, Moskowitz] noted in a New York Post op-ed that his son attends a selective, high-performing public high school. "Most parents don't have a public school option that's as good as de Blasio had access to for his son," Ms. Moskowitz wrote. She added that his message to parents in neighborhoods with bad schools was simple: "Drop dead."

Apparently the same sauce does not suit the gander, but the geese are going to get it whether they like it or not.

New Zealand is just entering the fray.  Our government schools have a smothering monopoly on  education.  Consequently, teacher unions have had an inordinate influence and in some cases actually control the sector.  Take the deaths of bulk funding, the re-imposition of  school zoning, and the complete stonewalling of the voucher system, for example. All three measures would have rewarded educational excellence and exposed under performance.  All three were viscerally hated because they threatened our mouldering egalitarianism. All three were cut off at the pass.  

Now we have a pilot charter school programme up and running.  For us, the success of charter schools in other jurisdictions like the United States and the United Kingdom is really important.  The more successful charter schools are elsewhere in revitalising and reforming the education sector the more the heat will come upon New Zealand's education industry.  Particularly if our global rankings continue to slide, and our illiteracy and innumeracy rates--already bad enough--rise.