It’s that time again when our ‘representatives’ in Concord will try to find new and innovative ways to change how schools are funded, while refusing to acknowledge that perhaps the only thing we know for sure about education is that where schools are concerned, funding is irrelevant.
One of the upcoming proposals is for something called Education Freedom Accounts. The final text of the bill isn’t yet available, but it aims to implement the school choice mantra that ‘the money should follow the child’ — discussion of which usually avoids any serious attempt to explain which money is being talked about.
Here a summary of the bill:
The money that would be spent on a child in a public school would follow the child [to pay for a private school, or homeschooling costs].
Let’s take a closer look at that phrase,
the money that would be spent on a child in public school
The normal, unthinking way to calculate that would be to use the average per-student cost of the school, i.e., to divide the cost of running the school by the number of students in the school.
But that’s not what the school district spends on that child. To get that number, we have to look at the marginal cost of educating the child. That is, how much more does the school have to spend if he attends there?
Another way to arrive at the same figure is to ask how much less the school has to spend if he’s not there. Do fewer teachers, administrators, or staff members have to be hired? No. Is the amount spent on transportation reduced? No. Does the cafeteria have to purchase or cook or serve less food? No.
In fact, unless we’re talking about a student whose presence requires dedicated personnel, the marginal cost of educating a student is zero. So in the normal case, the amount of money available to ‘follow the student’ is zero dollars.
Which is to say, any money deposited into those Education Freedom Accounts would not be shifted from the school to the student. It would represent additional spending to be paid by the taxpayers of a town that adopts the program.
Now, it’s true that if a large number of students leave a school, that might actually reduce the cost of running the school, say by eliminating the need for a teacher, or reducing subscription costs. In that case, it would make sense to let those students split the marginal savings that they’ve collectively brought about. (Having said that, schools have displayed nearly unlimited creativity in finding ways to spend money. One need only note that in many districts, total school spending has increased even while attendance has declined. So while this is theoretically possible, it’s still unlikely.)
And what about students with catastrophic special needs? The ones requiring out-of-district placements that may be five, ten, or twenty times the average per-student cost? Will the money that would be spent on those students simply be deposited into their accounts?
If your district implements Education Freedom Accounts, and if you can get the district to spend enough on your kid, you could pull him out of school, buy a house to keep him in, and have enough left to hire a full-time attendant — all paid for by your neighbors. As Holly Golightly might say, the mind reels.
There are lots of other problems with these and similar accounts. But this problem alone should be enough to make taxpayers wary of sticking their hands into this particular monkey trap.
