A phrase we heard a lot the other night at Andru Volinsky’s traveling show was ‘fix it’, as in: ‘Some states have fixed it’, ‘The legislature doesn’t have the political will to fix it’, and so on.
Which raises the question: Does something actually need to be fixed?
This needs to be asked, because whenever there is a conversation about reducing spending on government schools, we hear this argument: ‘New Hampshire’s schools are among the best in the nation’, the implication being that this is a result of our willingness to spend so much on them (about $15,300 per pupil, well above the national average of $11,800).
That doesn’t sound like something that needs to be fixed, does it?
On the other hand, whenever there is a conversation about increasing spending on those same schools, we hear the opposite argument: ‘New Hampshire’s schools are failing our children’, the implication being that this is a result of our unwillingness to spend enough on them.
So which is it? Is our government school system succeeding, or failing? Doing well, or doing poorly? It can’t be both, and without knowing which is the case, how can we decide whether spending should be increased, decreased, or left alone?
To take just one commonly-used metric, let’s look at 2015 NAEP scores for 4th grade reading. We find New Hampshire in one of the top three spots:
State Score Massachusetts 235 DoDEA 234 New Hampshire 232
That looks pretty good, right?
But wait — what’s DoDEA? Did President Trump annex another state while everyone was distracted by Mueller’s investigation?
No, DoDEA stands for Department of Defense Education Activity. It’s essentially a collection of schools for children of military members stationed at various bases in the United States. It’s in between New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the standings. What does it cost to get results like that?
State Score Cost per pupil Massachusetts 235 $15,600 DoDEA 234 $23,300 New Hampshire 232 $15,300
As we might expect, there’s not much difference between NH and MA. But look at how much DoDEA spends per pupil! What could we expect if we bumped our spending up to that level?
It’s a trick question. First, a difference of two points is considered statistically insignificant. So we could think of this as a three-way tie for first. To move from third to first, we don’t have to spend a dime!
Second, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between spending and results. If that’s not already clear, let’s look at a few other interesting cases:
State Score [rank] Cost per pupil [rank] Massachusetts 235 1 $15,600 9 DoDEA 234 2 $23,300 1 New Hampshire 232 3 $15,300 12 Utah 226 14 $7,000 52 North Carolina 226 16 $8,800 47 New York 223 29 $22,400 2 Alaska 213 49 $17,500 7 DC 212 51 $19,200 3
So, does spending a lot of money correlate with impressive results?
Again, it’s a trick question. In this particular test, a score of 239 (out of a maximum of 500) indicates minimum proficiency, so in that sense, every state is failing, and New Hampshire is in a three-way tie for ‘least failed’.
We can draw two important conclusions from this table. First, something does need to be fixed. Second, fixing it has nothing to do with how much we spend.
Which we already knew:
But if increased spending isn’t the key to improvement, what is? More technology? Less technology? A better curriculum? New assessments? A longer school year? More parental involvement? Less parental influence? Fairness? Inclusiveness? Competition? Discipline?
I think it’s something that almost no one ever talks about: motivation.
The main slide for Volinsky’s presentation shows a cracked chalkboard, which is supposed to remind the viewer of just how awful the conditions are in some schools around the state.
During the Q&A period after the presentation, state representative Kevin Verville pointed to the picture and noted that when Abe Lincoln was teaching himself to read and write, he didn’t even have a chalkboard. He had to use coal from his fireplace to write on the back of a shovel.
It might be apocryphal, but that doesn’t diminish the point of the story: Lincoln learned to read and write, and then learned to practice law, because he wanted to.
The questions no one wants to ask, with respect to improving schools, are these:
- If you want to learn something, who can stop you?
- If you don’t want to learn something, who can make you, and how?
Money isn’t the issue. It may have been a limiting factor once, but even Lincoln was able to progress by borrowing books from neighbors. Now we live in a world where anyone with a $200 laptop and an internet connection has access not just to the accumulated knowledge of the world, but also to countless people who are eager to help him learn anything he wants to know, often for free.
If we actually want to improve the performance of our government schools, we need to stop obsessing over money, and start focusing on motivation — kindling it, then cultivating it, and ultimately just getting out of its way.