Long ago, a Congressman from my home state gained notoriety when he said, while defending Richard Nixon, ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts.’ I was reminded of this upon reading an article that Steve forwarded to me from the Granite Crock site, which was written to ‘debunk’ something I’d written.
It would be nice if people who want to debunk statements would learn the facts about the issues involved, but apparently, that’s no longer considered necessary. All you have to do is toss around words like ‘baseless,’ which these days means just you haven’t bothered to examine the ideas on which the claim is based; or ‘discredited’, which just means that you hope no one will pay attention to it.
Case in point: The folks over at Crock apparently haven’t taken the time to understand how school funding actually works, which allows them to claim, with the expectation of being taken seriously, that ‘EFAs shift public funds intended for public education away from local school districts and towards private schools’.
You can find the fifth-grade-level explanation of why this claim isn’t true here and a more sophisticated version here.
To be fair, even people who are supposed to be specialists in this area — for example, members of Education Committees in the General Court — are surprised to learn how SWEPT taxes are actually collected and distributed, why the per-student cost is useless for estimating savings, and a number of other things that you’d hope would be understood by people itching to write laws that the rest of us are going to have to live with.
Putting these people in charge of education funding, let alone education, is a little like putting the Amish in charge of the Department of Motor Vehicles. But that’s the world we live in now.
In particular, Crock’s ‘understanding’ of how adequacy funds work is the pre-2011 version. Apparently, they don’t consider a change to the law that basically turned the whole purpose of the system on its head to be worth learning about. The facts would just confuse them.
As for their ‘argument’ against the striking parallels between Amendment 2 to the federal constitution and Article 83 of our state constitution, and the conclusions that logically follow from them, they don’t seem to have understood what I was saying, so please don’t rely on their description of it. Make sure you read the original post (and this, and this, and this), so you can evaluate the ideas for yourself.
Those points aside, Crock makes the same fundamental mistake as most people who discuss school funding, which is to continue to imagine that the amount of money we spend on schools makes any difference, while decades of data show that this is simply untrue.
We tripled spending (adjusted for inflation), and it had no effect on student achievement. There’s every reason to believe that if we triple it again, it still won’t have any effect. Similarly, there’s no reason to believe that we couldn’t cut it to 1/3, or even 1/10 of what we’re spending now, without any effect — especially given the deluge of high-quality, low-cost pedagogy that is available to anyone who wants it, anywhere they happen to be.
Tragically, continuing to focus the discussion on money, instead of on student achievement, is preventing us from having the discussion that we need to have, which centers around two questions that no one ever seems to want to consider:
If a student wants to learn something, who can stop him?
If a student doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him?
Given access to the Internet, if a kid wants to learn, there’s nothing that can stop him. And if a kid doesn’t want to learn, there’s no amount of spending that can make him. But raising a kid who wants to learn isn’t something that the government can do. It’s something that only parents can do.