Remember back in the day when National announced increases in class sizes, and argued that it wouldn’t damage educational outcomes? Bollocks of course. When it turned out that Key sent his kids to private schools because of the smaller classes that was pretty much the last straw, the U-turn followed and bigger classes were dropped.
Now we’ve come full circle:
Small class sizes a key factor in charter school success – report
Small class sizes have been hailed as one of the key conditions to charter school success in a first report into how the controversial education model is working.
Splendid. Lets give our regular schools the benefit of this astounding new academic insight and reduce their class sizes too then!
(Gotta love DPFs “flexibility” as he spins 180 degrees on class sizes. While we’re at it, let’s fund public schools at the same levels as charter schools too – howzat for flexibility.)
However, all this is just a prelude to the main event, as it emerged yesterday:
Education Minister overrules ministry’s advice on charter school report
The Education Minister shut down comparing student achievement results from charter schools with those of state schools despite ministry advice to do so.
A report by consultancy firm, Martin Jenkins, was commissioned by the Government to look at whether three of the first five charter schools set up in 2014 were delivering anything new.
…
But on March 18 Parata overruled the ministry and its intentions to supplement the independent report with information about student achievement. …
So the Education Minister overrode Ministry advice to protect National’s pet charter schools from being evaluated on their actual outcomes – all the while trumpeting national standards and accountability for public schools of course. Hypocrites much?
To be fair of course, such comparisons are going to be pretty tricky in the future, given the evidence of runaway grade inflation that is going on. Make an education system and its drivers all about naive measurement instead of learning and you end up with a broken system. Brilliant.
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