In a recent editorial about how school choice and charter schools ‘put public school funding at risk’, Donald Cohen waves three red herrings, hoping to distract you from the real issues at hand. They come up a lot, so they’re worth looking at more closely.
The first red herring is money. Half a century of data demonstrate conclusively that money is largely irrelevant where education is concerned. Nationwide, we’ve tripled per-student spending (adjusted for inflation) over the course of 50 years, with no measurable changes in student achievement.
Within New Hampshire, we’ve tripled spending in just 20 years, again with no measurable changes in achievement.
Plotting per-student spending by state against NAEP scores shows absolutely no correlation between spending and results.
Whatever the problem with schools is, the one thing we know for sure is that money isn’t the solution.
The second red herring is religion. As former New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Chuck Douglas has explained, the United States Supreme Court has already, in several cases, established the principle what matters isn’t where money ends up, but who decides that it should go there.
If a state decides to donate money to a church, that’s forbidden. But if a state gives a welfare check to someone who then decides to put some of that money in the collection plate at his church, that’s okay.
In exactly the same way, if a state decides to spend money on a religious school, that’s forbidden. But if a state gives money to a parent who then decides to spend it on a religious school, that’s okay.
This is, as they say, settled, and the only reason to drag it out is to stir up passions in the hope that they will overwhelm reason.
The third red herring is an unwarranted presumption of competence. That is, the presumption that we already know how to educate children, and that the ‘best practices’ followed at public schools are effective.
However, our 90% graduation rate and our 40% basic proficiency rate in core subjects like English and math tell a different story.
So what are the real issues? They have to do with how and when we learn.
So first, how do we learn? By trying things we haven’t tried before. That’s true for children, for adults, for companies, for teams, for governments… and for schools. The simple truth is that any set of ‘standards’ for how to do things is a recipe for fighting the last war, not the next one.
Every company or institution that is seriously preparing for the future sets aside some of its revenues for research, i.e., for trying things it hasn’t tried before, some of which can be expected to fail, but some of which can be expected to provide returns far beyond what was invested.
It would be short-sighted to think of these funds (which are often quite small compared to other expenses) as being ‘stolen from’ or ‘drained away’ from other parts of the enterprise.
Similarly, if our public school system is to seriously prepare for the future, it needs to do the same. And that is exactly what charter schools are for — to try things that haven’t been tried before, some of which can be expected to fail, but some of which can be expected to change our understanding of education in a way that ends up benefitting all students everywhere. It’s also a benefit that we can get from tuitioning students to private schools — if we’re smart enough to monitor them to see what works, and what doesn’t.
And similarly, it would be short-sighted to think of these funds (which are quite small compared to other public school expenses) as being stolen from or drained away from other parts of the system.
Second, when do we learn? Briefly, we learn when we’re interested… and we don’t when we’re not. We learn when we can pursue knowledge in ways that align with our particular strengths as individual learners… and we don’t when we can’t.
In New Hampshire, we spend about $15,000 per student, per year. For less than $1000, we could provide every student with a computer and an internet connection, and that student would have the opportunity to learn just about anything there is to be learned, which is what the courts have actually mandated to state to provide.
So what are we doing with the other $14,000? Mostly, we’re babysitting kids whose parents are at work, and trying to get those kids to learn things they don’t care about. We could spend twice as much, or ten times as much, and it wouldn’t help.
The real travesty of getting sidetracked by red herrings like money, religion, and unwarranted presumptions of competence, is that we never get around to asking the two questions that would most help us view our problems from a perspective from which we might actually be able to solve them: If a student wants to learn something, who can stop him? And if a student doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him?
