While perusing the ACT manifesto from last election, one thing stood out to me. That was of course, their brilliant education policy during the 2020 election:
“Provide every child with a student education account… Parents will be able to use it at any registered educational institution that will accept their child’s enrolment, public or private. Increase choice in our education system by allowing any state school to apply to become a Partnership School.” (www.act.org.nz/education-policy for more information)
There is nothing I like more than the privatisation of our education systems. Just watching publicly owned schools turn into private institutions that run for-profit is incredibly fascinating. To see the success of this policy, just look at our universities that have been running on a “how many students can you get to enrol in your degree” policy platform since the 1990s. It has definitely improved the outcome for tertiary students. Instead of spending fees and taxpayer money on the university’s own quality teaching and research, a for-profit system means that it all gets to be funnelled into the marketing sector. It also has the added benefit of making bigger universities bigger, and smaller universities smaller, as those with greater student populations are able to make more money, so can attract more students with their enriched marketing campaigns and world rankings. Another added benefit is the complete overreliance on international students. One of the sectors screaming for the borders to be open is tertiary institutions, as their valuable source of income, the international student, whom they charge exorbitant fees for a subpar education, can no longer make up the shortfall.
Now imagine if this model was copied to every school in the country. Watch as large schools became larger in search of great profit, and small schools who do their best but maybe not quite good enough for the middle-class suffer under a lack of funding. Won’t it be interesting to see as schools realize that ‘quality of teaching’ is just a buzzword, and really with the right socioeconomic background a student is likely to succeed anywhere?
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The only reason that private schools exist or should is that because those parents who are willing to subsidize their child’s own education should be able to. They release the burden on the taxpayer and the government with each child in a private school receiving about $2,000, while those children in state schools receive up to $7,000 each. Partnership schools, on the other hand, have no place in our schools. They get to bypass normal Ministry requirements and for what? Is that not just a statement that simple things like ensuring each child is taught a balanced amount based on the New Zealand curriculum is bad? Or that each child should be taught by qualified teachers? Those are requirements that make sense, and if they don’t, instead of inventing ‘partnership schools’ which are effectively public schools pretending to be private, we should change those requirements.
The focus of our school system should not be injecting ‘choice’ into it. What choices will parents make, but to choose whatever they perceive to be the best school for their child, in terms of culture, academics, sports and arts? Therefore, we should strive for all our schools to be the best school. This is the practice of countries like Finland, where there is no jumping on a bus to go to a school twenty kilometres. Instead, each child goes to their neighbourhood school because it is the best school.
ACT’s party policy is based on the free market but applying the free market to public goods never works out. You can’t just shut down a school once it’s run out of students and a good school cannot keep expanding its roll count. With this kind of policy, we’d see marketing campaigns from every school in the country and focus on quantity rather quality.
Making education a private commodity is not a good thing. It is a public good that everyone benefits from. An educated society is thriving one and one we should seek to improve. A movement away from standardized education to individualized control has led to a situation where a policy like this has become tangible. Instead, the government should be looking to shake control out of the Board of Trustee’s (who thought that parents running a school would be a good idea?) and standardize an education, with flexibility, so that every student can succeed no matter where they are.
Fred's Corner 