Editorial: Wrong about motives

The PPTA president gives her view on the new charter schools policy. Photo/Thinkstock

PPTA's stance on charter schools may be disappointing to Minister Parata but neither she, nor anyone else should be surprised.

Since the announcement of the policy in the Act-National coalition deal in 2011, our position has been clear. Charter schools will be disastrous for the education system as a whole, as overseas evidence and our experience of increased competition and fragmentation show.

The two charter schools in the North are receiving substantially more funding per student than other schools in the region, in part to reflect the fact that they are small schools which are still expected to provide a full curriculum. As secondary schools, each of them will get a base grant of $997,044 each year, from total annual funding of about $2 million.

Compare this to the base grant for a primary charter school (whatever its size) of $145,854. This reflects the fact that it's more expensive to teach physics or materials technology to 17-year-olds than reading and maths to 6-year-olds.

This is one of the reasons why it's galling that charter schools are expecting the local public schools to take on the teaching of specialist subjects. Sit this alongside the justification for these schools - that public schools are failing the students charter schools want to attract, and that the charter schools would be providing some sort of uniquely different offering, and it all seems rather confused.

I'm not too worried about "disappointing" the Minister of Education over matters that we disagree on, the feeling's often mutual. But it's a shame when the association's motives are misrepresented. The loss of teacher jobs is hard on schools and limits the options of students attending them - but if our opposition was simply based on losing members our response would be to try to recruit from charter schools, something we're not going to do.

And as wrong as Parata is about the motives of PPTA, she seems wilfully naive about the intentions of some of the people who are supporting them. As an editorial in the Advocate supporting charter schools said in November last year, they will "take them [ie, Maori kids] off mainstream schools' hands", which will raise their results. This argument is appalling.