Earlier today, I had an article in another place pleading with Education Minister Chris Hipkins not to discriminate against integrated schools. You can see that here. There were a few objections to this which I’d like to address as follows:
Some integrated schools are privileged: It’s true that some formerly exclusive Anglican schools have now been integrated. But so are some state schools. Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls Grammar are each getting $400,000 for maintenance. St Joseph’s, a decile one school in Patea, on the other hand, gets nothing.
Here is the list of Catholic schools in New Zealand. Look at the deciles of each of them. Does that look like a club for elite to you?
A consistent refrain on Twitter that while these schools once served disadvantaged communities, that’s no longer the case. This is not true. A few years back, Metro had a very good feature on the popularity of Catholic secondary schooling. Here’s an important takeaway:
Catholic schools perform. They sit well above national averages across all levels of NCEA. In Auckland, 75.6 per cent of students leaving Catholic schools attained University Entrance in 2013, as opposed to 52.5 per cent from state schools. About 45 per cent of Catholic-school students in Auckland are Pakeha, and that percentage is dropping. Pacific Island students make up 28 per cent. In state schools, Pasifika students can be a gloomy statistic, but their numbers grow at Catholic schools and achievement grows with them.
But in any event, the funding the government has announced is not targeted on the basis of need. The idea that no integrated school should be helped because some exclusive boarding schools are integrated makes no sense in the context of a funding announcement that doesn’t seem to really take need into account.
The Pope should cough up: It is true that the majority - but by no means, all - of the integrated schools in New Zealand are owned by the Catholic Church. But “the Church” is much more decentralised than people might think of their usually limited knowledge. It is really a union of 3,160 separate ecclesiastical bodies, including over 645 archdioceses and 2,236 dioceses, For the most part, they are all required to be financially self-supporting..
The Church in New Zealand is not rich. There are a handful of places in the world where the Church is rich. One of them is Germany, where the state collects and pays a Church tax on baptised adults. The other is parts of the United States, where a quarter of the population is Catholic and Irish Americans have been a runaway economic success story.
Local dioceses are responsible for their local schools but even if “Rome” was on the hook it’s unlikely that it would be able to pay. Did you know that the Holy See’s annual budget is smaller than that of the Archdiocese of Chicago? This isn’t the 1850s anymore and the Church doesn’t control vast swathes of Italy like it once did.
It’s true that the Church owns a large number of iconic buildings and artworks that cost a lot to maintain and generate no revenue. It could sell those things to property developers and private collectors, perhaps, but that’s no long term solution to school funding difficulties in New Zealand. In the meantime, broken spouting is broken spouting and arguing about something the local church has no control over seems a strange way to go about fixing that.
Why should the state pay for private buildings: This one relies on the fact that a lot of people with strong opinions also don’t really understand the difference between improvements and repairs. And in fairness, in some contexts (i.e. the deductibility of expenses from income tax) even experienced people can struggle to get it right.
Basically, however, expenses for routine and expected actions that keep building elements in their original condition or to a required legal standard (broadly speaking, repairs and maintenance) are not capital expenditure. Capital improvements, on the other hand, include things like new buildings and measures taken to boost a building’s value beyond its original state.
The money the government is making available to most state schools is for capital maintenance, not for capital improvements. And since integrated schools are meant to be funded in the same way as other state schools for such things, the argument that integrated schools should be excluded on those grounds is flimsy at best.
What it all comes down to
There is no way of reasoning people opposed to integrated schools in principle out of their opposition, I suppose. If your attitude to education is everything within the state, nothing outside the state then it’s unlikely there will be any convincing you of anything else. And that’s fine - it’s a view.
But this argument is about whether the state should live up to the commitments it made when it entered into the integration process for the sake of children who happen to go to a faith-based school that is still, at the end of the day, part of the state system of education.
This is not an attack on the Labour government, which I expect will come round to the decision if the Education Minister engages with the sector. In the first place, Hipkins has demonstrated pragmatism and fair-mindedness before and it seems unlikely that he would share in the personal prejudices of others against these schools.
Perhaps more crucially, however, the 90,000 students in integrated schools all have parents and grandparents. Many of them are drawn from segments of the electorate that typically swing voters. Few of them are apt to be understanding as to why their kids’ schools should miss out.
So again, it will be surprising if the government doesn’t eventually do the right thing.
DISCLOSURE: I served as an altar boy at Sacred Heart Rongotea between 1996 and 2001.