The School Wars

Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Story

It's not hard to imagine that the Teacher Unions have been choking over their corn flakes.  The antipathy and hatred of the unions for the nascent charter school sector in New Zealand is well known.  Charter schools just need to raise an eyebrow by a millimeter and the Teacher Unions viscerally react with a 500 decibel haka, threatening to cannibalise them all.  

How devastating it must be, then, for the NZ Herald to dare publish an article by Dr Don Brash celebrating one charter school as a result of his visit.   The sub-editor's headline alone was enough to get the unionists bowels all a-tangle and a-jingle.  It read: "Well-run Partnership School Outclasses Others"--by which is meant the state's union controlled schools.

We need to keep things in perspective, however.  There are slightly more than three charter schools in New Zealand.  They are a most highly regulated, controlled, supervised, and reported upon bevy of institutions which the government treats as if they were radioactive.  Despite this, it seems that educational success becomes them.  Must be the high-grade plutonium.

The unions (along with their political front--the NZ Labour Party) have a stock-standard answer when they hear of the success of a charter school.  It's all because they get more money than state union-controlled schools.  Dr Brash, however, also had the effrontery to shoot down that particular deceitful and misleading argument.

Ah yes, critics argue, but partnership schools get a lot more money from the taxpayer than other schools do. Absolute nonsense.  All schools get a lump sum to start up and, because South Auckland Middle School has been operating for less than three years, taking its start-up money and adding it to the money it receives for its on-going operation makes it appear that it gets more money than state schools.

But the start-up money it received was much less, on a per student basis, than comparable state schools have received.  South Auckland Middle School received just $1.3 million for start-up with a target roll of 120, and receives less than $12,000 per pupil annually to cover all teacher salaries and other operating costs.

Rototuna Primary School in Hamilton, with fewer than 800 pupils, recently received $40 million for start-up, and plenty of schools receive as much or more for operating costs, together with additional support from the Ministry of Education.  The conclusion is inescapable.

What sort of educational success are we talking about?  Well, the unions will hate Dr Brash even more for actually specifying the successes he found at South Auckland Middle School.

 Yes, the school is effectively bulk-funded, in principle enabling the school to employ unregistered or unqualified teachers. In reality, all their teachers are fully registered and fully qualified. Classes are limited in size to 15.  The school provides a school uniform and all basic stationery without charge, and no fees or "donations" are charged.

There is a fulltime member of staff whose only responsibility is to liaise with the "parents" (sometimes grandmothers) of the children in order to ensure, to the extent possible, that parents are fully engaged in the education of their children. . . .

Comparable figures for a nearby intermediate (another Decile 1 school) were 34 per cent, 34 per cent, and 37 per cent, while for the nearest primary school they were 40 per cent, 33 per cent and 24 per cent. Is it any wonder that parents are queuing up to send their children to South Auckland Middle School?

Here is cause for another ideological gripe on the part of the Teacher Unions.  They detest with an inchoate passion the idea that parents would be allowed to choose a school for their children. They would rather put parents up against a wall and systematically shoot the lot them rather than permit them to choose which school they wanted their children to attend.  That might result in some schools being successful, and other failing.

Dumbkopfs.  Parents know nothing.  We are the experts.  Parents are dumber than dumb.  Their choices for the education of the children will always end up doing damage.  We alone are the trained experts.  We alone know how to slip the educational dagger into the heads of children so they graduate without knowing how to read, write, or do maths competently.   But it's all good.  Because our failures treat everyone equally.  We are not elitists.  Our under-performance is universal.  It's gloriously egalitarian, and who could quibble over that.  All we need is more taxpayers money.  Parents need to be fleeced just a bit more and we would be able to do miracles.

Dr Brash has stupidly allowed the facts to get in the way of the Teacher Unions' "just-so" story.  It will be open warfare now.