The First Law of Holes is: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Don’t change shovels, or set a new schedule, or try a new digging technique. Just stop.
We’re in a particularly deep hole with regard to school funding, and we need to stop digging. But to do that, we need to turn our focus away from the usual discussions about how much money we need, or who should have to cough it up, or which kinds of taxes we should use to take it from them. Instead, we need to turn that focus towards the question of why we use taxes to fund schools in the first place.
We need to focus on this question for two reasons. First, as far as trying to help students learn, decades of data show that how much we spend is largely irrelevant.
Second, unless we have a clear, shared idea of what we’re trying to accomplish, the only way we can hope to succeed is by accident. As Zig Ziglar used to say: You can’t hit a target that you can’t see, and you can’t see a target that you don’t have.
Recently, I came across this charming explanation of why we pay school taxes: The point with school funding is that others paid for you to get an education and so now, you pay it back to educate your kids and other kids in your schools.
Nope.
Other often-heard explanations are of the form: Children deserve the best education we can give them, or the education they need, or to reach their full potentials, or to have bright futures, and so on.
Nope.
You also hear lots of Hillary Clinton-style claims about how our children need this or that.
Nope.
And it’s commonly assumed that the state constitution mandates it.
Nope.
It is, however, mandated by the courts, which is a very different thing. And their reason for mandating it is to ensure that
each educable child [has] an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.
In other words, it’s a special case of the general principle — articulated in Part 1, Article 3 of the state constitution — that you can be required to surrender some of your rights in order to protect the rest. In this case, what you surrender is your right to the property that is taken from you in the form of school taxes. And what you’re supposed to get in return is protection for your other rights.
That is, tax-funded education is not a pay-it-back or pay-it-forward scheme. It’s not a charity. It’s not an extended family situation, or a constitutional imperative.
Tax-funded education is not about what children need from citizens. It’s about what citizens need from children, and the parents of those children.
Citizens need to be protected from people who are illiterate, innumerate, and irrational. Because those are the greatest threats imaginable to their rights.
Citizens need for children to learn to read and write well enough learn whatever else they want to know, and to be able to able to understand the kinds of logical fallacies (including statistical arguments) that are often used to try to manipulate people during discussions of public policy.
Citizens need for parents to take responsibility for educating their children, paying for what they can afford, and only asking for assistance with what they cannot afford.
In short, a school tax is an idiocy-prevention tax, pure and simple. We lose sight of this fact, and control of our budgets, when we ignore the words educable, opportunity, and necessary in the court’s mandate.
That is, we spend enormous amounts of money (and create enormous amounts of disruption) schooling children who are not educable, in the sense in which the court used that word; we conflate providing opportunity with mandating participation, which incurs both unnecessary expenditures and avoidable opportunity costs; and we stuff our official definition of ‘adequate education’ with so many unnecessary items that we make it difficult for students to focus on the necessary ones.
Because we fail to take this idea, and these words, seriously, we throw truckloads of tax dollars at pursuits that take us ever farther afield of the court’s mandate — moving us away from our goals, rather than towards them.
As Pogo might put it, we have met the idiots, and they are us.
