Several years ago, Andru Volinsky and John Tobin did a little road show, in which they went around the state pushing for increased state funding for schools in New Hampshire.
They’ve revived the show, although this time, Tobin is doing the presentations without Volinsky. He did one the other night in Sunapee.
There were handouts (‘Answers to Key Questions about School Funding in…’) prepared for various towns. There are a couple of things to note about those.
First, they seemed to have been deliberately designed to make it impossible to make comparisons across towns. I’m not sure why they would want to do this, but it’s harder to do it this way than to just use a template, so it must have been intentional.
Second, a lot of the graphs in the handouts used the same sleight of hand that they used the last time around. As long as it keeps fooling people, I guess there’s no reason to change.
Early in the proceedings, an official from Sunapee said: ‘If we had more money, we could do a better job for our students.’ Which prompted me to ask this question during the Q&A period:
I’m confused. You say that more money would make a difference. But we’ve tripled spending, adjusted for inflation, without seeing any measurable improvements in student achievement. New Hampshire spends two or three times as much per student as other states that get the same results. And every district is now spending, adjusted for inflation, more than the richest districts were before Claremont, so every district is spending like a rich district. Again, with no improvements in achievement. Why would anyone believe that spending even more money would make any difference at all?
With help from his entourage, Tobin spent about five minutes not answering this question, ending with the pretty amazing claim: ‘I don’t think the schools are failing.’
I say it’s amazing because, with fewer than 40 percent of students reaching even the most basic levels of proficiency in English and math by graduation, you have to wonder: If this isn’t failure, what in the world would failure look like?
Tobin — who doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference between constitutional and court-mandated — kept claiming that the state constitution requires property tax rates to be uniform.
This is interesting, first, because I can’t find the word ‘uniform’ anywhere in my copy of the document. So this must be something — like the ‘right to an adequate education’ — that the court invented out of whole cloth.
But it’s interesting also because there is a big difference between a uniform tax, and a uniform tax rate. The latter means that the more you have, the more you pay — simply because you can. And that is half the essence of Marxism: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’
So it seems to be Tobin’s position that it’s the court’s position that a Marxist tax scheme is required by the state constitution.
Imagine if grocery stores worked this way. Consider two guys in line with the same basic items (a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a couple of steaks, a gallon of milk). But the first pays five times as much as the second — for the same thing — because his income is higher or because the value of his house is greater.
Is there anyone who wouldn’t consider this to be crazy? But it’s exactly what Tobin is claiming we are required to do when funding schools.
Finally, we distributed a little handout of our own, which I’m reproducing here in case you want to hand it out yourself when the show comes to a town near you.
The essence of the handout is that we’re not going to get anywhere until we stop obsessing over fairness in spending and start focusing instead on fairness in achievement.
fairness handout 5