Royters

I've just caught up on this news (it's been a big week) - unfortunately 'vouchers' have been ruled out to provide choice for the 20% of under-performing students and the top performing 5% as proposed by the Inter-Party Working Group on School Choice.

http://www.odt.co.nz/news/politics/121215/key-rules-out-education-vouchers

The report produced by the cross-party group of ACT, National and Maori Party MPs produced the "Step Change - Success the only option" report earlier this year. It proposed targeting the above groups and allowing school choice for students who are not achieving as they should.

I actually dislike the term 'vouchers' as it has become a tainted concept when applied to education. People think of vouchers as a discount on things like cans of baked beans. Education vouchers are not a discount at all - they would enable parents to enrol their children at any school and the funding that the student attracts would follow them to the school they attend.

I must admit that it has been a few years since I was in high school but I don’t recall our trigonometry lessons researching anything as exciting as the distance from the centre of the earth to the peak of a mountain, and we were blindly led to believe that Mt Cook was, at 12349 feet (3754m) our highest mountain.

Now I find that a Christchurch Boys' High School year 10 maths class, verified by Canterbury University, has blown this assertion out of the water, advising that instead Mt Ruapehu is 600m closer to the heavens than lowly Mt Cook.