This could be a new definition of madness: doing something you don’t particularly want to do that you’re not particularly convinced will work and that will make a whole lot of things you do want to do a lot more difficult, just to please people you never particularly wanted to please in the first place, and who have recently so thoroughly displeased you that if you could exile them to the Ross Dependency with a colony of bad tempered sea lions for company, you would, like a shot.
It’s also the reality of government under MMP.
Perhaps you could dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, but to me there are too many coincidences that point to the fact that Charter Schools are actually being driven by National.
1) Previous Education Minister, Anne Tolley, often expressed an interest in US models of education and mentioned the need for systemic change at the 2010 National Party Conference.
2) Lesley Longstone is employed to lead our Ministry of Education. Lesley’s previous job was the introduction and promotion of Free Schools (English version of Charter Schools) in England. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgAh2gS57g
3) The National Government has been open about the need to cut spending in Education, especially salaries. All the educational advantages of Charter Schools already exist in our current system except the ability to pay salaries outside the collective agreement and to employ non registered teachers.
4) Act did not campaign on Charter Schools in the 2011 elections and John Banks was obviously on the back foot when explaining what they were immediately after signing the coalition agreement.
National are using John Banks as the fall guy in pushing through what they had already established would be an unpopular initiative. It was very convenient to say that it was Act’s idea and rather strange that a Party with so little clout (john Banks was so grateful to be in Parliament he would have agreed to anything) could push through such a dramatic change to the existing public system.
Dave – don’t private and integrated schools already pay teachers outside the collective agreement?
Disturbing to see the National Party trailing along behind the US and UK religious right on this weird ‘education’ policy. In the US creationism and ‘christian’ science seem to be gathering steam, and not only in the Deep South. Serious US scientists view this with a mixture of horror and hilarity.
The real losers are the indoctrinated students, who may very well be denied entry to the better universities on the basis of ‘if you believe that, you;ll believe anything.’
Private schools may do, Ele, but integrated schools are part of the collective agreement.
No conspiracy theory required. Right in line with expectation, as Dave explained above.
Banks is a creationist.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Banks-believes-in-Bibles-account-of-creation/tabid/423/articleID/266072/Default.aspx
Not surprisingly, the National Party propose to allow unqualified teachers to trot out this piffle. Who else would?