I recently re-watched the brilliant film Interstate 60. If you haven’t seen it, put it on your to-watch list.
One of the characters, Bob Cody (played by Chris Cooper), is a former advertising man who got sick of lying all the time, and decided to spend the rest of his life promoting truth. Or more precisely, combatting lying, in all its forms.
At one point, he says: “Say what you mean, mean what you say. You know, that if everybody followed that rule, there’d be a lot less trouble.”
I agree with him. Not too long ago, I wrote a piece about so-called ‘divisive concepts’. I proposed a straightforward idea, which is that if we want to know which concepts are truly divisive — and therefore ought not to be taught using public funds — we shouldn’t ask legislatures to guess what they are, but simply let people vote on them. If there is significant division over an idea — whatever it is — then it is, by definition, divisive.
What could be more reasonable than that? If you want to stop teaching divisive concepts in schools, you first have to find out which concepts people are actually divided over.
Say what you mean, and mean what you say.
I’d like to propose a similarly straightforward idea regarding the idea that where education funding is concerned, ‘the money should follow the child’. Even if you think that’s a good idea, there remains the problem of figuring out just how much money that actually amounts to.
As with divisive concepts, instead of letting judges, or legislatures, or executive agencies guess what the right amount should be, we can just calculate it.
How do we do that? If N kids are going to leave a school in order to accept alternate funding, we can look at (A) the school budget before they leave, and (B) the school budget after they leave. Subtracting B from A tells us how much is being spent on those kids. Dividing the (B-A) by N tells us how the number of dollars that should ‘follow’ each of the kids.
What could be more reasonable than that? If you want the money that is spent on students in public schools to follow those students if they leave those schools, you have to first find out how much is actually being spent on them.
Say what you mean, and mean what you say. If everybody followed that rule, there’d be a lot less trouble — especially involving government initiatives that say they’re trying to do one thing, but are actually designed to do something quite different.
