New additions to public school curricula, like planking, swallowing Tide Pods and film remakes replacing male leads with women, get debated a few times each year depending on whatever is trendy at that very moment. Usually by every possible public personality except the parents of school children. The great thing about dropping out of high school is that I studied what I wanted when I wanted, how I wanted. Mainly politics, economics and history: the sort of things that make a student loan a poor financial investment.
Once you remove the emotive investment most of us have in education, an objective observer may refer to it as a product, much like a can of baked beans. Were this ever the next big public issue on talkback, some might describe it as a service, much like getting a can of baked beans from Uber Eats. Either way, cans of baked beans don’t have a Ministry of 2900 bureaucrats earning $480 million each year determining what can and cannot be in a can of baked beans. If there were it would probably be a can of tomato juice, de-tomatoed and dehydrated, with beefed corn, dialysed kidney beans and a single, morbidly obese tortefatti.
Fortunately, when you purchase a can of baked beans, you’ll visit one of thousands of food retailers, retailing in dozens of formats, with a range of brands and ‘Baked Beans with’ products all competing against one another to attract as many buyers as possible. Of course, there is no single canned baked bean product with universal appeal and, kinda like school, some of us would rather escape out the back door than suffer through compulsory consumption of beans.
Climate change, Te Reo, Spanish, Chinese (actually Mandarin or Cantonese you ignoramus), Civics, Home Economics, New Zealand history, Mates and Dates, phonetic reading, whole word reading, algebra, trigonometry, Christianity and generic religion are just some of the subjects I can recall that feature in public discourse over what children should be taught in school. You’ll observe that a school week of 5 days broken up into six hourly periods would allow just four hours a week to learn each without including all the other standard subjects currently being taught. Education risks becoming a democracy in which the 51% can stupify the 100%.
Founded in 2012, Partnership Schools/Kura Hourua gave a lucky few the opportunity to experience an education created for them instead of unions and bureaucrats. They were established under the Confidence and Supply Agreement signed between National and Act in 2011, but treated by National as Act’s freakish little experiment and kept on a very short leash. While Hekia Parata dealt with the Novopay debacle, dithered on closing/merging 31 schools using information that was largely inaccurate, backed down on increasing class sizes and proved that governments can’t run schools while preventing most charter school applicants proving that they can.
By the 2017 election, just thirteen charter schools had been founded, though one (Te Kura Hourua ki Whangaruru) had to be closed after just twelve months when the number of mismanagement scandals exceeded the number of students showing up each day. Opponents used it as an example of why charter schools don’t work, though I use it as an example of why the charter school model is so effective; mismanaged schools in the state sector stay open for years, while the amount of cash thrown at them increases until it stops resembling a dark Chicago alleyway and attains Glass Pipe Playground status. By the time National had decided charter schools were the best idea they’d never had, they were campaigning for a fourth term in Government and lost (call it what you want, they’re not in Government).
I don’t blame the closure of charter schools solely on Labour, though Willie Jackson and Kelvin Davis deserve to be singled out as morally decrepit, being fully aware of the evil of the action and failing to follow through on their threat to resign. Labour’s intentions were as obvious as their incompetence but National ensured the charter school system stayed small enough for the innumerate Hipkins and nasty Tracey Martin to end one of many Act success stories in a matter of months. Like banning plastic bags after supermarkets stopped using them.
National deserves the greatest condemnation and public shaming for those schools’ demise. National had six long years to facilitate the creation of as many as possible but were shitter than Twyford at Kiwibuild, opening just two schools a year. National may be virtually indistinguishable from Labour, policy-wise, but their caucus is at least competent enough to expand everything Labour starts and deliver it more efficiently. There should have been hundreds of charter schools attended by tens of thousands of children. And Labour, even if it could withstand the public outrage, would be incapable of closing them down. Labour shutdown 12 great schools, Act closed 1 bad school but National prevented hundreds of potentially fantastic schools.
Resurrecting the charter school model when Labour loses the government benches isn’t enough any more as National cannot be relied upon to centrally plan educational innovation any more than Labour can be relied upon to eliminate poverty. The public school system needs reform that is radical, rapid and puts the power into the same hands that buy their kids the best cans of baked beans.
$15 billion is spent on education each year. We have never spent more. Funding increases every year. Every year sets new records for total spend. Is it any better than a few years ago? Do teacher salaries reflect their abilities? Do school results reflect increased funding? Are there enough teachers to meet demand? Does your school motivate your child to learn and you to participate without being called in to discuss behavioural issues? The number of people sincerely proclaiming our schools get better with every funding boost are a fraction of the number of unionised teachers blaming their failings on funding levels.
It is time the Government stopped funding the Ministry of Education as it currently functions, stops funding thousands of individual schools based on a ten decile measure, stops paying teachers what their useless, self-interested and anti-innovation trade union requires. It is time we started funding the kids.
Obviously giving three year old children thousands of dollars of cash will be as useless as politicians running a school; however, splitting most of the current education spend amongst every child in New Zealand, into an educational funding account their parents spend, is revolutionary. Schools will be reformed in a manner that no socialist can deform. Like supermarkets, telecommunications companies, power suppliers and every other successful enterprise selling superior products to satisfied customers, schools will have to convince parents that they can provide the education they want, in a manner their child needs, by professionals who are more capable than other neighbouring schools competing to do the same. The anti-achievement, aggressively stagnant and viciously territorial trade union movement will be swept away from one of the last outposts of workplace collectivism as schools depend on attracting the best teachers with the highest salaries to become the most successful schools.
Who decides who are the best teachers, the decrepit purveyors of collective mediocrity may ask. Probably a genuine question because they’ve never cared before and invented all sorts of reasons they’re unique, the only profession in which it is impossible to distinguish quality workers from shit ones. Unique compared even to private schools who have been doing just that for decades.
The bastion of Scandanavian ‘socialism’ Finland has been doing this for several decades now and they outperform most of the world on educational achievement. New Zealand is yet to solve the problem of functionally illiterate university students. The reporting of student academic results at each school will be mandatory, though schools which are providing an excellent education hardly need encouragement.
Act proposes that every New Zealand child from age two will have $12,000 placed into their account every year they pursue an education from preschool to secondary school. Upon turning 18 an additional $30,000 will be deposited for tertiary education (whatever form that may take) with up to $50,000 available to top achievers through scholarship opportunities.
Act will also ensure there are no obstacles placed in the way of the stampede of state schools applying to convert to charter school status.
The Ministry of Education will be slashed in half. Currently a behemoth with more staff than New Zealand has schools, earning an average of $88,000 (higher than the top teacher salary) and determining each aspect of your child’s education, it will function only to administer the registration of schools, children and payment into their education accounts.
Oh and that little matter of the school curriculum I alluded to earlier before performing one of my trademark literary segues? Like the additional ingredients you can find in a can of baked beans, schools will be offering to teach children not just what a few crotchety parents demand, but what every parent pays for.