Schools shake-up: What some find ‘terrifying’ about govt plans for charter schools
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.