Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woods Megan: Education Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 October 2012. Volume:684;Page:6002. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram) 
: 
 Yes it is. What would be really good when we are debating something as fundamental as introducing a new form of education in this country is to hear some full calls from members opposite to actually tell us why it is that they think this will make a difference to the New Zealand education system and to not hear slogans—choice opportunity and hope coming to a place near you. Well no it is not if charter schools are all they have got. This bill should not be called the Education Amendment Bill; it should be called the “Education Demolition Bill” because this is what charter schools in this country are going to be about. I am very much as a member of the Education and Science Committee looking forward to having this piece of legislation come before us. Hopefully we will have adequate time to consider this. We do not will not and never will agree to National’s charter schools. There is simply— 
Simon O’Connor 
: Ideologues. 
Dr MEGAN WOODS 
: We are not ideologues. We simply are dealing in evidence and there is no evidence that charter schools work. In fact Mr O’Connor I refer you to a 2009 Center for Research on Education Outcomes research from Stanford University. It shows that 37 percent of students in charter schools perform significantly worse than students in other schools. They simply do not work. All we have from the party opposite is a deal done over the teacups to get it back into power and it is our children who are going to suffer. They are going to have unqualified teachers in their classrooms. The children of this country are going to be used like guinea pigs. What we know from the international evidence is that they simply do not perform any better. What this is about is ideology from the other side. 
 This is about making education for profit. I would like to read from the general policy statement in the commentary to the legislation. It says: “The sponsor will sign a contract with the Crown that sets out the responsibilities and obligations of both parties.” Hard to imagine we are talking about schools education and the future of our children when we have to read sentences like that. For me education is not about contracts and what to sign in terms of setting out the obligations and the responsibilities. We have over 100 years of an education system that has worked out exactly what those rights and responsibilities and obligations are and it is working. We have an education system that we can rightly be proud of. We have an education system that performs better than in the countries from where they are modelling what will be this failed experiment. 
Hekia Parata has told us this is all about student achievement. It is just irony that she is telling school boards to focus on student achievement in the same bill that allows the setting up of charter schools which are focused on turning a profit and not on educating our children. For me there should be one outcome from a school and that is giving a child the best start in life. This is not what this bill is doing and members opposite cannot even take full calls to justify how this will be the case. If you are going to make change of this kind of magnitude then we would actually like to hear what you have got to say. 
Where is it that we are focusing these schools on? It is not surprisingly Christchurch. Christchurch is going to be a target. We have seen this in other places. Charter schools do not work. They simply have not shown that they work in other places. This is about a National Government that is running out of ideas. It has no ideas for how it is that we can make this country a better place—a place where we do have opportunity and everybody has choice and certainly where people have something more to hope for than hoping their flight to Australia is on time. What we need to do is make sure that we are putting our children first and this bill most certainly does not do that.