In Croydon, where the school district has switched from a ransom model to a budget model, parents are suddenly asking lots of questions about the lower-cost alternatives for providing the opportunity for an adequate education that are being explored by the school board — mainly micro-schools run by companies like Prenda and Kai.
There is a pattern to many of the questions. They take the form: What if a kid doesn’t do well in micro-schools?
The simplest way to answer that is with another question: What if a kid doesn’t do well in regular public schools? You send him there anyway. Same thing here, right?
But among these, one particular question stands out: What if a kid just decides he doesn’t want to learn? As I said in my pamphlet, this is one of the questions that never gets considered under the ransom model. So it’s nice to see it being discussed now.
I phrased it slightly differently there, as one of a pair of related questions: (1) If a kid wants to learn something, who can stop him? (2) If a kid doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him?
The answer to both questions, of course, is ‘no one.’
The questions can also be phrased in terms of money: (1) If a kid wants to learn something, how much does it cost to teach him? (2) If a kid doesn’t want to learn something, how much does it cost to teach him?
The answer to the first is ‘Almost nothing’. The answer to the second is ‘There isn’t enough money in the world’.
With respect to the right to carry a gun in public, nearly all states are now either ‘shall-issue’ states or ‘constitutional carry’ states. A short time ago, very few people would have predicted this, but now it seems pretty normal.
I think that the Croydon school district should lead the way by becoming the first ‘shall-issue’ school district. If a kid decides that he’s done with school, the district should issue him a diploma.
Once the kid has a diploma, the district has no more responsibility to do anything about his education. RSA 189:1-a says that
It shall be the duty of the school board to provide, at district expense, elementary and secondary education to all pupils who reside in the district until such time as the pupil has acquired a high school diploma or has reached age 21, whichever occurs first.
This would get the district off the kid’s back, and the kid out of the district’s hair. It would reduce distractions for other kids who are trying to learn and teachers who are trying to teach. And it would save taxpayers money.
Of course, there are some who would complain that such a student isn’t ‘qualified’ to get that diploma. But in a state with a graduation rate above 90%, and a basic proficiency rate below 50%, it’s not clear what qualifications are being required of graduates in any district.
The state supreme court made it very clear, in its Claremont decisions, that the state is not required to provide a kid with an education, but only with the opportunity to acquire one. If a kid doesn’t want to take advantage of that opportunity, it’s a waste of everyone’s time, energy, attention, and money to throw him in with students who are trying to take advantage of it.
But wouldn’t this dilute the value of diplomas issued to kids who have done the work of accumulating credits towards graduation? Again, there’s a precedent that we can use for guidance. In town tuitioning programs, towns can only provide tuition to schools that are ‘approved’ by the state.
But there are two kinds of approval: approval for curriculum, and approval for attendance. It’s not clear that either of those is particularly meaningful, but one is harder to get than the other.
In the same way, districts could issue ‘diplomas for curriculum’ and ‘diplomas for attendance’. One would be harder to get than the other. Colleges, prospective employees, the armed services, and so on, could treat them accordingly.
Also, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) already outlines procedures for granting ‘alternate diplomas’ to students with cognitive disabilities. We’d just be extending that to include intransigence as a cognitive disability. As General Peckham might say, if refusal to learn isn’t a cognitive disability, I wonder what in the world is.
The idea is already here. It’s just the details that need to be worked out.
Shall-issue diplomas are the future. Someone has to get that ball rolling. It might as well be Croydon.