Opinion & Commentary
NZ school zoning: fairness or fraud?
Good state schools in both New Zealand and Australia are facing a large and growing problem—fraud. Families are providing false addresses within a school’s zone so that their children can attend the state school of their choice.
Zoning does not force children to attend the closest school, but it makes it difficult for children to enroll in a different school. Because every child living within a state school’s zone is entitled to enroll there, only if a school has places left after accommodating all children within its zone may it enroll children from other zones. Even then certain children have priority and the remaining few places are allocated by lottery.
This may sound fair, but is it? The idea of public education as free, secular schools that reflect the socioeconomic, ethnic and political mix of the wider community. Zoning effectively undermines the achievement of the latter.
New Zealand has strong demographic clusters. Children of similar socioeconomic status and ethnicity tend to live near each other. This means that certain school zones consist entirely of high cost housing, driven even higher by families seeking enrolment at the school of their choice, and thus restricting enrolments in those schools to high income families. Children of low-income families are excluded from these schools because they cannot afford to live near them.
This situation might not be so bad if all children had a greater choice of non-state schools. Presently, the option of a school other than a state or integrated school is available only to those families willing and able to pay for their children’s education out of their own pockets – usually high income families.
This is clearly inequitable. High-income families can choose a state school by moving to the relevant state school zone, choosing a well-performing integrated school, or enrolling in a private school. Low-income families are forced to rely on chance and fate if they do not, for whatever reason, favour their local state school. Almost all integrated schools are religious schools, with limits on non-religious enrolments, so families wanting a secular education have even fewer options.
Fewer than 5% of students in New Zealand attend independent private schools. In Australia, the figure is twice as high for independent private schools and six times higher if Catholic systemic schools are included. Government subsidies to non-government schools in Australia have become increasingly generous, enabling the establishment of low-fee independent schools. This market is so dynamic it has now reached the point where it is unclear whether demand or supply is leading the growth.
New Zealand is falling even further behind in supporting school choice, with recent caps being placed on independent school funding and the axing of the Targeted Individual Entitlement scheme, a small voucher scheme that was aimed at low-income students.
Despite its advantages over the New Zealand system, the Australian system has its problems. Funding is still school-centred, resulting in debate over which schools are more deserving than others. If funding were instead child-centred, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Under a child-centred funding system, every child would be entitled to a level of funding that gives them access to the state school of their choice, and which they could supplement if they prefer an integrated or private school.
It is generally agreed that a well-educated populace benefits a whole society. A good education is not exclusive to public schools. Indeed, the lead article of The Independent of February 26 indicates that people can spend ten years in a state school without learning basic skills. If a good education is not guaranteed by a state school, and can be provided by private schools or even at home, why is the level of public funding to which a child is entitled dependent on the school they attend?
This is usually answered with reference to the public good. It is often claimed that only public schools encourage social cohesion, by enrolling a mixture of children of all classes, creeds and colours. As explained above, the combination of demographic clusters and lack of choice makes this highly unlikely. And limited evidence available from US voucher programmes is that it is not true.
What would happen if families had more freedom to choose their school? Going by the results in Australia and Sweden, more independent schools would open, particularly catering for families who are unable to exercise choice within the state system.
There are several assured and several possible consequences of freedom of choice. The assured consequences are competition and accountability. In order to attract and retain students, schools would have to ensure that parents have faith in their ability to provide a good education. The balance of accountability will shift from a system of reporting to bureaucracy to one of satisfying parents and students. International research has shown that this lifts educational quality across the board, particularly in those schools most at risk of losing students.
To many people, of foremost concern among the possible consequences is that people will segregate along academic, class and ethnic lines. New Zealand’s own experience with the abolition of zoning in the early 1990s showed that Maori and Pacific students took greatest advantage of choice. It also showed that segregation along income lines was lower after zoning was removed.
An overall decrease in segregation is usually viewed as positive, yet there are circumstances where segregation is in fact welcomed, such as Kura Kaupapa Maori in New Zealand and academically selective schools in Australia. That is, segregation is in the eye of the beholder.
Unfortunately, zoning was progressively reinstated in the years following dezoning, so the longer term effects remain unknown.
In addition, the New Zealand experience will not have shown us the full potential of choice. This is because choice was hampered by a number of other policy constraints—including centralised bargaining, controls on the ability of popular state schools to expand and new schools to open and much lower funding for independent schools. For all these reasons, choice remained controlled.
A further problem was the lack of fair, consistent and useful information about schools, a situation that remains today. Choice will not be advantageous if it is not informed choice.
The benefits of school choice by far outweigh the potential concerns, but it must be real school choice. Quasi-choice has a much greater chance of failure. Real school choice means that parents have the responsibility, the means and the information to choose a school for their child—state, integrated or private—and schools have the resources, the autonomy and the incentives to respond.
Jennifer Buckingham is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.
