Dice already loaded in charter schools favour

Thursday, March 7, 2013
Dice already loaded in charter schools favour

Charter schools will have a huge funding advantage over comparable state schools making it almost impossible to evaluate their effectiveness, says Massey teacher education specialist Professor John O’Neill.

The Ministry of Education yesterday called for applications from potential sponsors to run the Government’s new public private partnership (PPP) schools.

But Professor O’Neill says the Government is “already loading the dice in favour of Partnership Schools Kura Hourua” with the planned funding model.

“The rhetoric all along with this National-Act programme has been that these new schools will be free to innovate in curriculum, teaching and assessment. The claim is these learning innovations alone are all that is needed to solve the problem of inequality of educational outcomes,” he says.

“But, the Government has not been able to resist giving the new schools a huge funding advantage over comparable state schools,” says Professor O’Neill. “The funding model for the new schools includes what is described as an annual per student amount that is a proxy for centrally-funded support to state schools.

“The ministry spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on central support services to try and ensure a level playing field for all state schools and local communities. Instead of giving access to these common services, the new PPP schools will receive a cash sum annually.

“The double whammy of this is, on the one hand it makes it more difficult for the ministry to maintain central services for state schools and, on the other hand, it gives the new PPP schools a huge increase in their per student funding compared with their state school counterparts.

“This cynical ploy has been borrowed from overseas charter school models. We were promised that the New Zealand model would only take the best from the overseas schemes. This is the worst,” Professor O’Neill says.

He believes the skewed funding model will make a fair trial of the effectiveness of the new schools almost impossible. “The only fair way to evaluate the new PPP schools is to compare apples with apples. The Government appears very reluctant to take that risk.”

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