A lot of people are talking about the recent decision to reject the $46 million startup grant to help form new charter schools in New Hampshire. Many of the comments focus on the party-line vote, and range from ‘Democrats hate children’ to ‘Democrats rejected the money because it was procured by a Republican’.
But the blame for this vote cannot be laid entirely at the feet of Democrats. Even if Democrats were inclined to vote against the grant, Republicans — and other supporters of the grant — played right into their hands.
How? By misstating — whether accidentally, or deliberately — the fiscal consequences of accepting the grant. These misstatements took two main forms.
First, claiming that the grant wouldn’t incur any other costs to taxpayers. As explained here, this is simply untrue.
Second, constantly comparing the tuition at a charter school (roughly $7000) with the per-student cost at a regular public school (roughly $16,000), with the implication that the state would actually save money by opening the new charters. As explained here, this is irrelevant.
There were other misstatements, many of which seemed to stem from confusing the NH school funding model with models in other states. But for now, let’s look at these two.
First, suppose I give you a house worth $46,000, with some conditions. You can’t sell it, you can’t rent it out or use it to earn income, and you’ll have to pay between $14,000 and $28,000 each year to hold on to it. Also, you have to keep living in your current house. This is extra.
You might very well decide to refuse this offer. But if that’s the case, would you say that you are turning down a generous gift? That you are ‘leaving $46,000 on the table’, to use a phrase that pops up a lot in these discussions? Or would you say that you are avoiding an expensive obligation?
If we multiply the numbers by 1000, that’s the situation the state was in. The grant would have created 4,000 seats in charter schools. Each one of those seats would require the state to pony up either $3500 or $7100 in tuition, an annual expense of between $14 and $28 million. This would be in new spending from the state education trust fund. It’s not money that ‘follows the children’, another popular misconception.
Second, comparing tuition at a charter school to per-student cost at a regular public school is only relevant if a charter school is replacing a regular public school. But that’s not the case here. When a student leaves a regular public school, the budget of that school doesn’t change at all. The school is still paying for that student, even though he’s no longer there. And now the state is also paying for him. The costs are additive, so their relative sizes don’t matter.
In reading articles, editorials, social media posts, and so on, it quickly becomes clear that most people have little or no idea how money gets collected from taxpayers and spent on students. (I know I certainly didn’t, until I started trying to understand how the state could justify turning away ‘free money’.)
This is somewhat excusable, as the way we fund schools in New Hampshire is unintuitive at best, and Byzantine at worst. But for some people — like the Governor, or the Commissioner of Education — there’s really no excuse. Their misstatements about how accepting the grant wouldn’t cost taxpayers anything can only be seen as intentional, as the elevation of rhetoric above reality.
If you’re a witness in court, and you are caught in a lie, the judge will instruct the jury to disregard, not just the lie, but anything else you may have said.
If you are trying to influence a committee (whether in testimony, email, an op-ed, or a press release), and you say something that is clearly wrong, and known by the committee to be wrong — such as that accepting a grant will cost taxpayers nothing — then the committee is likely to disregard anything else you say.
So all those facts and figures and anecdotes about how charter schools would help children? Falling on deaf ears.
How should this have been handled instead? The lead should have been:
Yes, this grant is basically a down payment on new charter schools, and accepting it will incur some extra costs on New Hampshire taxpayers, to tuition students to those schools.
But looking at the budget submitted by the majority in the last session, it’s clear that the members of this committee have no objection, in principle, to increasing spending on education. So that’s not sufficient justification to turn down the grant.
Instead, the question we need to be considering is: What will we get in return for that extra spending?
I have my own thoughts about answering that question, which I’ll get to in a moment. But for now, I want to be clear about one point: A substantive discussion of the merits of accepting the grant was not even possible unless the extra costs were acknowledged up front, so they could be addressed, rather than ignored as if they don’t exist. Republicans didn’t do this, so they didn’t even get the chance to have the discussion they (and other supporters of the grant) needed to have.
In thinking about what we could expect to get in return for the extra spending, I think there are at least three approaches that would have been worth exploring, which we might call the Edunaut, Groupon, and Blockbuster Video discussions.
The Edunaut discussion
A kid who decides to leave a regular public school in order to attend a charter school is willing to leave behind all the protections that the state has put in place for students of regular public schools. He is like an astronaut — willing to risk going somewhere new, in order to bring back knowledge that can help everyone else.
It’s beyond dispute that our current system is broken. Consider that while our graduation rate is above 90 percent, only 40 percent of graduating students can perform at even the most basic levels of proficiency in fundamental subjects like reading and mathematics. This isn’t sustainable. But how do we figure out how to fix it?
The same way we figure out anything important. By conducting experiments. By trying new things, freed from the red tape and bureaucratic hoops that are supposed to represent ‘best practices’, but which clearly don’t. Anything we learn from these experiments, we can apply to all public schools, helping all the students they serve.
That’s what charter schools are for.
Viewed this way, the question isn’t whether we can afford to have charter schools. The question is whether we can afford not to have as many as possible. We should be rewarding and supporting the brave kids who are willing to assume the risks that always accompany advances in knowledge.
The Groupon discussion
What makes a Groupon coupon interesting is that the discount provided by the coupon doesn’t take effect until some minimum number of people sign up for it.
Charter schools work the same way! It’s popular to point out that the tuition at a charter school is less than half the per-student cost at a typical regular public school. So charter schools represent a huge potential savings.
Unfortunately, we can’t realize those savings until some minimum number of regular public schools are replaced with charter schools. Until then, we’re funding two parallel systems, and a small number of students moving to a small number of charters does absolutely nothing to reduce what we spend on regular public schools. It just increases what we spend on charter schools — like adding a second car payment to one that we’re already making.
Viewed this way, the question isn’t whether we should have more charter schools. The question is how many charter schools need to replace regular public schools for us to transform those potential savings into actual savings.
The Blockbuster Video discussion
Remember Blockbuster Video? At its peak, it was an amazing store. They had the inventory, they had the indexing, they had the locations. But they didn’t keep up with Netflix and other competitors. They didn’t take into account changes in technology. They just kept doing the same things, in the same way. So they went out of business. Which is what should have happened.
If Blockbuster had a been the same kind of tax-funded monopoly as a regular public school, all those stores would still be there, taking up prime real estate. You’d be paying your ‘video tax’ to keep them in business, on top of whatever you were paying to other stores or businesses to actually watch movies. They’d still have VHS tapes for rent, and each rental would be around $20, because they’d have to keep raising their prices to account for a declining customer base.
The Blockbuster story demonstrates something crucial about accountability. Unless an institution can go out of business, it cannot, in any meaningful way, be said to be accountable to anyone.
Setting aside disagreements about how charter schools stack up against regular public schools, there is one absolutely crucial difference between the two: Charter schools can go out of business when they screw up. Except in the rarest of circumstances, regular public schools cannot.
So if accountability is essential, the question isn’t whether we should have more charter schools. The question is why we would ever want to have anything but charter schools.
There are other approaches that might be explored as well. But again, let me be clear: I’m not saying that any of these approaches is ‘the right approach’, or that any of these discussions would be ‘the right discussion’ to have. The point I am making is just this: Discussions like these were stopped before they could even get started by the refusal to acknowledge the extra costs that would be incurred by accepting the grant.
In this debate, Republicans sacrificed their credibility early on by wishing away the extra costs that it would incur. And in so doing, they practically begged Democrats to ignore whatever else they had to say.
What can we learn from this? As someone once noted, experience is a great teacher, but she sends terrific bills. In this case, the bill for a lesson about embracing, rather than ignoring, unpleasant facts turned out to be $46 million. One can only hope it’s not a lesson we’ll have to repeat too many times.
