Poverty Before Profits

The Charter School Experiment

As the Education and Training Bill is working its way through select committee it timely that we return to the disaster that Charter Schools will be in Aotearoa.

We have been given permission to share the following piece from Prof John O'Neill, which was previously published in 2014 in Beyond the free market: Rebuilding a just society in New Zealand, edited by David Cooke, Claire Hill, Pat Baskett and Ruth Irwin, Dunmore Publishing.

I hope readers will forgive the rather intemperate tone of this chapter. Usually, I try to write reasonably balanced analyses of educational issues, recognizing that education is complex and that there are often multiple possible policy solutions to ‘wicked’ educational problems. But, the whole debate about charter schools is simply infuriating. From everything I have read about their real effects overseas during the last 20 years (as opposed to their promised effects), it seems to me that they are no more than the educational equivalent of 19^th century snake oil elixirs, or the health supplements industry of today. The evidence of the benefits of charter schooling is highly questionable but it is marketed, or peddled, very cleverly indeed.  So, just for once, I want to write about charter schools without having to try and be fair to the assertions of their advocates. I need to vent some of the utter frustration I and others feel whenever politicians and officials glibly state that their education policy decisions are based on evidence - but the only evidence they choose to use is that which justifies the policy option that has already been chosen in advance.  

In the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, charter or free schools have been established in various countries around the world as an alternative to state schools. Populist politicians, neo-liberal think tanks, corporations and the super-wealthy individuals who set out to shape public policy under the pretext of ‘charity’, justify their introduction on the basis that the public school system has supposedly failed children and families for decades. They claim that as a result, there is a crisis in public schooling, which only the private sector can solve on behalf of government and the taxpayer. This is, essentially, a manufactured crisis. The overriding purpose is to enable systematic transfer of public funding for education to the private sector. 

Along the way, these charter supporters may forge tactical political alliances with (and offer cosmetic concessions to) disadvantaged cultural, ethnic, religious or other minorities. But the ideological agenda, the privatisation of the state education system, remains the larger goal.

Charter schools get state funding but operate under a contract with for-profit companies or not-for-profit charitable trusts, or groups of parents. They are controversial because their classroom methods are frequently authoritarian. Their academic results are very mixed. And their claims to innovation in teaching, learning and curriculum often do not bear close scrutiny. They typically set up in areas of high poverty and social disadvantage. The contract for running the charter school is signed by the government and the private organization, not the government and the local community. The evidence from overseas is that charter schools often arrive in local communities, or public schools are converted into charter schools, against the express wishes of the local community. So, quite apart from privatizing the public funding that goes to charter schools, it is also a calculated way of setting aside local democratic rights.

It is a bitter irony that high poverty and social disadvantage are the combined result of two factors: a long-term failure of government to invest in communities; and the more recent freedom for global corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying taxes. Yet, charter schools are sold to these same poor and marginalized communities as governments and the private sector working on their behalf in a Public Private Partnership (PPP). 

The official purpose of charter schools is to deliver tailor-made teaching and curriculums to poor children to ensure that more of them meet expected norms of achievement, attendance and behaviour. The evidence from overseas is that while some charter schools produce good academic results for some children, they do not do so for all children who attend. Often the most disadvantaged either don’t get entry or are discarded by charter schools. They then have no option but to return to a local community school. Another sad irony is that politicians and better-off families who advocate ‘no excuses’ militaristic discipline and curriculum gruel for the children of the poor would not accept the same deal for their own children.

Since the mid-20th century, the state in New Zealand has funded and provided universal compulsory schooling at primary and secondary levels. Until recently, this held true irrespective of whether Labour or National was in government. Schooling was generally understood as a public good in the sense that it helped to build and maintain the social fabric, advance local, regional and national economic productivity and encourage active citizenship within a social democracy. 

Because education provides these considerable public benefits it was understood during these decades that the state should pay for schooling and do so through progressive general taxation of income. Taxation was regarded as an equitable form of economic and social redistribution of to ensure that everyone had sufficient access to basic public services for their needs. 

Through health, welfare, social security and education, the state could attempt to compensate for the worst effects of the genetic lottery, as well as variable access to market information and poverty that lasts from one generation to the next. Moreover, the state accepted a moral obligation to do so.

Since the 1980s, things have changed, gradually at first, but now with increasingly one-sided zealotry. The New Zealand Parliament passed legislation for the introduction of a new system of charter schools in 2012 (to be called Partnership Schools or Kura Hourua). Ironically, though, New Zealand already had charter schools – more than 2,500 of them. Here’s what happened.

The 1989 Education Act preserved the notion of schooling as a public good. This was to be take place through an agreement, or ‘charter’, between the Crown and the local community. Funding was to be allocated transparently for use according to the priorities decided by the local community, based on balanced assessments of the needs of students and the community. 

The 1989 Education Act was also designed to be highly flexible. It provided for groups of parents in a local community to apply to the Minister of Education to establish a special character school or kura kaupapa Māori in cases where existing state schooling could not meet local community needs. These too would be fully funded and fully provided state schools, subject to the same policies and regulations as any other state school. In making a decision, moreover, the Act required the Minister to evaluate the effects of establishing the proposed school on the community as a whole. 

Ever since 1989, politicians and bureaucrats have carefully whittled away at the social democratic elements of the charter. It is now little more than a contract between an increasingly powerful state machinery and an almost powerless local community board of trustees. In this sense, governments and officials in New Zealand have spent the last quarter century actively eroding the social democratic principles of the public school charter.

The original purpose of the school charter was to document an agreement between partners, with an equal mix of local community and national system goals. The process was to be mediated by an even-handed Education Review Office (ERO) and a Parent Advocacy Council. This kind of charter was never really given a chance to work. Instead, the demands of the Crown partner steadily increased. National Education Goals and National Administrative Guidelines smothered local community aspiration, creativity and need. The ERO became government’s watchdog, for many years undertaking audits of systems rather than evaluations of learning. To this day, it sees its role to ensure that boards of trustees implement government policy unquestioningly. 

Instead of social democracy at the local school community level, we have New Public Management (the ideology that public services must be run like businesses) run riot. The audit culture imposed on schools for 25 years has not worked. The deliberate erosion of trust within school communities and between teachers and trustees has proven toxic. Teachers and trustees are blamed for not doing the jobs that the state demands when, in fact, it is the ideologically driven actions of politicians and officials that need to be held to account.

In a way it is puzzling that the National-led government has chosen the controversial charter school route, when it was quietly leaching increasing amounts of public funding to the families of privately educated children anyway. Look at how they do it.

Since 2008, the government has significantly increased the public subsidy paid to children who attend private schools, and the number of scholarships to permit state school children to attend them. It has also permitted financially struggling independent schools to become ‘integrated’ into the state school system, while continuing to charge several thousand dollars each year in attendance dues.

The government’s logic has been that it is ‘inequitable’ to pay different education subsidies to families attending private vs public schools. 

On this argument, all families are equally deserving, irrespective of their particular financial circumstances and their children’s life chances. This logic is perverse. It completely abandons traditional social democratic principles - the idea that education is a public good and that its purpose is to redistribute educational opportunities, not reinforce educational inequalities. 

The National government has already argued that holding 51% of state assets still constitutes a public ownership model. On this argument, it can justify the establishment of a further 1,245 or so charter schools, whether or not their local communities want them. As the American, English and Swedish models have shown over more than two decades, there is precious little research evidence that these schools work. Where they do, it tends to be only for the more motivated, organized and committed of disadvantaged families. 

In New Zealand it is regarded as politically acceptable that a quarter of children are living in poverty in 2013. It is also now regarded as politically acceptable to fob these children and their families off with the education policy solution of charter schools. Yet, 20 years after their introduction overseas, we still have no reliable evidence that charter schools help to change the financial and social circumstances that have been determined for poor children and their families by powerful political and business interests.

Charter schools will do little or nothing for New Zealand children and families in poverty. But they will create plenty of profit and other forms of capital for their operators. Can communities resist, and, if so, how?

There are, thankfully, examples of courageous school communities who have challenged the political and bureaucratic standover tactics that are used to impose charter schools against the wishes of families. In Aotearoa, the recent experiences of schooling reorganisation in Christchurch and in the special schooling sector have been encouraging. They show that it is possible to stand up to the Minister and the Ministry, provided that parents and community groups organise themselves to do so.

Specifically with respect to charter schools, the experience of organised resistance by the Downhills school local community in London shows how easy it is, on one level, to challenge the lies that politicians and officials use in order to manufacture the crisis that they need to justify replacing local democratic governance with a private commercial contract. (www.academiesandlies.org.uk)

On another level, the Downhills community experience also shows the extreme lengths to which politicians, aided and abetted by officials and private organisations, will go to in order to implement an unproven educational ideology. To the extent that Downhills parents, trustees and teachers have been able to resist a government imposed agenda, they have succeeded by: (i) challenging the slick truth claims of politicians, officials and charter school operators; (ii) seeking alliances with researchers and other groups of parents in similar circumstances to counter official misinformation campaigns; and (iii) engage their own parent community fully in information sharing, meetings and action.

In other words, these parents have deployed core social democratic principles and practices to try and defend the interests of the local community against those of asset strippers from outside. It is precisely these kinds of commitment and engagement by the local community that may improve the lot of poor, disadvantaged children in the long term. If they had any common sense at all, politicians and bureaucrats would be trying to support the aspirations of the local community by fully funding and fully providing public schools in high poverty neighbourhoods, not shackling disenfranchised families and communities to the requirements of a secret bean-counter’s contract.