The Pigeonhole

Don Brash is famous for two things

By ToilandTrouble

1. His willingness to use race in order to advance his campaign for political power in 2005, and:
2. His ability to survive for many weeks on a diet of corned beef and frozen peas.

He is also an economist and we know how many of them it takes to change a light bulb (none, the darkness will cause the light bulb to change itself).  In sum he is overwhelmingly under-qualified to comment on educational matters.  That doesn't matter though because economists are immune to intellectual humility,  untroubled by their own ignorance and always ready to draw a crooked line from an unproved assumption to a forgone conclusion.

Don's recipe for New Zealand education is more privatisation. The fact that we have been systematically privatising education since 1989 with nil effect on achievement but big increases in disparities between schools might deter a deeper thinker but not so our Don - no, he sees this as evidence that we need more privatisation. Presumably when the patient  is dead we will know that we have administered a sufficient dosage.

As he puts it in the 2025 taskforce  report (so called because it is supposed to have the income gap with Australia closed by then.)

  “At the heart of the issue is the lack of effective choice. State schools are all managed independently, with neither the incentive nor the ability to take a successful model and replicate it in another community. Private schools seeking to enter the market get very little government funding (even though the prior decision has already been made to require all children to attend school, so that the state is obliged to fund each child’s education). And the lack of choice reinforces the power of teacher and principal unions to avoid serious accountability to purchasers – whether conceived of as the state or parents. International evidence suggests that, in teaching as elsewhere, choice and pay for performance work. People are rational: they respond to incentives. If we want better schools – better educational outcomes, better choice, and better value for money – we need better models of ownership, governance and accountability, and remuneration.

So that's all it takes. The taxpayer picks up more of the tab for Don Brash and his wealthy ACT colleagues to send their children to private schools at the cost of the vast majority of New Zealanders who just want a decent local school to send their kids to.  Brash evidences Sweden as a country that funds private and public schools equally but conveniently avoids mentioning that Swedes pay up to 60% in tax. When there is that level of tax commitment all schools are well funded not just the select few.  But Brash wants to reduce the tax take while upping the money going to private schools and  encouraging parents to contribute more to their children’s education – you don’t have to be an economist to tell who the winners and losers are in that scenario. More importantly, public and private schools in Sweden have to take all comers and not just cherry pick the children of the wealthy as Brash would prefer. The last thing he would want is a class full of children from the wrong side of the track polluting his son’s private school.  Anyway I think New Zealanders expect their schools to be overseen by someone accountable, like the Minister of Education, not some faceless overseas company. 

Brash maintains that his system will work.  He even finds one (yes one!) piece of research that (according to his reading) says you can pay teachers by student results.  Maybe one piece of research from India passes for evidence in your circles Don but outside that people expect something closer to the balance of probabilities. Given all this it’s nice of him to assure us that “people are rational” because that’s the last conclusion anyone would draw on reading his opinions on education.