Are your state representatives smarter than fifth-graders?
Here’s a word problem that even a fifth-grader should be able to solve:
A boat ferries passengers across a lake. Ten people want to ride it together. The captain says: It costs me $100 to run the boat, so you’ll have to pay an average of $10 each.
On the day of the trip, one of the people discovers a scheduling conflict, and can’t travel at the appointed time He has to go a little later. So the other nine think about it like this: We’ll give $5 to the tenth guy, which he can use to take an Uber. And we’ll give the captain $10 for each of the rest of us, or $90 in total.
How much does the group spend to get everyone to the other side?
If you’re a fifth-grader, you reason like this: The captain is going to charge them $100 no matter how many of them are on the boat, so they’re spending an extra $5 for the special needs passenger. The total cost for the group is $105.
But if you’re a state legislator, or an employee of the state Department of Education¹, you reason like this: $10 per passenger, times 9 passengers, plus $5, is $95. So that’s what the group pays — a savings of $5 for letting one of the passengers exercise ‘transportation choice’!
This is the discussion about funding Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) — or Education Spending Accounts (ESAs), or whatever you want to call them — in a nutshell.
¹ The recent report ‘New Hampshire Department of Education Long-term Comprehensive Modeling Analysis Education Freedom Accounts’, which ‘shows’ how the state will save money by implementing EFAs, is based on the latter reasoning.
