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Schooling New Zealand: International lessons for equity and choice

By Maryanne Spurdle August 09, 2024

New Zealand’s public schools were created to provide all students equal educational opportunities, but by international standards, the gap between students’ educational outcomes is large. More than one-third of 15-year-olds struggle to read and write, 82% of Māori students leave school without UE, and more than 40% of students don’t attend school regularly.

The system provides limited options for families who cannot finance alternatives to local state schools but who want access to special education, different educational philosophies, or simply schools with better outcomes. This is more than an inconvenience; international surveys measuring education equity show that more localised control and more diverse models reduce gaps between high-performing and low-performing students.

New Zealand, however, has resisted the trend toward creating public-private partnerships to operate schools, even though most OECD countries now supply more than half of independent schools’ funding. In 2010, the OECD reported that “many of the world’s best-performing education systems have moved from bureaucratic ‘command and control’ environments towards school systems in which the people at the frontline have much more control of the way resources are used, people are deployed, the work is organised and the way in which the work gets done.”

In New Zealand, meanwhile, staffing at the Ministry of Education grew 620% between 2000 and 2023 and educational outcomes declined. Andreas Schleicher, who helped develop the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), said that the challenge to improving outcomes “is that such system transformation cannot be mandated by government, which leads to surface compliance.” The past, he said, “was about quality control; the future is about quality assurance.”

School vouchers in Sweden were an early form of public education that focused on outcomes rather than dictating methods. Charter schools in the United States, free schools and academies in England, and Australia’s subsidies for private and Catholic school tuition are all examples of public-private partnerships that could enrich New Zealand’s education system.

The current government intends to introduce charter schools in 2025, following the brief and small-scale existence of a similar model a decade ago. They would be most similar to the United States’ charter schools, where independent operators contract with state education providers. Schools receive per-child funding as if they were a public school but retain operational independence. They are accountable to the state for outcomes, but not processes.

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Schooling New Zealand

International lessons for equity and choice

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Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) reached a clear verdict on their value in 2023: “against a backdrop of flat performance for the nation as a whole, the trend of learning gains for students enrolled in charter schools is both large and positive.” This is not due to receiving more funding or enrolling fewer students with learning challenges. In fact, in the United States, charter schools receive less funding per student on average and serve a higher proportion of disadvantaged children.

The research also found that charter schools enrolled higher proportions of disadvantaged students. Success, then, is due to characteristics of the schools, not the students. PISA studies “showed that there is no automatic link between social disadvantage and poor performance in school.” Education systems, the report said, could be made to improve and “there was nothing inevitable or fixed about how schools performed.”

This does not mean that there is an “ideal” school character or funding model. Schools’ greatest assets are their teachers. In the words of educational economist Caroline Hoxby, since “people are by far the most important input in education, the most important constraint on a school’s being independently managed is an inability to make decisions regarding hiring, compensation, assignment to duties, promotion and so on.”

This is backed up by research conducted in the American city of Michigan, where comparable schools exist with one difference: some have greater hiring independence. Those are also the schools that have greater student progression. Significant autonomy over staffing decisions is a key difference between state schools and independent schools.

The success of such schools does not detract from neighbouring schools. On the contrary, evidence indicates that, with sufficient accountability, they create helpful signposts for others to follow. Independently operated, publicly funded schools have the potential to provide families from all postcodes access to more and better educational options. As each school variation is encouraged to flourish, the entire education ecosystem becomes richer.

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