Thursday, December 08, 2016

Strapping the chicken on charter schools

National is desperate that their charters chools are successful. So naturally, they allowed them to lie about how good their results were:
Charter school pass rates are out of line with state schools, a report has revealed.

[...]

The reported results were inflated because the charter schools, also known as partnership schools, were using a different method from state schools to report NCEA pass rates.

The report showed Vanguard Military School on Auckland's North Shore and Te Kura Hourua O Whangarei Terenga Paraoa reported they had met their 2014 NCEA leaver targets - but when the figures were analysed, they did not.

Vanguard reported a 100 per cent pass rate for NCEA Level 2. However, when revised in line with NCEA standards it dropped to just 60 per cent. It met Level 1 standards.

At Te Kura Hourua, neither Level 1 or Level 2 NCEA standards were met once revised: Level 1 dropped from 82 per cent to 77.8 per cent, and Level 2 dropped from 80 per cent to 55.6 per cent.


This sort of chicken-strapping is normal for National - see also their lowball targets for private prisons. But it deliberately sets out to mislead the public, and potentially persuades parents to send their kids to a substandard school as a result. That's obviously great for National's charter school cronies, who get to profit as a direct result of these lies. But its very, very bad for the public. But then, when has National ever cared about us?