New charter schools are opening in New Zealand as the United States Supreme Court says it is deadlocked in a decision over one in a case that has threatened the separation of church and state in American education.
Over two years, the New Zealand government will spend nearly $140 million on charter schools — a type of school that is not required to adhere to the national curriculum.
In a policy that scholars said echoed education models in the US and the United Kingdom, the coalition government pledged to open 15 new charter schools while also converting 35 existing state schools into so-called charters.
Now the first batch is in operation, with another school set to come online in July, and New Zealand is getting a sense of just how much demand there is for this style of education.
Charter schools are owned and run privately but are paid for with public funds. They don't charge fees, so theoretically they offer families a choice over where to send their children to school without incurring any cost.
Their critics say they splinter already inadequate education budgets, are not proven to improve results and ultimately become expensive distractions.
Their proponents, like incoming New Zealand deputy prime minister David Seymour, say charter schools offer a chance for educators to break free of bureaucracy and innovate their way to academic success, and they "have clear performance requirements, which state schools don't".
Across the world, charter schools are a policy of classic liberalism.
Just as these movements push for a free market, they argue that in education there should also be choice and that by letting private groups run schools with more flexibility, results will improve because competition demands it.
"But education doesn't work in the same way that selling cars works," professor of education at the University of Southern Queensland and expert in the democratisation of schooling systems Stewart Riddle said.
In the United States, charter schools are set up as alternatives to traditional public schools.
The belief system that underpins these schools is that government should fund education, but not control it.
"They have, as the name suggests, a charter — a particular kind of promise that they make as a school," Dr Riddle said.
"You might have a charter school that is built for students who have an interest in the creative arts or the performing arts.
"What's tended to happen in the US is they get driven by groups that have religious and other kinds of beliefs and so they want to have control over curriculum."
Overnight, the Supreme Court of the United States said it was split over the future of a charter school in Oklahoma — a decision that will be a blow to the Catholic backers of that school who wanted to change the nature of public education in America.
What is a charter school?
Charter schools are run as private organisations, are funded by the state on a per child basis and therefore do not charge families tuition for enrolment.
These schools give families a private school choice, without private school fees.
Australia has resisted going down the charter school path, instead educating most children in public, private or independent schools.
All schools receive public funding, but to be a registered school in Australia, you have to follow the national curriculum until senior years, even if the way you teach that material varies.
Recently, Mr Seymour announced a new charter school called Twin Oaks Classical School will open in Auckland in July.
"Students attending Twin Oaks Classical School will spend the first three days of the week at school and the last two days learning from home. The school will train and support parents and provide clear expectations for work that students complete at home. This partnership approach is based on the classical Charlotte Mason approach," he said.
The Charlotte Mason method is one adopted by Christian homeschooling families, and takes a very traditional view of gender roles, morality and spirituality, according to Dr Riddle.
Other charter schools in New Zealand have different areas of focus, including models dedicated to at-risk students who are disengaged from mainstream schooling, Maori immersion schools, a creative arts college and a French school.
New Zealand's Charter School Agency says the schools "have considerable flexibility around teaching and curriculum" as long as they deliver results according to their agreed-upon charter.
New Zealand has had charter schools before, but the model was scrapped under Jacinda Ardern's first government. And former prime minister and now Opposition Leader Chris Hipkins has said the same would happen again if Labour was returned to power.
Across the political spectrum and within the sector, there's acknowledgement that New Zealand's education system is in crisis, but there is not a consensus on how much help charter schools will be.
"What we're doing is setting up a parallel, very expensive system, that's not evidence-based and that's costing a lot of money and that is money that is not available to the public system to use," senior lecturer in education at the University of Auckland Dr Jude MacArthur said.
Mr Seymour told the ABC "the money that is put into the education budget doesn't belong to unions or the state schooling system – it belongs to the students".
"What I find bizarre is that some people seem to think that just because a student is better off in a different school they don't deserve to have their education funded like any state school student," he said in a statement.
Mr Seymour has argued the charter schools will specifically address needs of neurodivergent students.
He pointed to new charter Mastery School in Christchurch, saying "it provides another option for students who were disengaged from the state system, particularly neurodiverse students, and the results speak for themselves with vastly superior reading, mathematics and spelling achievement".
Dr MacArthur said state schools faced similar challenges, but for years had been asking for more resources to overcome them.
"One of the charter schools has one teacher and three teacher aides to every classroom," she said.
"If the charter school is saying that's what's needed to support these students, then why are we not putting that money into a public system where we know these children and young people are?"
In the latest New Zealand budget released on Thursday, the government has allocated new spending and "re-prioritised" funds to boost learning support services in schools by nearly $600 million over the next four years.
It's a massive shift and one the government is calling: "The largest boost to learning support in a generation."
The budget papers noted some savings were made when money provisionally set aside for state schools to convert to charter schools in 2024/25 were not required "as no state schools converted in this period".
Dr Riddle said, looking at the United States where charter schools have been part of the education system for decades, the results were mixed.
"The argument becomes, 'OK, these struggling public schools, let's turn them into charter schools because private business is allegedly more efficient than government' — that's the usual argument for privatisation," he said.
"But then what has happened in the US, is where they've had situations where charter schools have not performed, they've simply closed them down."
The debate over school choice
In 2023, when New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was negotiating to form government, he struck coalition deals with the ACT Party and New Zealand First.
In those negotiations, ACT Party leader David Seymour won his charter school policy, just as he won support to draft and table the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill.
It was also the ACT Party who won the right to launch charter schools in New Zealand the first time around — that time in a confidence and supply agreement with John Key's National government.
Messaging from Mr Seymour and New Zealand's Charter School Agency is that this renewed leap into the charter school model will provide parents with choice and schools with the space to be innovative.
"A one-size-fits-all education system is not working for everyone, and families paying their taxes deserve more educational choice for their children," Mr Seymour told the ABC in a statement.
Dr MacArthur questions that logic.
"Parents have enormous an amount of choice in our ... school system. They can choose public, or private, or they can choose state-integrated special character schools they can choose kura kaupapa Maori schools and so on. There is a big range of choice here," she said.
"Also we don't have a problem in our public education system when it comes to innovation. Our schools are incredibly innovative under our own New Zealand curriculum."
Charter schools most often come to the fore as a policy when conservative governments are in power, according to Dr Riddle.
"It's more a political act, than an educational one," he said.
"At the end of the day what they're doing is moving responsibility for what's effectively public education away from the public and into the market."
As New Zealand goes back and forth on charter schools, the United States is now decades down the road, with most states funding these institutions.
In Oklahoma, there has been a legal fight over a charter school and it went all the way to the nation's Supreme Court.
It has been very closely watched because it was reckoning with the fundamental question of whether public money funding a religious school that can teach its own curriculum threatens the separation of church and state, or if not doing so would be an act of religious discrimination.
Oklahoma vs St Isidore
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution includes this line: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The "establishment clause" restricts government officials from endorsing any particular religion or promoting religion over non-religion. The "free exercise" clause protects the free exercise of religion.
And it is a charter school that has laid bare the tension between the two clauses and brought them to the bench of the Supreme Court.
Two Catholic dioceses in Oklahoma have been bidding to launch the first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in the United States, but it was blocked by the state's top court.
That court's reasoning was that by being publicly funded it was a government entity that could not, under the constitution, establish a religion.
The conservative-leaning Supreme Court has been deliberating over the case.
"The essence of the establishment clause was, 'We're not going to pay religious leaders to teach their religion'," liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during arguments.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern that rejecting St Isidore would be religious discrimination.
"When you have a program that's open to all comers, except religion, that seems like rank discrimination against religion," he said.
On Thursday (local time) the Supreme Court released its decision — a 4-4 deadlocked ruling.
With conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, the deadlock leaves intact the lower court's decision and blocks the establishment of St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.
Although with no majority ruling, the result sets no precedent on the bigger constitutional question.
The St Isidore charter school had sought American public money to teach children across Oklahoma "God's orderly creation of the universe" and "the value of human life from the beginnings of a cell, conception and throughout the nine body systems", among other lessons detailed in the school's Catholic curriculum.
"We will learn that the heart and brain are the first in embryonic development allowing us to know the truth and to love God as we are made in his image," the document reads.
Dr Riddle said the Oklahoma case was an extreme example of where charter school models can end up.
"There's this really long, robust process of figuring out what's the best curriculum for our young people," he said.
"And I fear that kind of switch to a charter model takes you down the pathway that Oklahoma's going down. That's where you end up. It's a slippery slope."
ABC/Reuters
