A recent Grok post begins: All our state’s students deserve the best education possible…
I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.
There’s no court-mandated right to ‘the best education possible’. (Or to ‘a bright future’, as our Education Commissioner likes to say. Or to ‘fulfill their potentials’. And so on.)
The courts have required the state to provide each EDUCABLE child with an OPPORTUNITY to acquire the knowledge and learning NECESSARY to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.
Currently, any school district could meet this mandate by providing a laptop and an internet connection to each child in the district, for less than 10% of what it’s spending now — while, ironically, actually increasing the options available to each child by orders of magnitude.
Rhetoric about what kids ‘deserve’ gives people the feels, but it’s not in the mandate, and it’s a big contributor to our slide towards bankruptcy.
If you’re going to take money from taxpayers — if you’re going to infringe on their right to property — Article 3 of the state constitution requires you to use that money to protect their other rights. That is the constitutional (as opposed to court-mandated) justification for taxes of any kind, taken for any purpose.
So it’s not the children, but rather the taxpayers, who ‘deserve’ something in return for the money being taken from them. In particular, they deserve to be spared the danger to their rights that comes from being surrounded by newly-minted ‘graduates’ who are illiterate, innumerate, and irrational, whether those graduates are from regular public schools, or charter schools, or private schools, or are schooled at home.
Until proponents of school choice and other educational reforms get that straight, and stop treating tax-funded education as a charity program, they’re always going to be at odds with taxpayers.
How can we move in that direction? We could start by changing the rhetoric so that the interests of parents, students, and taxpayers are aligned, instead of at cross-purposes. For example:
- If we took seriously the idea that tax-funded schools should be teaching what is necessary for participation in society, it would make it easier to stop using taxes to fund the teaching of what is unnecessary. That provides a bright line for paring down the curriculum to a manageable — and affordable — size.
- If we took seriously the idea that this is about opportunity, it we would require parents who can afford to fund even part of the education of their children do that, instead of relying completely on subsidies, which are often taken from people who are less well off than those parents.
- If we took seriously the idea that it’s the ability to demonstrate competence, rather than the ability to sit still in a seat for 12 years, that makes you ready to ‘commence’ your life as a citizen, we could eliminate our current toxic reliance on cohorts and credits. Students could graduate faster (relieving taxpayers of the burden of ‘keeping them busy’ until they reach an arbitrary age); and graduation would actually become meaningful again.
This all begins with directing rhetoric about schools towards how taxpayers can get what they’re paying for, instead of towards how kids can get what they ‘deserve’. Because if approached properly, those actually turn out to be the same thing.
