Oh, boy! It looks like we’re going to have a new education funding commission, to look at the question of how schools should be funded in New Hampshire.
We can safely make two predictions about how this will work out. First, school spending will go up significantly. Second, student achievement will not go up at all. Why? Because that’s how things have been going ever since Claremont, more than 20 years ago.
That is, we now spend, on average, and adjusted for inflation, about $10,000 more per student per year, than we did before Claremont. And during that interval there has been no measurable increase in student achievement.
But couldn’t it be different this time? It’s pretty to think that this might happen, but the early signs are discouraging.
The first such sign is that the chairman of the commission, State Rep. David Luneau, seems to believe that the problem to be solved can be summed up this way: The current system results in a different education being given to students living in property-rich versus property-poor school districts.
Let’s think about that for a moment.
First, Rep. Luneau seems to think that education is something that is ‘given to students’, instead of something that students do to themselves. If you’re looking for one fundamental misconception that causes more problems than any other, this would certainly be a good candidate.
Another would be the idea that ‘different’ is a bad thing. If you listen to people talk about schools, one of the phrases you hear most often is ‘local control’. Clearly, what people don’t want is for every school to be the same as every other school, and with good reason. When everything has to be the same, mistakes get amplified, rather than randomly canceling each other out. To borrow a phrase from computer programming, ‘different’ is a feature, not a bug.
Possibly he meant to say that the current system results in a worse education being given to students living in property-rich versus property-poor school districts. But is this actually a problem? Suppose every kid in every district got a solid grounding in literacy (reading, writing, rhetoric), numeracy (arithmetic, algebra, statistics), and rationality (logic, with an emphasis on learning the fallacies that are often used to fool people). Any kid with an education like that would be in a position to learn, and thus become, anything he wants to.
Would it then be such a big deal if the schools in some districts offered more classes in more subjects? It would not, because students who are solidly grounded in fundamentals would be able to teach themselves those subjects. That’s what it means to be solidly grounded in fundamentals.
What’s crucial isn’t whether education in one district is different, or worse than in another district. The issue is whether education in every district is adequate for taking charge of one’s own education.
Rep. Luneau is indicating that in his view, the problem to be resolved is fundamentally one of jealousy. (‘Those people over there are spending more than we are, and it’s not fair.’) History shows that taking this approach leads to everyone spending more money, without anyone ever addressing questions like: If a kid wants to learn something, who can stop him? And if a kid doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him — and at what cost?
If you’re looking for a recipe for funding disaster, focusing on money rather than minds is a good one.
A second sign of impending disaster is that this is all being driven by a pronouncement made by Cheshire County Superior Court Judge David Ruoff: ‘The distribution of a resource as precious as educational opportunity may not have as its determining force the mere fortuity of a child’s residence.’
Again, let’s think about that for a moment.
First, he’s saying that there are other resources as precious as educational opportunity. So we don’t change the meaning of his statement at all if we rephrase it as: ‘The distribution of precious resources may not be determined by the mere fortuity of a child’s residence’.
Well, what determines a child’s residence? In almost every case, his parentage. What determines a child’s parentage? In a word, luck. Some kids are lucky enough to be born to parents who have lots of resources, while others aren’t.
So again, we don’t change the meaning of the judge’s statement if we rephrase it as: ‘The distribution of precious resources may not be determined by luck’.
And that, he would tell you, is the constitution speaking. It turns out that luck is unconstitutional. Who knew?
In addition, Judge Ruoff’s comment about ‘the distribution of… educational opportunity’ makes me think about a scene from The Horse Whisperer. (And I hope you’ll think about it, too, whenever you hear people discussing schools or school funding.)
Taking a break from dancing, Annie asks Tom if they can get some water. He grabs a glass and they head to the porch. She thinks they’re going to have to walk through a downpour to find water at a house some distance away. Deciding she isn’t that desperate, she’s about to turn back. He says: ‘Here we are, looking out through the rain and you’re thinking, too bad, no water.’
She’s so focused on the idea that you can only get water from a faucet that she can’t see the water that’s all around her.
Anyone with a cell phone and a WiFi connection is a few clicks away from the accumulated knowledge of mankind, and thousands of people who are lined up for the chance to teach him anything he wants to know, often for free. That is the distribution of educational opportunity in the world we live in.
But people like Judge Ruoff, and Rep. Luneau, are so focused on the idea that you can only get education from a school that they can’t see the education that’s all around them.
Now, it’s amazing to me that people who have so little power to reason coherently, and so little awareness of the nature of the world around them, are able to end up in positions where they can exert so much influence over our lives.
But you know what’s even more amazing than that, is that we feel like we have to actually listen to them.