Charter schools appeared around 20 years ago as the New Right's brave step backwards for education: schooling designed and paid for by big business, ostensibly to help lift the poor huddled masses toward the light but in practice surely just a way to move folk more "efficiently" from the schoolhouse to their workhouse with the appropriate job-specific skills in place.
No bad thing? Maybe - if it worked. And if there were jobs waiting for the trained-up fodder in whatever corporate paid for their enlightenment.
Or should I say "extra" enlightenment, since the schools are still at base state-funded;
in theory the wealthy backers add greater opportunity for otherwise overlooked talents to blossom within the sponsors' particular approach.
Yeah, right. A recent study of these schools in the US shows only 17 per cent delivered better outcomes than state schools, while 37 per cent delivered worse, with the rest at par.
Hardly a glowing recommendation - especially when under Tomorrow's Schools New Zealand already enjoys more diversity of curriculum choice and learning environments than is common in just about any other country, including the US.
In reality, this is simply the first step to privatising education - just as everything else is or will be privatised. As if privatisation were not already shown to add no lasting value of any sort to healthcare or water quality or asset management - at least, no more than if the state were to spend a similar amount on it.
Besides, the model has also failed to generate expected profits, and unlike in America we do not have a decent pool of genuinely-philanthropic billionaires (or companies for that matter) willing to write off money in educating the masses.
So who will be fool enough to set up charter schools if there is no ongoing benefit - financial or educational?
Banks himself has already made plain he does not understand the model he is now charged with "trialling". Likely it was actually a bottom-drawer National policy-in-waiting (as all their policies seem to be) with Act's support deal merely a ready excuse for roll-out.
What is inexplicable - and in my book unpardonable - is not the hidden-agenda scurrilousness but the fact this neo-liberal "do whatever you like at your cost" direction is completely at odds with the justly-maligned National Standards, which has seen "different" schools with their own distinct characteristics (such as Hastings' Taikura Rudolf Steiner) threatened with excommunication from the support system unless they adopt them.
I'm sorry, which is it? A standardised one-bully-rules-all regime or whatever you wish to teach so long as you can afford to fund it?
Both, apparently. What mock of our young - and of those striving to better equip them.
Just as it only took one working day to renege on an agreement not to mine the conservation estate, so it has taken only one deal to make a bad government and a laughing stock of a good reputation in education.
And let's not forget that Banks' election was an organised rort of the system - and since his seat provides a majority, that rort is the basis on which this government has been formed.
This dumb policy has no mandate and the public has been blinded. We can only hope the Greens' Mojo Mathers, although profoundly deaf, can help government hear - and retract this idiocy before it is birthed.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
