Rudman's city: Quality schooling close to home solves zone row

By BRIAN RUDMAN

There used to be two certainties of an Auckland summer. One was that the weather never settled until the kids returned to school; the other was that real estate agents would make a January killing out of Grammar-zone property.

This year the weather seems to have failed us, but the annual school zoning controversy has not. It has been fuelled by the clamour from four popular Auckland state secondary schools - Auckland Grammar, Rangitoto College, Macleans College and Avondale College - for exemption from their obligation to take neighbourhood students.

They are also seeking the right to cap their rolls - a backdoor way of excluding some locals - to keep pupil numbers down.

Not unexpectedly, Education Minister Trevor Mallard has rejected this demand for the right to pick and choose, and instead has offered the schools extra classrooms to cope with their burgeoning rolls.

Another alternative would have been to tighten zone boundaries in the way electoral boundaries are moved to match population changes.

For whatever reason, that's not a proposal that seems to have come up.

With Rangitoto College's roll blown out to 2600, perhaps it is time it did. Such numbers seem more appropriate for a poultry farm than a community-based school.

Despite the right's best efforts to paint school zoning as an aberration, it has been with us as a way of matching schools with students in urban areas such as Auckland for decades. It was the ideologically driven de-zoning experiment of National Education Minister Lockwood Smith in 1991 that was the aberration.

De-zoning, as still contended by its supporters in Act and National, was supposed to give parents a choice of education for their children. And choice it did bring for some. But it was neither universal nor was it necessarily parental choice.

At schools such as Auckland Grammar, what we got was school choice. Its talent spotters could sift through the files of hopefuls, selecting the best and brightest, academically and on the sports fields.

Low income also restricted the exercise of choice. Some parents had no chance to exercise choice because no alternatives to the local school existed in their neighbourhood and there was no way they could afford the costs of enrolling their children into a different school if they had wanted to.

The de-zoning of 1991 also struck at the heart of the belief that had underpinned education policy for 50 years, that every New Zealander had the right to equality of educational opportunity at their local community high school. Schooling suddenly became a commodity and schools were ranked on a desirability scale like cars or breakfast cereals. The ranking was mainly on a socio-economic basis.

In a 1999 report, the Ministry of Education reported that from 1993 to 1998 more than 50 per cent of the lowest-decile schools had roll decreases of more than 10 per cent, while 45 per cent of high-decile schools had roll increases above 10 per cent.

In late 1998 in Petone the market experiment in education led to a state secondary school closing. In Auckland more than one low-decile secondary school went on to life support. All in all, it was a wasteful way of managing state-owned investments.

Proponents of this market free-for-all would say this was free choice at work. And certainly for the lucky few, transplanted because of brawn or brain from their low socio-economic background into a new environment, the experiment was probably worth it.

But what about the majority the market spat out?

National's education spokesman, Nick Smith, has complained that Maori and Pacific Island student numbers have dropped at Auckland Grammar because of zoning. They are being locked out, he says, by a law which "favours wealthy parents". It was hardly the drama he painted. In numerical terms the drop was 13 boys, down from 37 to 24.

You could equally argue they were locked out because of an economic regime that drove their parents from inner-city Grammar catchment suburbs to the outer suburbs, but let's not get diverted.

The reality is that Auckland Grammar, set as it is amid some of the city's wealthiest homes, is always going to be top heavy with rich kids. Headmaster John Morris said last week that before zoning was reinstated "we could take a few people from out of the zone and we used to like to take Maori and Pacific Island students". Just a few though. A rugby team or two.

For most students, however, the only choice was the local school. And why not? I'm with Mr Mallard on this one.

His goal is to empower every school to deliver a quality education and so avoid any need for a child "to go past the local school to access quality".

It was a recipe that worked well for 50 years until Dr Smith's ideological excesses. The experiment failed in the 1990s. Why should we have to repeat it?