Charter schools NZ 2.0: Bait and switch

We have been given permission to share the following piece from Prof John O'Neill,

Make no mistake. The reintroduction of charter schools in 2024 has nothing to do with improving the educational and life chances of children from poor and socio-economically disadvantaged communities. This was the explicit justification for the original Partnership Schools Kura Hourua scheme in the 2010s.  But that justification has now disappeared from the Associate Minister of Education’s narrative.

Instead, what is proposed through the Education and Training Amendment Bill is purely and simply a vehicle for the accelerated privatisation of our State schooling system. The Act Party’s gambit involves a standard political ‘bait and switch’: get people talking about the benefits and harms of a relatively small number of very niche, mostly small new schools and, meanwhile, create a conveyor belt to convert a much larger number of state schools to privately owned and operated charters. 

We know this is a bait and switch because: 

1. the only mention in the preamble to the Bill of charter schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities refers to the previous scheme, not the new one; 

2. existing state schools may apply to convert to charter schools irrespective of the relative socio-economic advantage of the community where they are located, and the levels educational success they are already achieving—the Associate Minister also has power to direct state schools to convert; 

3. state sector teacher unions are prevented from engaging in multi-employer collective bargaining in charter schools while their sponsors are free to appoint unqualified persons to fixed-term and permanent teaching positions—parents have no guarantee that their child will be taught by a professionally qualified teacher with a practising certificate, and no recourse if they are not; 

4. there is no requirement for private charter school sponsors to include elected or nominated local parent and community representatives on governing bodies, and certainly not a majority of the membership; 

5. there is no provision for charter schools who wish to convert or reconvert to state school status if the school community is dissatisfied with the private sponsor’s performance—the Bill creates a one way ticket to private sponsor ownership and control of state assets; 

6. for-profit and overseas sponsors may apply to run one charter school or a chain of schools, despite the fact that the current state system is grossly underfunded for its needs (the extractive economic appeal is evident from some submissions of those who wrote in support of the Bill);

7. at the same time that Act’s Associate Minister of Education is dangling the promise of cashed up bulk funding, deregulation, deunionisation, flexible employment, capital and building maintenance, and curriculum freedoms to charter schools, National’s Minister of Education intends to swamp state schools with a host of new curriculum, teaching, assessment and reporting strictures, while signalling that there is precious little funding to support their introduction; and

8. Of the the four fully-funded, public good state education sectors that used to exist (early childhood, schooling, tertiary and adult and community), only state schooling today remains still to be fully marketised. Even though they are normally fully-funded and free to attend, all state schools rely on a range of international student fees, gambling and philanthropic trust grants, parental donations, and commercialised food, uniform and activity services in order to try and make ends meet.

We also know what the larger ideological prize is because the Associate Minister has publicly stated that the $153 million allocated in the 2024 budget to establish up to 15 new charter schools and up to 35 converted state schools in 2025 and 2026, is merely the first tranche. Based on overseas experience, the scheme is likely to be rapidly scaled-up should the current coalition be returned to the government benches in the 2026 election. 

To appear less radical and contentious than it is, the bait and switch gambit also has to make the three types of schools appear morally equivalent. A narrative is needed that claims the three types of school are no more than different items on the parental menu of publicly subsidised schooling options. This narrative is facilitated through: (a) creation in statute of three types of schools of equal status: state, charter, private, (b) normalisation of per student public funding for all of these types (albeit still differentiated while the narrative is being fully socialised), and (c) encouragementent of both state schools and private schools—such as the NZX-listed, venture capital owned, full-fee paying, private Age School that has been repeatedly boosted by the Associate Minister—actively to join the same charter school category. 

Together, these strands of the narrative advance the goal of privatising state schooling in two ways: 

1. they further blur what were once the clear historical distinctions between what counts as public and private schooling. The charter schooling model attempts to create a bridge between fully public and fully private because charter schools will be privately owned and privately governed but fully publicly funded; and

2. they provide a veil for the outrageous argument first made by a former National Minister that it is ‘inequitable’ to provide differentiated levels of subsidy to public and private tertiary education organisations for providing the same services. In other words, it promotes the view that all public and private schooling should be funded at exactly the same subsidy rate. Of course, the logical end-game of this argument is a  simple schooling voucher scheme as has occured in Sweden, for example, where all the money follows the child whichever type of school they attend.

The Bill was considered by Parliament’s Education and Workforce Select Committee. Ninety percent of the 481 submissions it received on the charter school proposals were opposed to their reintroduction. Only five percent or 23 proposals were in favour. Those supporting charter schools included: Bangerz Education and Wellbeing Trust (a self-styled ‘youth-for-youth charity’ and candidate charter school sponsor); BusinessNZ (a national enterprise and business advocacy peak body); Crimson Global Academy (an elite NZ-based private wholly online school – former Prime Minister Sir John Key is a senior advisor to the Board as is Kevin Rudd, the former Australian PM); Mastery Schools New Zealand Arapiki (a candidate charter school sponsor offering a local version of Mastery Schools Australia); Maxim Institute (a family, marriage and moral development oriented charitable education think tank); and UP Education (a NZ based corporate tertiary education provider operating across Australasia). 

As is often the way, fringe schooling policies tend to attract fringe politicians and fringe policy edupreneurs while the voices of career state education professionals—who in other contexts would be celebrated as ‘ordinary, hardworking, taxpayer Kiwis’—are marginalised, pathologised, ignored and dismissed as a vested interest group. For some unaccountable reason, here we have an Associate Minister of Education who seems to be taking a particular delight in publicly ‘twerking’ the very teacher professional associations who are and have always been the backbone of the state schooling system. The commons of compulsory state schooling should surely not be a vehicle for this sort of puerile ideological point scoring and virtue signalling by the leader of a political party that gained less than 10 percent of the party vote at the 2023 election.

On the contrary, precisely because children’s life chances are at stake, any major education policy change should be developed from solid evidence that it will be beneficial and just as importantly that it will first do no harm. So what is the evidence, and how plausible are the arguments?

Based on similar ideologically driven experiments in the US, UK, Sweden and our own previous experience here in Aotearoa from 2013-2018, there is no good, independent evidence to support the reintroduction of charter schools. The only evidence that has been put forward here in Aotearoa for reintroduction is that other countries have charter schools of various types. The evidence from these is that: 

1. statistically, they make very little difference to children’s achievement compared with local state school equivalents; 

2. their curriculums and teaching approaches are often not particularly innovative but on the contrary, unimaginative or simply recycle best practice that we know about already; and

3. despite the claim to being open and welcoming to everyone in the community, they are often selective and deselective through the demands they make of families and children.  

So if they are unlikely to produce any major educational gains, why would the Act Party have insisted on their introduction and, in fact, a major expansion of the policy, as part of its coalition negotiations? The clues lie in the delail of the Amendment Bill (plus Associate Minister Seymour’s later additional amendments to the amendment bill regarding teachers’ labour rights while it was before the Education and Workforce committee).

The Ministry of Education advised Cabinet that there was no specific Te Tiriti o Waitangi requirement in the draft Bill. Since the Education and Training Amendment Act 2020, all State schools are required to give effect to Te Tiriti, and to ensure that what they do reflects mātauranga, te reo, local tikanga and te ao Māori. Yet, the Bill intends that the charter school authorisation board, the charter school agency, sponsors and individual schools will not have to give effect to Te Tiriti. In doing so the Bill also thumbs a very uncaring nose at the educational rights of all children (tamariki Tiriti and tamariki whenua), indigenous children and their whānau specifically, and also indigenous children with disabilities. These rights are contained in the international charters and declarations we quite happily signed up to as a country in the past.

Given this effective disapplication of Te Tiriti and indigenous children’s rights in the new charter schools, it is a very bitter irony that in the Charter School Agency’s fact sheet, the only reference to taha Māori is the continued appropriation of the te reo version of the name Kura Hourua. Ironically, however, the two hulls of the charter schooling waka refer not to a transparent partnership between the Crown and iwi Māori, or between private sponsors and their local public community,  but to one between sponsors and the government. 

The coalition’s frequently stated goal is to create up to fifty charter schools in this term of government. In terms of the political bait and switch, it bears repetition that the target split is fifteen new charter schools, and thirty five converter state schools. To make this easier, the Associate Minister of Education will have the power to require state schools to convert to charter school status even if parents, students, teachers and trustees do not wish to. This is exactly the model developed in the UK where over the last two decades, the large majority of secondary schools have become or been forced to become individual academies or join chains of academies; and less than half of primary schools. Effectively, these former state schools are now privatised, run by charitable trusts that have very minimal accountability to their local community. And, of course, no right to revert to state school status even if the community wants to. And this despite the fact that independent research has shown that many academies and academy chains do no better in terms of academic achievement outcomes than their local education authority equivalents.  If the interests of students and the right to choose of parents really do underpin the Associate Minister’s intentions, why on earth can the charter school community not choose state school status? 

When one looks behind the rhetoric of parental choice and student interests that have accompanied the Bill, it seems clear that there is a crude libertarian ideological barrow being pushed by the Act Party’s Associate Minister of Education. As has happened consistently since the infamous ‘Teapot Tape’ incident in 2011, involving then Prime Minister John Key and Act party candidate John Banks, the National Party has seemed content to ensure the presence of a minor coalition partner that puts up radically libertarian policy proposals which National can then either align itself with or distance itself from according to how well they land with voters. 

Comparing charter schools NZ 1.0 and 2.0 versions, the Associate Minister’s  and the Act Party’s ambitions have clearly grown. What was framed as a trial with a handful of schools in 2011, is now putting in place all the essential elements in place for a large scale privatisation and in the longer term, the complete voucherisation of both public and private schooling. 

The blunt, unadorned message from this for all those who remain committed to both the legacy and the future possibility of a vibrant state schooling system is: Ignore the twerks, don’t be fooled by the bait and switch, organise your local community, and just say ‘No!’