Tuesday, August 23, 2016



Charter schools rip us off

Surprise, surprise - National's charter schools are ripping us off with high "administration" fees:

The country's eight charter schools paid their owners or related entities more than $1 million for administration and management services last year.

[...]

The financial statements showed the eight schools paid the organisations that own them or related companies as much as $360,000 for administration and management in 2015.

Collectively those payments appeared to have totalled at least $1.25m from total funding of about $14m last year.

Vanguard Military School chief executive Nick Hyde said the payments were no different to any other school.


...except for being much higher. Because this is how the private companies which run these charter schools make their profit (when they're not just outright stealing from the people of New Zealand)

This demonstrates the fundamental problem of charter schools. With a state school, every dollar we spend goes on education. With a charter school, the operator takes a slice of it for profit. This is by definition less efficient, and a good reason not to use this model.