The Minister Of Education Climbs Down

Painted Up To Look Like Victory

When we were growing up, one of our favorite rejoinders to the odd lecture from parents was, "Don't care!".  Whereupon, our mother's wry retort was,

Don't Care was made to care.
Don't Care was hung.
Don't Care was put in a pot
And boiled 'till he was done.

The Minister of Education, Chris "Hapless" Hipkins has been "made to care" over the matter of  Charter Schools.  Captive to the all-powerful teacher unions, Hipkins was determined to stamp out the dozen or so charter schools operating in New Zealand.  They, said Hipkins, represented a reckless endangerment to our young people.  Under Labour policy they were to have been done and gone.

Minister Hipkins, however, was faced with unexpected opposition--from the public at large.  In the past nine months or so, there has been nary a negative story about these charter schools.  The repeated account was that they have been remarkably successful at teaching students who were falling through the cracks and failing at the government schools.  It seems that the old Kiwi sense of fair play and non-ideological pragmatism came into play.  The media bought into the narrative and generally painted New Zealand's charter schools in a very positive light.

So, Hipkins has reached a compromise.  The dozen or so  charter schools were "changed" into integrated schools or special character schools which means they could basically carry on doing what they proved to be so good at--educating in their distinctive ways kids who were falling through the cracks.

This implies that when the Labour coalition government is eventually voted out, National can get back to creating charter schools with a vengeance.
  The past six years were characterised by National putting its toe in the water, ever so gingerly.  Charter schools moved off the slips into the water at a rate roughly resembling the appearance of a blue moon.  But now the model has been "proved up" as it were.  So, when next in government, National can go full steam ahead.

When Labour returns to power in around fifteen to twenty years time, once again due to its bondage to the unions, it will doubtless "convert" these schools into state schools to placate its union masters.  But they will all retain their "special character" or be "integrated" which will permit their distinct differences to continue.  The end result will be a government education system being broken down by a competitive diversity.  At this point parents will be asking why the neighbourhood zoned school is not doing nearly as well, in terms of results, as the special character school half a kilometer down the road.

And that will make the end of the monolithic state education system.  Parents will be voting with their feet.  Failing schools will be shut down or taken over by successful former-charter schools.  At least we can live in hope.

Former Minister Hipkins will be in his fifties by then.  "Don't Care" will have been put in a pot and have been thoroughly boiled until he was well and truly done.  Mark it: the decline and dismemberment of the state education monopoly began with Minister Hipkins in the second decade of the 21st Century.  He had no idea of what he was unleashing.

Here is the foretaste of what is to come:

All but perhaps one of the 13 charter schools set up by the National Government now look set to stay open in some form, after two more were approved today as special character state schools.  Education Minister Chris Hipkins has announced that Middle School West Auckland and South Auckland Middle School have been approved to reopen as designated character state schools next year.

The two schools, both run by Alwyn Poole's Villa Education Trust, complained loudly when they were left out of a first batch of six charter schools that were approved as designated character schools last month.  One other, Vanguard Military Academy, won its designated character approval in May, and three others, Māngere-based Te Kura Māori o Waatea and a proposed Waatea High School, and a proposed new school, Tūranga Tangata Rite in Gisborne, are expected to become state-integrated schools.

Only the Rise Up Academy, a mainly Pacific school in Māngere East, is still waiting for approval as a designated character state school.  Poole, who started a private school in Epsom before opening his two charter schools, said he was "delighted" to be approved to run two state schools.  He said the change meant his teachers would now be paid at centrally-negotiated state rates, but he hoped to "look after" them using the school operations grants.  "We are convinced that we can manage to keep a few of our key points of difference," he said.  "One is that our parents won't pay a donation. Two, our class sizes will be restricted to 15. And we will work out ways of really looking after our staff."

Hipkins said he deferred deciding on Poole's two charter schools in July "because more information was needed to demonstrate that they meet the legal requirements for designated character schools".  [NZ Herald]

And that, dear readers, is what's known as Ministerial Surrender.