If there’s anything that we should have learned over the last half century, it’s that spending more money on schools does nothing to improve student achievement, and that there is no correlation between the amount spent and the results obtained.
And if there’s anything that we should have learned during the two decades since the Claremont decision, it’s that even making every district into a ‘rich district’ does nothing to improve student performance.
These results shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. We’ve been focusing all our attention on money, and very little on what we’re doing with the money. It’s almost as if we think that something will work better if we pay more for it, or if we take the money out of a different pocket.
But let’s pretend for a moment that money is the issue, and that we want to change how schools are paid for without having to change anything about how they actually operate. We could keep tinkering with property tax rates, or adequacy formulas, or stabilization grants, or gambling revenues, or whatever. But we’ve tried all that. One definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.
However, there is one simple change that we could make, which would have the immediate effect of lowering property taxes everywhere; and which would also have the longer-term effect of simultaneously reducing spending and increasing achievement.
It’s so simple, and so obvious, it’s truly amazing that it’s almost never suggested.
The change is just this: Parents would pay for their own kids, to the extent that they can, and their towns would provide monetary assistance for the amounts they can’t come up with.
Nothing else would change. The district would come up with a budget that includes a per-pupil cost. The parents whose children attend school in that district would pay as much of the per-pupil cost as they can, for each of their children. And the district would collect the shortfall — rather than the entire cost — in property taxes.
We might call this the Educaid model. Or means testing. Or we could just call it fair.
That is, if you have money that you could put towards the schooling of your own children, what could be less fair than making other people subsidize you? Especially people who are less well off than you are? It’s perverse.
Just to get some numbers to think with, let’s say that
- 10 percent of the parents in a district could pay 100% of the cost for their children.
- 20 percent of the parents could pay 50%.
- 30 percent of the parents could pay 25%.
- 40 percent of the parents could pay 10%.
What would this mean? It would mean that the parents would be coming up with almost 30 percent of the school budget, leaving 70 percent to be made up by the town. That would be, as they say, a good first step.
Is there any scheme now being considered in Concord that would come anywhere near giving that kind of tax relief to property owners?
But wait — wouldn’t this create another bureaucracy, to figure out which parents can afford how much? Not really, because there are already a number of other assistance programs, to help people get money for medical care, food, heat, housing, and so on. There’s no reason why they can’t share the paperwork.
In fact, the SNAP (food stamp) program is already being used to certify children who are eligible for free lunches at school. So this is just a generalization of something we’re already doing.
And there is already a system (FAFSA) that parents use to determine how much of the cost of a college education they can afford to pay. Since the cost of a year in some public schools exceeds the cost of a year in college, this system should produce reasonable results.
So that’s what we would see in the short term: Immediate and significant property tax relief.
What about the long term? Well, let’s say you’re a parent of three, and now instead of getting $45,000 in schooling for $5000 in property taxes, you need to start coming up with an additional $5000. That’s still a pretty nice discount, so you might not be too concerned about trying to bring costs down.
You will, however, be a lot more concerned with getting your money’s worth from the school! So you would have an incentive to put pressure on the school to change how it does things — for example, favoring mastery of a small number of fundamental abilities over mediocrity in a wider variety of less important subjects.
Or, let’s say you’re a parent of three, and now instead of getting $45,000 in schooling for $5000 in property taxes, you need to start coming up with the whole amount. The first thing that might occur to you would be to use that money to send your kids to private schools!
But you’re still on the hook for that $5000 — that is, you’re still paying for everyone else’s kids, in addition to paying for your own. A lot of parents aren’t going to be able to do both. So those parents are going to be very interested in getting costs down.
To put it bluntly, if we’re going to make any progress on fixing our schools, we need to mobilize parents by making them pay a lot more attention to (1) what they’re paying, and (2) what they’re getting for it.
The approach I’m describing would give us two sets of parents, each pushing at one end of the problem — bringing quality up, and bringing costs down — with interests that are aligned with the interests of the taxpayers who are being forced to support them.
Contrast that with the current situation, where we have one set of parents who are almost exclusively focused on increasing spending, and whose interests are 180 degrees away from the interests of taxpayers.
Wouldn’t it be nice to get into a spiral where costs keep going down, while quality keeps going up, instead of the other way around? We’re one small step away from that.
