Been a while since I did a full fisk of Idiot.
As we all know, National’s support agreement with ACT included an out-of-the-blue infliction of charter schools.
Well, “out of the blue” for people who haven’t bothered to read what ACT has been saying about education, and who did a quick ctrl-f search on the policy and didn’t find the exact words “Charter Schools”.
This failed American model
Except that of course it’s used all over the place and has had a great deal of success in the right conditions.
will be trialled first in Christchurch East and South Auckland – both strong Labour electorates.
But not in Dunedin. Hm, why might that be?
Which invites an obvious question:
Brace yourself people!
why aren’t National and ACT trialling these schools on their own kids?
a) probably because these areas are where kids are being failed by the existing system
b) There are almost 12,000 National voters in Christchurch East, and 14,000 Labour ones. From that, I conclude that this particular evil scheme to bring good education to Labour children isn’t exactly well targeted – unless of course there’s some sort of laser detector above the door with the ability to detect the voting preferences of student’s parents.
Why aren’t they trialling them in Epsom, Helensville, and the North Shore? Surely if these schools are all they claim they are, then they should be beating down the door?
Of course the real, boring answer is that the trial is being setup where it’s needed most. But real, boring answers aren’t of any interest to a hyper-political conspiracy junkie.
Sadly, the answer is equally obvious: not even their supporters believe the schools will work – or at least, not strongly enough to risk the future of their own children (or their political career) on it.
This is the same idiot who complains when National and ACT supporters put their kids in private school.
So instead we have the usual story: the children of the poor get to be guinea pigs for the crackpot theories of the rich. And if it doesn’t work out, well, its not as if anyone important suffers, is it?
This paragraph actually makes me very angry. Idiot talks about a potential solution as though it’s evil, while it is in fact his own position which is most likely to deliver the bad outcomes he claims to oppose.
Don’t ever be fooled into thinking that the left are best for the poor. Labour is the party of Unions and when (as in this case) it’s fight between what’s best for the poor, or what’s best for the unions, the poor will lose every time.
If Key and Banks want to run this experiment, they should put their money where their mouth is: run the trial in their own electorates, and send their own kids to them. The fact that they won’t speaks volumes.
I for one hope that the trial succeeds in it’s goal – taking kids from poorly performing schools and improving their lives through better education.
Something should go here, maybe later. 