After my initial excitement yesterday that school choice was being discussed again, I’ve now had time to read the Report of the Inter-Party Working Group for School Choice. Others have already had a go at the issue from the predictable vouchers good/bad positions, so I will look at it from a practical policy/politics perspective  (I am from the “vouchers good” disposition, but I always try to engage with the facts/context as well as my ideology). Basically the report is a political, not a policy, document and should be judged in that way.

• The report had some tough goals to meet such as reviewing funding, enrolment schemes, trust school models, property and so on  (p.4). It doesn’t do it (no-one could in 12 pages of body text) but there’s no clear attempt to make the report fit the goals.
• This paper has been written (or at least edited) by 6 MPs and it shows. I support their basic premise but I’m certainly not convinced that this paper should become policy as it stands. It reads much as you’d expect a partisan group of people to write a policy proposal. That’s the main point though -you can’t really judge it in the same way that you would judge a paper by a research centre, a journal article or a Cabinet paper. Certainly, this paper has lots of references, but it is more a political statement than a policy paper. We should judge it by whether it gets a political reaction (seems to be doing well so far) and then whether it sparks a serious policy process (see below).
• As an example of the response, Russell Brown has made some strong criticisms of the paper, and he’s gone out of his way to Google things that undermine the paper. He attacked references to Sweden in the paper, and provided some good alternative views, so I had naturally assumed that Sweden was important to the main paper. There are, however, 2 paras about Sweden in a fairly light case study section that has little reference to the proposals that follow. I have no concerns about Russell having a partisan go at the paper (he’s not a neutral civil servant) but I wonder if he’s gone over the top in his response. He’s attacking a political document for not being an example of “evidence-based policy development”, which seems like a losing battle in life to me. Why bother holding it up to ridicule for something its not (a balanced policy paper), when you might just be giving the issue the oxygen that its promoters wanted?
• While the paper and the initial responses to the paper offer fairly predictable stances in the school choice debate (see Scoop Education for input from Maxim, Education Forum, QPEC, PPTA and NZEI), I’m more interested right now in the political and policy aspects. So, what might come out of this paper?
  • The joint writing and launch by ACT, National and Maori MPs was very telling. ACT is expected to support school choice publicly, but we shouldn’t underestimate support amongst Maori for diverse service delivery models, which fits very well with National’s core preferences for devolution, subsidiarity and (yes) privatisation. The paper draws on some of the same underlying concepts as the Whanau Ora policy that National and the Maori Party are working so hard on.
  • The targeting of both gifted and at-risk students is probably quite good politics, and I’d expect to see more of that. The gifted and talented education national body has a very low profile in education policy and it would probably be quite cheap to make a difference in that area and help bring more parents with you than just focusing on struggling students.
  • Performance funding sounds unduly complicated and might not be worth the hassle of implementing it in the education sector culture. It would probably be easier to just cut contracts after a period of non-performance and warnings.
  • Learning brokers also sound quite complicated and I can’t see them happening unless the policy can be described much more clearly. Some vox pops on the news last night showed parental interest in personalisation but also concerns about logistics – if there is strong demand for this, then the logistics need to be sorted.
  • Flexibility over property management for schools is quite likely under this government.
  • Overall, I see very little likelihood of the policy as proposed being implemented, but what we are seeing is some new thinking being exposed by National in particular. They have avoided discussions about choice in recent years to avoid spooking the horses, but now they’re willing to talk about it. That will make their core supporters happy and it will make Labour happy to create some differentiation. I think there will be a taskforce of some sort established to follow up the s, but it will have a much narrower brief. Alternatively, a few ideas from the report will be cherry-picked and pushed through normal policy processes.

Other comments on this issue are available at No Minister, Kiwiblog, and Red Alert (good post by Kelvin Davis).