Anyone who knows me has heard me quote Confucius: The first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names.
What we call things determines how we think about them and how we act toward them. This is why it’s time for us to stop using the term public school and replace it with a term that is both more accurate and more precise: welfare school.
By welfare, I mean ‘Money that is taken from someone else to be given to you or spent on you.’ So food stamps are welfare. But so is Social Security.
(People don’t want to believe that, but more than 60 years ago, in Fleming v. Nestor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that you have no legally binding contractual rights to Social Security benefits and that those benefits can be cut or even eliminated at any time.)
Some types of welfare require you to demonstrate need, while others don’t. But welfare is welfare.
Using the name welfare school would force us to confront an inconvenient truth: that these institutions exist primarily to provide schooling — i.e., daycare, transportation, recreation, nutrition, therapy, and so on, with the possibility of a little education occurring — for the children of parents who are unable — or more often, simply unwilling — to take responsibility for educating them.
Imagine how just changing the name might affect decisions by parents about how to educate their children. You’re not going to send your kids to the Croydon Welfare School if you can help it. And that would be better for the kids, since less than half the children at that school are performing at proficiency by the time they leave.
(That’s also true at the overwhelming majority of welfare schools in New Hampshire. But even at schools near the top of the rankings, as many as 1/4 of the kids fail to reach even the most basic levels of proficiency by graduation. Which doesn’t stop them from graduating.)
Imagine how just changing the name might affect decisions by taxpayers about what kinds of subjects should be taught, what kinds of activities should be subsidized, and so on. You’re not going to support sports and other hobbies at your local welfare school — especially if those schools are being subsidized by people who are on fixed incomes, and being taxed out of their homes.
We have enough experience by now to know that a welfare school shouldn’t be any parent’s first choice for educating his kids. It should be a last resort.
But the lofty-sounding name public school disguises the nature and distorts the perceptions of what happens there — and more importantly, what fails to happen there. It encourages parents to believe that they are providing their children with an opportunity, when it’s closer to the truth to say that they are imposing on those children an opportunity cost.
Perhaps worst of all, it props up the idea that it’s reasonable for the state to exercise a monopoly on education — even though that flies in the face of our state constitution, which charges the state with protecting us from monopolies.
Changing the name public school to welfare school would be one small step towards climbing out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. But it may be an essential one.
