On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:44:55 -0500, "Ed Huntress" wrote:



Yeah, I've never looked into New Zealand's system, but this is the only
(supposedly) independent discussion of this point I found. This is from a
parent-teacher organization called QPEC:

"Measured against the theory of devolution, the devolved system in New
Zealand has been a resounding failure. Far from being the drivers of the
system, the boards of trustees are now largely irrelevant to it, and it is
not at all clear what work they do, except comply with a planning and
reporting framework imposed from above (which could just as easily be done
by the school staff)..."

"Administrative workloads (especially in the area of compliance) have
increased for all school staff, and it is reasonably clear that devolution
causes a huge increase in the overall amount of administration needed in a
school system. The system, far from being more efficient, appears markedly
inefficient. It may also be expensive, as schools lost system-wide
purchasing power which, in some areas, has never been regained."


What makes you think that a local school board is likely to have a clue
about how to teach, what curriculum to have, or anything else above the
level of how to keep the toilets running? Half of them are housewives and
small business owners who have crappy educations themselves.

When it comes to school boards, the details matter. As they are
currently structured in the US, they are typically just another
layer of paper pushers.

The system in New Zealand seems to suffer from the same problems we have
with incompetent school boards:

"There have been failures. Wealthy schools often attract lawyers,
accountants and financial and community experts onto their boards, while
poor schools, which have more problems to overcome, often struggle to
attract effective parent governors. Quite a large number of schools have
had to be put in the hands of statutory managers. More importantly, however,
there is a problem with each school having to 're-invent the wheel' when it
comes to innovative practices, especially in a market context which brings
conservatising influences and militates against change. In summary, it is
not clear that the system encourages quality local decision-making, or that
local management has improved New Zealand schools or student achievement."

Too much Milton Friedman, too little thinking-through -- just like here.


An in dependant report huh?

That report actually presents a mixed picture. It also contains a lot of
generalities and few examples. One thing that they mention is that there
is extra cost because each school buys supplies on its own. It seems to
me that should be an easily solvable problem with motivated superintendents
and principals. Other than the toilet paper example, they don't say much
about what central services are missing.

It mentions extra workload on teachers because of 'compliance' issues. I
don't speak New Zealandese but that sure sounds to me like mandated
paperwork from some central authority. Do these compliance issues
actually improve the education of New Zealand's youth?

The report also notes that there are still "calls for more parental
choice" and "less government involvement". So, I'll speculate that
what happened was that the original bureaucrats were unable to stop
the devolution but they were capable of inserting enough requirements
into it that devolution would not work. Dynasties come and dynasties
go but the civil service is forever. Maybe someone from New Zealand
can fill us in on the real situation.

That report does suggest a question. What is the optimal size for a
school district? I suspect that one school, which seems to be what
New Zealand did, is too small.

Another report from QPEC, http://qpec.org.nz/privatisation/par..._of_school.doc
notes :
"Contrary to the claim that parental choice "rolls back the state" and
therefore debureaucratizes and depoliticizes education, "choice" did not
reduce central state control of schooling in England or the United
States but, rather, reconstituted it at different levels (Carl, 1994) (p. 297)"

That seems to fit my speculation above.

The rest of that report reveals their biases towards central control:

"In marketised plans, more affluent parents often have more flexible
hours and can visit multiple schools. They have cars - often more than
one - and can afford driving their children across town to attend a better
school(Apple, 2001)(p. 415)"

I'm not familiar with New Zealand, but don't even low level workers
get vacation days or sick days that they could use to check out schools,
provided they felt it was important? And are cars really that rare in New
Zealand? I've always pictured New Zealand as much wealthier than that.
It sounds to me that parents who value education make the effort
to help their kids get educated and that the parents who do that often
have higher incomes because they themselves are educated.

Or this

"However, as noted below, while wealthy parents may be able to better
engage with choice systems, this does not mean that choices are made on
the basis of rational and detailed consideration of choice options. One
of the key factors emerging from the research on parental choice in
action is that choices are often made on the basis of fashion,
hearsay, 'network' knowledge and assumption, and parents often
deliberately ignore the official knowledge emerging from the school
sector."

So parents ignore the experts and use other sources of information and
the experts are miffed about being ignored. In my area, parents pour
over the test results of each school and school district but the way
they chose a house is by which schools their kids would go to.

"... the research is remarkably consistent in demonstrating that choices
are far more often made of the basis of who will my child be going to
school with?"

Who wants their kids to go to school with members of the Crips,
Bloods, and El Norte? I'd believe that parents want their kids
to associate with other kids who are likely to be successful in
life.

Then there is this insulting quote:

"Many of them believe that the "back-to-basics" parents are
really more interested in setting up schools in their own
image - in other words, schools that are generally conservative,
white, and middle- to upper-middle class. As one miffed neighborhood
school parent put it, "They just want schools for their own kids and
don't give a damn about anybody else." (Bomotti, 1998)."

I feel lucky that my kids got into the local back-to-basics grammar
school. About 3 times as many students apply as get in. It's a
real sign that the school district is not parent oriented that they
have not opened a second and third back-to-basics school.

I can assure you that the grammar school my kids went to was not
white (~10%) and middle of the road on the political spectrum. There
is a different school for the far left parents. I was
sometimes the only white parent at school functions. As
far as I can tell, my motives were the same as all of the other
parents I spoke to. We wanted our kids to get a good grounding in
the basics and we were willing to put in a lot of effort to give
our kids a good chance.

For parents who have had some success in life and want their children to do
at least as well, why shouldn't they try to have their children replicate
their success by following the same, proven trail? Would anything else
be rational?

The last sentence captures something important; parents want a great
school for their kid. Many of those parents are willing to put in
a lot of effort to achieve that. There must be some way to harness
that so that at least some kids of less capable parents can benefit.
For the poor folks mentioned above, their kids aren't getting a good
education under either system. Is their plight noticeably different
under either system?


In the past, some states gave school
boards the ability to raise taxes (usually property taxes) and
hence properly fund their local schools. That ability is largely
gone now, and state centralized funding (and paper pushing) is the
norm now.

Here in NJ, funding, except for state support for poorer districts, is in
the hands of local municipalities, who fund schools almost completely by
means of property taxes. The main result is that it causes open political
war between parents of school-age kids and retirees.

Our local schools actually get less money and perform better than many nearby
schools. It has to do with the way school funding was set up after
Proposition 13 passed. The funding formulas haven't changed since
then, though the population has shifted.

Bob S