Last week some Aucklanders in the double grammar school zone (Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls’) were upset to see that One Tree College and Selwyn College were looking at including them in their school zones too. They fear this may lead to Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls’ shrinking their school zones, excluding their children from entry to these sought-after schools.

Oh – and let’s not forget the impact on their property premium.

New Zealand prides itself on being an egalitarian society. But egalitarianism is more than saying hello to the bus driver. It is the idea that the bus driver’s children will have the same access to education and opportunity as your children do.

But what happens when the bus driver can’t afford to live in a good school zone?

An egalitarian society is one where a person’s quality of life is not determined by the situation they are born into. Of course, the lottery of birth has a huge influence on how well you do in life, but the public education system should correct for this as much as it can. Yet, in a recent paper on the impact of zoning on property prices, University of Waikato economists noted that “restrictions on schooling opportunities [zoning] are likely to exacerbate socio-economic inequalities”.

There are a several ways of attempting to achieve egalitarianism.

The first is to have a competitive system with choice. Funding follows the student, which drives schools to provide a sought-after education. Under a market model, schools would be allowed to fail. If they cannot turn the school around, over time their roll numbers fall and would be taken over by schools where demand outstrips capacity.

New Zealand’s system has the competition, but restrictive zones limit choice and remove the mechanism for failure.

The second model is one where the government decides where teachers are deployed to spread the best educators through the system. This is a far cry from our self-managing schools model where principals choose teachers.

Neither of these models, each at the extreme ends of the market-central control continuum, are ideal.

Neither is the Investing in Educational Success (IES) policy. But what government would be courageous enough to battle those in the Eastern Auckland suburbs and remove school zoning? And removing the autonomy that schools have under our self-managing system is neither foreseeable nor favorable. 

IES no doubt has snags to iron out. But it’s hard to argue with its broad principles of enabling the best educators to develop capacity in others.

The bus driver can’t drive his kids across town to a better school. But if the IES is done well, at least they have a better chance of accessing quality teaching at their local school.