I’m slowly getting to my first hypothesis regarding the decline in the New Zealand PISA scores.  Before I can fully explain hypothesis 1, though, I need to describe a few more factors relating to schooling in New Zealand.  I promise my hypothesis 1 is coming soon.  I also promise that I’ll soon get into the good stuff: what’s happening in classrooms!

School funding

In Illinois, most school funding comes from local taxpayers.  Some funds also come from the Illinois government and some funds also come from the national government.  In New Zealand, the funding comes from one source: the national government.  Local property owners do not pay additional taxes to support their local schools.  They do pay taxes, but that money goes straight to the national government to be distributed to schools across the country.  So how does the national government decide how much money each school gets?  The answer to this is less complex than school funding in the U.S., but still complex enough to require an explanation.  First, there are different types of funding for schools.  There’s the general funding and then there’s the additional funding.  Examples of additional funding include money to support special education students, facility improvements/additions, money for at-risk student programs, and in some cases, transportation.

New Zealand teachers are paid on a national salary schedule.  So, no matter where teachers are working in the country, they are paid similarly.  The salary payment schedules are slightly different than those found in the U.S., but the bottom line is that all schools have about the same salary costs per student.

Knowing that most of a school’s budget is devoted to salary, one might assume that funding from the national government is based only on the number of students.  One would be wrong to assume that.  New Zealand recognizes that with poverty and other low-SES indicators comes educational challenges.  They have unequal funding to schools with MORE funding going to low-SES schools.  This is the opposite of what we see in Illinois.  In Illinois, if a school is located in a high SES area, they get more funding because it is supplied by the local community.  In New Zealand, schools with students from high SES homes receive the baseline funding while schools with students from low SES homes receive the baseline funding PLUS principal discretionary funding, food for students, additional targeted staffing funding and other financial supports.  Schools can’t charge families fees to attend.  They do, however, strongly suggest a “voluntary donation” as part of the school registration process.  Parents don’t have to pay the donation, but most do.  It isn’t a surprise that these donations are usually found in schools with students from high SES backgrounds since those schools only receive the baseline funding (Ministry of Education, 2016).

The Ministry of Education uses a system to rank schools for their funding.  The ranking includes SES factors to determine which schools should receive more funding.  The system is called the decile system. It includes home factors such as family income, employment in low skill jobs, household crowding, parent education, and how much welfare support the family receives.  The Ministry uses decile ratings to rank schools.  Unfortunately, determining school ranks is not as simple as calculating the decile rating for the school’s local community because there are no geographic boundaries for schools.  Instead, schools send the Ministry their student rolls with addresses.  The Ministry then calculates the school’s decile rating based on where students actually live.  Every 5 years the census process divides the country into smaller blocks and calculates averages for these factors.  Those smaller blocks are then used in combination with the student home address to calculate the decile (Ministry of Education, 2016).  As you can see, the funding comes from one source, but the determination of amount of funding is a complex process that requires a few governmental agencies to figure out.

Now, how is school funding related to my hypotheses?… it influences a few of my hypotheses.  Hypothesis 1 is the one I’m working towards right now so I’ll focus here on that.  So, here we have a system that the government uses to provide equitable funding to schools.  The decile system was developed with good intentions, however it has been used in other ways.  Remember that parents have absolute free choice of where to send their children to school.  It didn’t take long for high SES families to use the decile system as a way to figure out which schools to send their children to.  Now, some schools that started out as ranked average in terms of SES backgrounds of students have been pushed to the extremes with high SES students either flowing into or out of schools.  This has caused large segregation between schools based on family SES.  And, here in New Zealand family SES is also very closely linked to ethnicity.  Local parents and educators are very familiar with the phrase “white flight” (Duff, 2016).  Now, to be fair, the changes in school demographics is not entirely the fault of school choice, there have also been changes in student demographics across the nation (Callister, 2012).  The Callister report was written in 2012 and I’m sure much has changed since then.  But, for the purpose of explaining my hypothesis, it doesn’t really matter what the underlying cause is, the bottom line is that between-school demographics has changed a lot since 2000 when PISA was first administered.

There has been talk lately about possibly replacing the decile system with a system that incorporates more than SES.  The proposed new system would include other student risk factors such as single-parent households and parental incarceration (RadioNZ, 2016).

References

Callister, P. (2012).  White flight: how data can spoil a good story.  Callister & Associates.  Retrieved from http://callister.co.nz/white-flight-how-data-can-spoil-a-good-story.pdf

Duff, M. (2016).  White flight: why middle-class parents are snubbing local schools.  Stuff. Retrieved from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/69025550/white-flight-why-middleclass-parents-are-snubbing-local-schools

Ministry of Education. (2016).  School deciles.  Retrieved from http://www.education.govt.nz/school/running-a-school/resourcing/operational-funding/school-decile-ratings/

RadioNZ.  (2016).  School decile funding system may be dropped.  Retrieved from http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/298961/school-decile-funding-system-may-be-dropped