I was just at a meeting of the Croydon school board, and several times, when the question of how the students are doing came up, there was a rush — one might say a stampede — to offer excuses as to why it’s simply not possible to say in any objective way whether students are doing well enough to justify what we’re spending on them.
(Which is, it’s worth reminding ourselves often, about the cost of a house over the course of a K-12 education.)
Apparently, we can’t use anything like test scores, because those don’t tell the whole story.
The consensus among parents — who normally make up the bulk of the audience, showing up to protect their tax-subsidized 95% discount on day care — seems to be that we should just let the superintendent worry about it.
And if the superintendent says things are okay — because, for example, while a kid isn’t doing so well academically, he’s ‘excelling in extra-curricular activities’ — we should take his word for it.
(If things seem too bleak, we can always just label the kid as ‘special needs’, in which case, all metrics become irrelevant, so even if the kid exhibits a ‘negative growth rate’ — yes, that’s an official term — then that’s still growth, so there’s nothing to worry about.)
Also, the consensus among parents seems to be that if they are happy, then it doesn’t really matter whether the people subsidizing them are happy.
From the taxpayer’s perspective, all of this is reminiscent of former basketball coach Bobby Knight’s advice that ‘if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it’.
But even if tests don’t tell the whole story, we don’t need the whole story. What we need to know is whether kids are performing as expected for their grade levels, or even that they’re making reasonable progress compared to how they were doing last year. And we really just need to know that for foundational skills like reading and mathematics.
But if these are things that we can’t test, then what the hell are we even doing? How can we justify spending this much money on something without knowing how to tell whether or not we’re actually getting it?
I think we’ve reached this point because we have a vocabulary problem. The parents are arguing that it’s difficult — even impossible — to say whether a kid is educated. And there may be some basis for that, in that if you ask ten people what it means to be educated, you’ll get at least a dozen different answers.¹
But whatever else you can do, if you can’t
read a proposed statute or regulation and understand what behavior it’s supposed to punish or reward (and whether that’s consistent with the powers delegated to government under our written constitutions); or
look at a report written by a pharmaceutical company and re-issued by the CDC and tell whether the statistical methods being used are reasonable; or
tell the difference between an ad hominem attack and a substantive reply in a policy debate; and so on,
then you are uneducated. And these are things we can demonstrate with tests.
As Article 83 of our state constitution reminds us, if you are uneducated, you are a danger to the preservation of a free government.
Which, by the way, is the answer to the question ‘Why is this guy paying to educate that guy’s kids?’
It’s not charity. It’s not for the benefit of the parents (so they can have somewhere to park their kids while they make a living). It’s not for the benefit of the kids (so they can have ‘bright futures’ or ‘get high-paying jobs’). It’s not for the benefit of employers (so they can have a ‘reliable workforce’). It’s for the protection of the rights of the people whose property is being appropriated in order to pay for it.
It’s right there in Part 1, Article 3 of the state constitution. You can look it up.
And when we forget that, we end up with… well, what we have now.
¹ The state supreme court, in Claremont, gave its own definition: you have an adequate education if you have the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.
Which means that, at the very least, taxpayers should ask of everything that they’re paying for: For participation in which of these systems is it necessary to be able to weld, or hit a fastball, or play the tuba, or sew an apron, or speak French, and so on?
But I can tell you from experience that if you merely quote the court’s definition, you’ll be told that such an idea is ‘crazy’, that it is ‘too narrow a view of public education’, that it is a ‘detriment to our society’, and so on.
Apparently the court knows what it’s doing when it says that the state should spend more money; but not when it says what the state should get in return for that spending.
