In their recent column ‘Our Turn: A painful exercise in education funding’, John Tobin and Doug Hall attempt some feats of misdirection worthy of the magicians Penn & Teller.
They begin with the popular misstatement that ‘Our state constitution makes our state government responsible for educating New Hampshire’s children’. People tend to accept this uncritically, in much the same way that they watch the hand that is moving the cup instead of watching the hand that is depositing the ball into a pocket.
If you haven’t read Part 2, Article 83 of the New Hampshire constitution, please take a moment to do that now. When you do, you’ll see that it identifies an individual right (‘the inherent and essential right of the people’ to ‘free and fair competition in the trades and industries’), and also a state responsibility (to protect competition ‘against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it’).
But the court has replaced this actual right, and this actual responsibility, with an invented right (to an education), and an invented responsibility (to pay for it). In other words, the court would have you believe that Article 83 requires the state to create a tax-funded monopoly to hinder free and fair competition in the industry of education. Which — as anyone but a supreme court justice can see — is 180 degrees away from the plain meaning of the Article.
(Additionally, the Article specifies that the state must treat ‘seminaries and public schools’ in the same way. Can the state fund, regulate, or operate a seminary? No, it can’t. So it can’t do those things for public schools, either. But don’t take my word for any of this. Go read the document. Tobin and Hall are betting that you won’t.)
All of which is to say: Everything that Tobin and Hall claim is mandated by the constitution is actually mandated by the court; and accepting that these are the same requires accepting that the court is the constitution. Which is certainly what the court — and Tobin and Hall, and Andru Volinsky, and many others — would like you to think.
Having convinced you that whatever the court says goes, they then add another level of misdirection by misquoting the court. What the court actually said is that the state must ‘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’.
If we take that mandate seriously, we find that, far from $3600 being too small a sum to provide an adequate education, it’s actually more than is needed. To see why, we need to pay attention to three crucial words: educable, necessary, and opportunity.
The word ‘educable’ is a frank admission that not every child is going to be able to participate intelligently in the named systems. The court is saying that for these children, the state has no responsibility to provide them with anything, let alone the exorbitant amounts that their parents now demand from the rest of us.
The word ‘necessary’ draws a clear line between what taxes may pay for, and what they may not. That is, if some knowledge and learning are necessary for intelligent participation in the named systems, then other knowledge and learning are unnecessary for that; and only the former may be supported by taxes.
To take just a few examples: Is literacy necessary for intelligent participation in these systems? Yes. Is speaking a foreign language, or playing a musical instrument, or learning about ‘wood technology’ necessary? No. So what the court has said is that teaching children to read and write is a valid use of tax money, while teaching those other things is not.
It’s worth taking a moment here to talk about literacy. Suppose we set as our goal teaching every educable child to read at an 8th-grade level. If you can read at an 8th-grade level, then the only thing standing between you and reading at a 12th-grade level is… more reading. And that reading is not something that you need a teacher, or a classroom, to do.
A student who can read at a 12th-grade level can take on nearly one hundred percent of the responsibility for his own education, rather than needing a ‘class’ in which he can have books read to him (and for which he can receive ‘credit’ whether he learns anything or not). For a student who can read with fluency and comprehension, the cost of providing an opportunity to learn something is just the cost of giving him access to the relevant materials. Which brings us to the third of our crucial words.
The word ‘opportunity’ rules out making any aspect of education mandatory. And it rules out using taxes to purchase goods and services for children whose parents can already afford to provide them.
But it also must take into account that we are surrounded 24/7 by ubiquitous, free, high-quality pedagogy. Anyone connected to the internet has the opportunity to learn practically anything known to practically anyone, anywhere. So the cost to the state of providing the opportunity to become educated is the cost of a laptop every few years, and an internet connection — but only for those students whose parents can’t afford those things.
Finally, Tobin and Hall offer up another piece of constitutional sleight of hand that most people accept without even thinking about it: that it is the court’s job to tell the legislature what the law should say, i.e., that the legislature works for the court, when actually the judiciary and the legislature are co-equal branches of government. Again, I urge you to check the state constitution for any evidence that the court is empowered to do this. You won’t find any.
And all of this misdirection is intended to keep you from ever noticing the single most obvious fact about school funding, which is that money is irrelevant to achievement. How do we know this? As a nation, we’ve more than tripled spending (adjusted for inflation) over the last 50 years. In NH, we’ve tripled spending (adjusted for inflation) just since Claremont. During those periods, we’ve introduced new technologies, curricula, assessments, and pedagogical approaches — and lots of new jobs — while seeing absolutely no increases in student achievement, as measured by the very experts who introduced all these changes.
Whatever is wrong with our schools — as evidenced by our 90% graduation rate, and our 40% proficiency rate — it should be clear by now that more money won’t fix it. The question, when considering the ‘cost of an adequate education’ isn’t whether $3600 will pay for the kinds of things we’ve been doing (clearly it won’t), but whether it will pay for the things we should be doing.
If kids are taught — as they should be — to take control of their own learning as soon as possible, $3600 per student is more than sufficient. On the other hand, if kids are taught — as they are now — that education is something that is done to them, rather than something they do to themselves, no amount of money will ever be enough.
The act put on by Penn & Teller works by tricking you into momentarily forgetting the simple truths that you know, and have always known — for example, that a ball can’t simply vanish into thin air.
The act put on by Tobin & Hall works in much the same way. They want you to forget what you know from experience about how well children learn (and how poorly schools teach), forget that the constitution is a document that you can read (instead of having the courts ‘explain’ it to you), and so on.
The big difference is that Penn & Teller are up front about admitting that they are in the business of fooling you, and in many cases will show you exactly how their tricks work. Tobin & Hall, in contrast, are hoping that you won’t notice that they are jerking you around like trout.
If we really want to bankrupt ourselves by turning schools into comprehensive social welfare agencies/daycare centers that do as much to prevent education as to promote it, then let’s at least do it with our eyes open — without pretending that it doesn’t violate both our constitution, and our common sense.
