Charter schools and cycling

Recently National and ACT signed a coalition agreement which included an initiative to trial some charter schools in low income areas such as South Auckland.

There has been a lot of discussion in the media and blogosphere around charter schools since then – mainly about whether they will help increase educational achievement.

David Farrar says they will while Danyl at the Dimpost says they likely won’t because they haven’t worked particularly well in the USA. This article from the New York Times offers interesting insights, as does this piece about education in Finland.

Personally, I think my friend from NZEI was probably right when she said that one of the government’s main reasons for bringing in charter schools is to try and break the teachers’ unions (or, at the least, diminish their power) by getting a higher proportion of teachers into the workforce who are not union members or involved in collective bargaining. Teachers  in charter schools won’t be on the collective contract that applies to all NZ teachers working in state schools.

But anyway, this is a blog about cycling, not pedagogy or industrial relations.

Charter schools won’t be zoned

From a transport perspective, what is most important about charter schools is that, unlike state schools in NZ, they will not be obliged to take “in zone” children. For those of you who have no children and never read articles in the Herald about house prices, right now most popular state schools in NZ have a zoning system.

This means the vast majority of their students have to come from within a zone around the school. The rest of the students who live out of zone get picked out of a ballot.

You can see the zones for different schools on this website – and the thing that is most striking about them is that they are small. Probably only 1 or 2 km around the school (roughly) for primary and 5 km for most highschools.

Zoning means kids live near their schools

The zoning system is primarily put in place to prevent over-crowding at particularly popular schools but it also has a strong side-effect on how far children travel to school. If a school has a particularly good reputation and parents can afford it to live near it they will move in-zone. When parents can’t afford it they’ll send their kids to the local school, which generally still does a pretty good job at providing a decent education.

According to MfEd, 86% of NZ children go to state schools.  10% go to state integrated schools and only a very small proportion (4%) go to private schools.

State-integrated schools are schools of special character (e.g., a Catholic school or kura kauapapa Maori).

The effect of all this is that most children in Auckland still live pretty close to their school. According to this report by NZTA (PDF), 50% of trips to school in Auckland are under 2 km. 75% are under 5.5 km. Obviously, kids at high school tend to travel slightly further to school than kids at primary because high schools are larger and have bigger zones.

If we wanted to, we could fix this situation pretty easily

I always find this statistic very comforting because what it suggests to me is that right now we may have completely mucked the design of our city up. We may have created an environment in which most parents are afraid (PDF) to let their children or teenagers walk or ride to school alone. Rates of walking and cycling to school may have halved (PDF) since the late 1990s.

We may have some of the highest rates of vehicle ownership, kms driven, and obesity in the world. Less than 1% of our children may cycle to school.

But, if we got a pro-active government and council in place who really wanted to turn this situation around for our children, they could pretty easily. Because the barriers to getting somebody to walk or cycle 2 kms are much lower than the barriers to getting them to walk or cycle 10 km.

All it would probably take is a few changes, such as: Putting in place lower speed limits around schools, increasing funding for walking and cycling to school programs and putting in place more infrastructure for pedestrians and cylists around schools, and we could probably see a dramatic change in the way our children travel for what would likely (as a proportion of the entire transport budget) be a very minor cost.

Charter schools will make it harder to raise walking and cycling rates for kids

Charter schools will change all that because they will allow parents to send their children to school in a much wider range. Obviously, 4-5 charter schools, which is the current proposal, won’t make much difference.

But if, say, 20% of Auckland children were attending charter or private schools they weren’t zoned for that would make a huge difference. It would increase congestion on our roads and make it harder to increase walking and cycling rates.

And that, for me, is enough to make me seriously question whether we should introduce Charter Schools at all, unless we have really strong evidence they will increase educational outcomes for those who are struggling in our current system.

You probably think that’s hopelessly myopic of me, to be so focused on transport, but where we live and the way we travel around our cities matters – it matters to our climate, our air quality, our physical and mental health, our house prices, the amenity of the neighbourhoods we live in, and our quality of life.

What do you think? Do you think we should have a system that ensures most kids  go to their local school?