National's Bleak Educational Landscape

By John Minto
National Chairperson
Quality Public Education Coalition
Email: jbminto@xtra.co.nz

Using the poor to enhance the agenda of the wealthy and powerful has been a strong feature of political debate in New Zealand over 25 years now. Norman LaRocque does precisely this when he expresses strong support for the National Party’s education policies (Independent, 4 May).

LaRocque is the policy advisor to the Business Roundtable and its education sub-committee - the Education Forum - so it’s not surprising to see his unqualified support for Don Brash’s policies.

In fact the most interesting aspect of National’s policies is that they focus on the Business Roundtable’s holy grail - privatization of public education - rather than on improving student achievement.

As head of the Reserve Bank for many years Don Brash was involved with successive governments in developing and implementing policy to privatize community assets. In this context his proposal to develop “Trust Schools” is immediately recognizable.

Recall for a moment the State Owned Enterprise model for public services developed in the 1980’s by the 4th Labour government. Under this SOE model we saw community assets such as Telecom firstly established as profit making businesses and then sold outright to the private sector. Later in the 1990’s the National-led government prepared the electricity sector for privatization. This time it was done by turning the assets over to community trusts - many of which have now been privatized through the issuing of shares to account holders by the trustees. These assets are now run primarily for shareholder profit rather than as a service to the community.

National’s education policy would put our schools into the same half-way house as was done with our electricity assets - community trusts - to ready them for privatization. This is not a new idea. Don Brash’s fellow traveller Ruth Richardson proposed selling public schools outright and received critical acclaim from the Business Roundtable.

LaRocque glosses over the privatization issue - knowing it’s rejected by the majority of New Zealanders - and instead makes the outrageous claim that National’s plans for education are somehow “mainstream” Rubbish!

Educationally the key question is “Would “trust schools” improve student achievement?” No - why would they? Brash’s plans would simply mean that these schools would be freer to cherry-pick the students they want to enhance their reputations. Without exception this was the case through the 1990’s when popular schools were able to set their own enrolment policies. It was the schools which chose the students - not the other way round.

“Choice” is surely the leading weasel word of Tomorrow’s Schools.

What about allowing weaker schools to be taken over by these trust schools? Surely this would improve student achievement? No again. Before tomorrow’s schools there were many such arrangements whereby a single board of trustees (they were called Boards of Governors) would run a number of schools. Student achievement then - as now - was dominated by the income levels of the communities from which the students came. One has only to glance at a graph of NCEA pass rates against school decile to see a near perfect correlation between community income and student achievement.

It’s critically important to say here that this is not an excuse for any school to have low educational standards or set low expectations for their students - just the opposite in fact. Schools in low income communities must expect more from their students than schools in high income communities to help overcome the effect of socio-economic disadvantage.

If some schools are underperforming the government’s job is to assertively deal to that problem instead of leaving parents in the lurch.

Won’t bulk funding of teachers salaries improve student achievement? No again! Extensive research comparing bulk funded and centrally funded schools in the 1990’s said quite baldly that it didn’t. The differences between schools which did emerge were directly attributable to the extra funding - the “bribes” - which bulk funded schools received from the National government.

LaRocque praises Sweden for its “school choice” policies but fails to mention that any Swedish private schools which receive government funding are neither allowed to cherry-pick the students they want nor allowed to charge fees for students to attend. On this basis not a single New Zealand private school would receive a cent of government funding - let alone the $40 million they currently receive from Labour.

LaRocque says “National’s package is a good first step” towards the “ideal” of a system - vouchers - where a child can enrol in any school, public, religious or private and the government will provide the same funding for whatever “choice” is made.

It’s that weasel word “choice” again. The reality is that under vouchers the children of the wealthy get the first and best choices because the government funded voucher is simply a deposit for an education. The school fees which will be charged on top will be many thousands above this for “popular” schools. Most parents would be left in a bleak educational marketplace where the quality of education their children will receive will depend on the parents’ ability to pay.

The Business Roundtable lauded this model in a submission to government some years back where they quite incisively compared the education marketplace to that of motor vehicles. They said people are used to shopping for a car and having the choice between a Lada and a BMW for example so why not have the same choice in education. Why not? Precisely because the quality of the car depends on the amount of money in your pocket.

In any and every marketplace the quality of the product depends on the ability to pay. Such a model has no place in education. Education is a right of citizenship and the same high quality must be available to all students irrespective of the wealth of the parents.

Even as it stands the resourcing gap is well opened up. For example a comparison of real schools conducted by educationalist Stuart Middleton has shown that a decile 10 secondary school with 100 foreign fee-payers and average parent “donations” has 25% more income per student than the same sized decile 1 school. And yet there are far greater learning needs at a decile 1 school.

This is just another shameful statistic from Labour’s woeful stewardship of public education.

Following the scholarship/NCEA debacle and in the absence of any coherent vision, leadership or direction from Labour’s Minister of Education Trevor Mallard, National’s policies will be attractive to many. There will be something to fill the void.

And after 5 years of Labour-led governments we still have the same two critical but unaddressed problems which bedevil schooling - the long tail of student underachievement and the chronic underfunding of public schools.

Labour has no credible policies to address either problem. On the other hand Don Brash just ignores them. Instead one senses the quickening of his pulse and the salivating of his friends in the wealthy corporate elite at the prospect of selling our schools.

Can’t we expect any better than this pathetic duo of our largest political parties?