Last year, the government approved five charter schools to open in 2014. A year on, how are they doing? Badly. One of them, Vanguard Military School, has seen its roll drop by 25%, while another, Te Kura Hourua ki Whangaruru, has seen a larger drop as well as serious problems with poor teaching quality, management infighting, and drug use. So, that's a 40% failure rate, after just one year.
When John Key introduced charter schools, he promised that
"If those partnership schools don't succeed the Government will be just as quick to close them down as we have been to establish them."
Its time for him to make good on that promise, and close down these failed schools. We shouldn't be paying for failure, and we definitely shouldn't be paying massively more than we pay for state schools just to subsidise the profits and extravagant salaries of charter school operators.
