In the movie Idiocracy, people in the future experience massive crop failures. Why? Because the government has convinced farmers that ‘electrolytes are what plants crave’, so farmers start watering their fields with the sports drink Brawndo (which is basically Gatorade).
I couldn’t help thinking of this the other day when someone forwarded me the latest email blast from Comrade Volinsky, who is running something called the School Funding Fairness Project.
In this email, he’s got a spreadsheet showing, for each district, how much more money the legislature tried to give them, only to be stopped by the governor’s veto of the budget.
What made me think of Idiocracy is this: There isn’t even a hint that the money is needed for anything in particular. Basically, people have become convinced that ‘money is what schools need’, and that if we just pour money on schools, students will learn more — even though half a century of data say that this simply isn’t true.
In fact, if you watch this clip from the movie, it’s easy to imagine that you’re not in some fictional future, but in a meeting about school funding taking place somewhere in Concord right now. The only real difference is that instead of talking about pouring electrolytes on crops, they’re talking about pouring money on schools. The ‘logic’ is exactly the same.
The problem with all this is that Comrade Volinsky’s definition of ‘fairness’ is the same one that’s been bankrupting communities financially, and bankrupting students educationally. This is reflected in the name of his group, which is not concerned with fairness in education, just fairness in funding. As if those are the same.
There is a better definition, which focuses, not on money, but on what it is that schools are actually supposed to be doing, and — more importantly — on why we use taxes to fund them in the first place. Ironically, when you stop obsessing about money, and start thinking about learning, a lot of the money problems go away. The kids win and the taxpayers win.
The only people who lose are the ones who have managed to turn the public school system into a massive jobs program/social work agency. Those people can’t afford to consider any ideas that might involve trying to do more with less, instead of trying to do less with more.
