Back in April an OIA request exposed the absurd cost of ACT's charter schools - five times more per student than the government spends on public schools. ACT obviously didn't like that, but they have a solution: keep the number of students secret:
The seven charter schools set up at the start of the year have been told to keep their enrolments secret, by The Charter School Agency....which means no more bad headlines about stupidly high costs per student. Convenient for a minister and an agency wanting to avoid criticism. But terrible for the public wanting to know whether these gold-plated luxury schools work or not, and if the cost is worth it.The organisation, which manages charter school contracts and funding, told RNZ it was not appropriate to share information about the rolls of the publicly funded private schools.
"The Charter School Agency does not intend to release the numbers of students currently enrolled at each individual school during the crucial establishment phase as this could undermine their commercial position and their efforts to build their roll and deliver quality education," it said.
(Of course, it's illegal: most of the schools in question are non-profit, and so cannot have a commercial position to protect, and for those that aren't, there's a clear over-riding public interest in transparency and accountability, in that student numbers are essential to determining whether the people of Aotearoa are getting value for money. But that would require a complaint to the Ombudsman, which would take a year or two, so the government wins simply by virtue of shit enforcement...)
There's an obvious parallel here with the government's boot camps - also run by an ACT minister - where after several high-profile failures, all outcomes were declared secret. And that's how this government prevents criticism: not by performing well, but by censorship and secrecy. Transparency? Our right to know? Not under this regime.
