ACT party leader David Seymour makes an announcement regarding charter schools at Vanguard Military School in May. Photo: RNZ/Nick Monro
Charter schools are a recipe for disaster that will loot resources from state schools, MPs have heard.
Parliament's Education and Workforce Committee is hearing submissions on an education bill that will introduce the publicly-funded private schools.
Submitters today told the committee aspects of the bill were preposterous and outrageous and the proposed changes would breach labour, human rights and free trade agreements.
Others said the schools would give families more choice about their children's education and raise achievement.
NZEI Principals Council chairperson Stephanie Madden told the committee it opposed many aspects of the bill.
She said giving the education minister the power to force state schools to become charter schools was undemocratic and authoritarian.
Madden said the power could be misused to stop principals speaking out against government policies.
"The destabilising effect this would have on a community is absolutely enormous," she said.
Council member Martyn Weatherill said converting state schools into charters would result in confiscation of property such as halls and other facilities that communities had paid for themselves.
"Communities tend not to like people stealing from them," he said.
Weatherill said schools did not suffer from a lack of flexibility - one of the main reasons the government said charter schools were needed - rather, they suffered from a lack of resources.
Maxim Institute researcher Maryanne Spurdle said unlike New Zealand, most other OECD countries provided more than half the income of private schools.
She said charter schools would take pressure off the public system and were more cost-effective than state schools.
Spurdle said countries with more government-funded private schools tended to have higher public satisfaction with their education systems.
She said the current education system did not provide families with choice.
"The system on paper may be set up to provide choice but in fact it does not. This would."
Submitter Andrew Riddell said allowing state schools to convert to charters was a way of looting resources from the public school system.
School principal Wayne Leighton said charter schools were a recipe for disaster.
He said the schools were not needed and were fundamentally wrong.
Submitter Natalie Jump said allowing charter schools to make a profit was despicable.
She said research showed the schools would try to select their students to avoid those with more expensive needs.
Long-time charter school opponent Bill Courtney said the bill introducing charter schools was pure ideology.
"Basically it doesn't work," he said.
Courtney said charter schools had the same student achievement as state schools and setting up more small schools would only increase the costs of education to the government.
He said there was no evidence of innovative teaching practices the last time charter schools were allowed to operate.
Educational Institute Te Riu Roa president Mark Potter said the union strongly opposed the bill.
He said charter schools offered no benefit for New Zealand children as state schools already had a lot of freedom to innovate.
Potter said the $153 million allocated to reintroducing charter schools would be better spent elsewhere.
The union's national secretary Stephanie Mills said allowing state schools to convert to charter schools was an insult to the generations of people who had contributed to their local schools.
Mills said there was no requirement for charter schools to have regard for the Treaty of Waitangi, which was not appropriate given the large number of Māori children.
She said the union was deeply concerned that charter schools would be allowed to employ people who were not qualified teachers, which would put children at risk.
Post Primary Teachers Association acting president Kieran Gainsford said the suggestion that charter schools were needed to introduce flexibility was outrageous and a red herring.
He said New Zealand schools were already among the most innovative in the world.
Gainsford said proposals for converting state schools to charter schools were an over-reach of ministerial power and preventing charter teachers from joining multi-employer collective agreements would breach international law.
He said the idea that schools needed individual employment agreements to be innovative was preposterous.
Gainsford warned that charter schools overseas tended to use narrow curriculums with teachers who taught to the test.
E tū spokesman John Ryall said the union was worried about the bill's provisions for workers at state schools that became charters.
He said the bill would steam-roller over vulnerable workers' collective agreements and the protections those agreements provided.
Epsom Girls Grammar PPTA branch member Lisa Murphy said teachers were dismayed by the bill.
She said allowing charter schools to hire people who were not registered teachers was a bad idea.
"It is insulting to think anyone can do this job without training or expertise," she said.
Murphy said keeping charters out of multi-employer collective agreements was a sly way of keeping teachers beholden to charter school sponsors.
Former Labour Party MP and principal Marian Hobbs told the committee state schools could already try different approaches to teaching and there was no need for charter schools.
She urged the committee not to allow state schools to convert to charters because her experience in the UK indicated it was very disruptive to children's learning.
She said a clause that would allow charter schools to ignore rulings from the Teaching Council regarding their teachers was dangerous.