KEY POINTS:
The headline read, "Parents rally over decile rating".
The story beneath began: "A Wellington school has mobilised any army of parents, armed with socioeconomic data, to fight to keep its decile rating down.
"Lyall Bay Primary School faces a $20,000 funding cut for 2008 after the Government increased the school's decile rating by two levels. It is now rated decile 7 ... "
Further on, the item in the Dominion Post reported that parents of the 395 pupils had been given "socioeconomic questionnaires" to fill in.
This can only mean the school hopes the parents of its pupils are not as wealthy or as well-educated as the average person in its district, which is broadly the basis of these decile grants.
Let's do a little deduction.
If the parents of those 395 pupils want to cover that $20,000 cut it will cost them about $50 a child, a year. Maybe $55 if the school exempts as many as 10 per cent on hardship grounds.
And note, this area is not poor. It was rated decile 5 on the national scale of 10 before last year's census.
Many schools around the country, including 118 in Auckland, stand to lose a little of their annual grant because their locality has moved up the ladder of mean household incomes, educational qualifications and occupational status.
Evidently this is terrible news.
All week we have been hearing the consternation of principals and teachers' unions that schools have been given only a few months notice that they will have to ask parents to pay higher fees from next year.
The Herald found a better case.
The small Ahuroa School near Puhoi will lose 20 per cent of its present grant because its rating has jumped from decile 2 to decile 7, the largest rise in the Auckland region.
The school's roll is growing fast and no wonder.
The northern motorway was extended to Orewa in the period since the previous census and next year it will reach Puhoi.
Notice how quickly you can get to Orewa now and it is no wonder Puhoi is prospering.
Isn't this good news? Evidently not.
At least 50 schools nationwide are appealing for relief. They too must be asking parents to make a miserable declaration like Lyall Bay's.
There is no way to challenge a social statistic other than to cite individual circumstances.
It is obvious that a school's locality and its parents are not quite the same thing.
But that is of no interest to the present Government because it wants them to be the same thing.
Labour has done all it can, with zoning and roll restrictions, to force children into the nearest school.
Decile funding is just one of the perverse consequences. It pays to be poor.
We forget sometimes how soul-destroying socialism was. There is only Cuba left in the world to remind us, and the education system here.
Sit on the board of a state school and you quickly learn the culture. Principals constantly tell parents and newspaper reporters that their Government grant doesn't cover the essentials, but it does.
They say this because, like any professionals, they want to do their job as well as it can be done but they have spent their careers in the state service, not business.
They understand how to increase their job satisfaction by pressuring governments to pay for what they want to do, not by convincing customers to voluntarily pay for it.
The tragedy is that most parents would do so. Not all would, and a small proportion could not afford to - the whole education system is geared to avoid injustice to them.
Equal opportunity could be assured to the genuinely poor by loading their state grant with assistance directed not at a statistical "decile" but to real verifiable cases of individual hardship.
Suppose schools were allowed to operate like normal valuable services. The Government could fund them as much as it was able, assisting the poor with more, and schools could charge fees that reflected the standards they wanted to offer and parents' willingness to pay.
State school fees are still ridiculously low. It is rare for one to ask more than a few hundred dollars a year. And even then some parents refuse.
They are often not poor; they freely concede they can afford it.
They object "on principle". They are taxpayers and education is supposed to be free.
So it is. But schools inevitably want to provide more than their allocation will cover. It is as inevitable as it is in health, where there is no limit to the life-enhancing treatments science can conceive.
But there is a limit to the taxes governments dare raise.
A child can be quite adequately educated in the basics by bored teachers in depreciating buildings for free.
Or you can pay a bit more for a bit more and keep some self-respect.
