Editorial: Zoning the culprit at Grammar

As every new school year begins we are hearing the same story. Parents desperate to get their child into a high school of their choice are trying to sneak around the zoning system. They are temporarily renting a house, or even just a room, or using a relative's address in the zone of the desired school, and the school is obliged by present law to take them.

They arrive to enrol just as the school is preparing for the new year and cause great inconvenience to its planned classes and timetables. Auckland Grammar School, where demand for places is greatest, had 80 such applicants last week. It has been driven to appoint an enrolment officer, whose job it is to check that prospective students are bona fide residents of the zone, and it has closed its roll for the time being, even to applicants in zone, though legally it is obliged to take them.

It is easy to portray the parents as the villains of this problem, as though it was a social offence to go to any lengths to get your child into the school of your choice. They are not the villains, they are obviously parents to whom their child's education is extremely important but for one reason or another - most likely their limited wealth - they do not have a permanent residence in the zone.

The blame for their plight, and that of the schools they try to deceive, lies squarely with education policy-makers who would dearly like to draft every child into the nearest school. In the egalitarian ethos of the policy-makers, every school is, or should be, as good as any other and it is most desirable that every school should retain the full range of pupils in its neighbourhood. They believe that if education was deregulated the most able students would congregate in a few prestigious schools and the rest would languish.

That might happen for a short time. But quite quickly more schools would emulate the prestigious ones to cater for what would be a big unsatisfied demand. Before very long the entire education system would be modelled on the schools that attract most people. That is how all markets work. Poor neighbourhoods do not have inferior supermarkets or petrol stations, nor would they finish up with inferior schools. The inequalities of deregulation would be a transitional problem until the demand for good schools had changed them all.

State educationists probably know this but they do not like it because the kind of schools that most parents prefer are not the kind that educational professionals think are best for society. Most people, given a choice, seem to prefer "conservative" schools with old-fashioned academic habits, uniforms, discipline and sporting values. Public education policy is made largely by theorists and professionals, especially the teachers' unions, who hold quite different interests, attitudes and priorities. Deregulation directly threatens their power and they respond with inordinate fury and fear to any policy that points in that direction.

Zoning exposes their egalitarian arguments to be a sham. There is nothing egalitarian about a system that closes the schools of choice to all but the people who can afford real estate in their zone. The policy-makers argue that choice is a sham because it is the schools in demand that could do the choosing. That would be so until most schools adapted to the demand, but even in the interim, it is fairer to give good pupils a shot at selection by a school of their choice rather than draft them into the nearest.

And, as we hear at the start of every school year, drafting has not worked anyway. Families find all sorts of ways to break into the zone of their desired school and, worse, many schools are left languishing with low rolls and no likelihood of improvement while zoning lasts. It is the culprit.