[This was written in response to an editorial at the New Hampshire Bulletin, about Education Freedom Accounts. I sent it to the Bulletin, but the editor, who is also the author of the piece, said that it was ‘just not the kind of opinion pieces we run’. So I’m publishing it at Grok instead.]
Confucius said that the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names. If we use words carelessly, we run the risk of talking nonsense. Dana Wormald’s recent editorial on School Vouchers provides an excellent example of this.
We can start with the fact that New Hampshire doesn’t have a ‘school voucher’ program. We do have town tuitioning, which works differently. And we do have Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) and Education Tax Credit Scholarships, which also work differently.
Does it matter what we call such programs? It does, if people are going to import the conclusions of other discussions out of context. Arguments for or against vouchers are not arguments for or against EFAs, and vice versa.
We can continue by asking what it might mean to ‘deny’ someone an education. If you can’t afford a car, are you being denied a car, if no one else wants to give you one?
Being denied an education means that you’re trying to educate yourself, and someone is actively stopping you from doing that — for example, by barring your entrance to a public library, or cutting the fiber optic cable that you use to access the internet.
Do you have a right to have an education? Sure, in the same way that you have a right to have a gun. And for the same reason: Being educated and being armed are the two principal defenses against government overreach. But in neither case is anyone else required to buy you anything.
What about the argument that kids need to be ‘exposed’ to things like art and music, and that this needs to happen in schools? Consider a kid who has a smartphone or a laptop, and an Internet connection. Now think about what you would have to do to prevent that kid from seeing art and hearing music, of a wider variety than would be ‘covered’ in school. Whatever Wormald is arguing for here, it must be something other than exposure.
One suspects, in fact, that he doesn’t know what he’s arguing for. He’s just repeating arguments that he’s heard other people making.
Those are just three examples, but once you start looking for them, you’ll see them everywhere in his article.
The article also illustrates why it’s helpful, when defending a position, to stick with it instead of changing sides without notice.
In one paragraph, Wormald argues that it’s unfair for educational opportunities to be tied to zip codes. Just a few paragraphs later, he argues that open enrollment (in which any kid can attend a school in any district) is bad — even though its principal effect is to loosen the tie between educational opportunities and zip codes.
At one point, Wormald claims that ‘rich towns will have rich schools and vice versa’. Apparently he hasn’t been paying attention to how dramatically school funding has changed since the Claremont decisions at the turn of the century.
Adjusted for inflation, every school is now spending more — on average, more than $10,000 more per student per year — than even the richest districts were spending before Claremont. That is, in terms of spending, New Hampshire has only rich districts. And yet, no measurable improvements in student academic achievement have occurred in spite of all that extra spending.
This brings us back to perhaps the most egregious misuse of vocabulary that occurs in discussions about education: Using spending instead of results when talking about ‘fairness.’
This conflation of two unrelated concepts prevents us from ever asking what is perhaps the most obvious question of all: What if, instead of trying to spend similar amounts on different kids, we tried to make sure that each kid learns the same things?
The first thing that would happen is that we would focus on having every student develop skills that should be mandatory: literacy, numeracy, rhetoric, statistics, scientific reasoning. And we would eliminate any content that is not important enough to require all students to learn it.
The curriculum would radically shrink, but also radically improve — kind of like substituting a steak and a salad for a buffet of desserts. Costs would also radically shrink.
Here’s the vision of fairness in education that I put forward in my book, Rethinking Fairness in Education:
For students, fairness in education means: You get exactly the same adequate education as everyone else. No more, and no less. No matter who you are, or where you live, or what your parents can afford. And this takes as long as it takes.
For taxpayers, fairness in education means: Your taxes are used to pay for public benefit, but not for private enrichment, or political influence. And they are used to pay for results, not for time spent, or for good intentions.
One final word about fairness. Imagine that two people get into the checkout line at a grocery store. They have identical items: a couple of steaks, a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk. The first one pays $40. The second one is told that he’ll have to pay $80 for the same items. Why? Because his house is worth twice as much.
I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t see immediately that this makes no sense. It’s not like the second guy can use his house as an ATM, from which he can withdraw extra money. And even if he could, he shouldn’t have to!
But this is exactly how school taxes work. We’re all paying for the same thing. But we have been conditioned to think that it’s ‘fair’ for some people to pay more for it, and — even stranger — that it is ‘unfair’ if what one person pays represents a higher percentage of the cost of his house.
Returning to the importance of calling things by their right names, Wormald worries that our communities will become ‘even more fractured’ if students attend different schools.
This reveals something very important about his view of schools, which is a view that is shared (although not articulated) by a number of people. What many people want for their kids isn’t a school at all, but rather a community center — a place where the kids can stay while the parents are at work, can socialize with their friends, and may sometimes work on job-related skills like welding or CNC machining.
Recognizing that schools and community centers are different kinds of creatures, with different kinds of functions, would be an important step, not towards ‘solving’ the problems that cause Wormald such worry, but towards dissolving them, by eliminating the confusion that gives rise to them in the first place. And many communities already have buildings that can be used for this purpose: Town halls (which often stand empty most of the year), and libraries.
None of this is to say that EFAs are a good idea, or a bad one. All of it is to say that if we want to have sensible discussions about education, we need to start talking with each other instead of past each other, which begins with using words correctly.
