I won’t pay the Union Leader, our state’s largest circulation newspaper, for the privilege of access to the declining value of what they call news, but I get their emails, and this headline caught my eye. “Manchester schools ask business leaders to push for adequate funding.”
Even if you’re not a victim of the ed funding scam in New Hampshire, stick around. Some of this probably applies to the ed funding scam where you live.
The New Hampshire legislature is taking a somewhat serious look at its responsibilities regarding the funding of what we call public education. I won’t say they are all in on the constitutional obligation, which, as we’ve reported previously, is none. But the question is always on the table, and one of the buzzwords is adequate.
The problem, aside from the courts pretending they have a say (or the legislature, for that matter), is that word. Adequate. What does it mean? Sufficient to satisfy a requirement or meet a need. What requirement? What need? The State Constitution says we should cherish a long list of things, but “public ed” is the only thing in that list to which the courts have attached a fiscal mandate.
Cherish means stealing money from people to give to government schools, but not seminaries, or anything else. So, when we talk about adequate in the same context, often in the same or successive breaths, the Education Industrial Complex will tell you it is the next largest sum they can extort from taxpayers to prolong their grift. Education funding, in this context, is the schooling of working families on how quickly a government entity can bankrupt their village in pursuit of academic mediocrity, and that’s being generous.
When Schoolboards, Superintendents, and Administrators talk about adequacy, they do not mean outputs, which – as Grokster Ian has reminded us repeatedly- is the problem. You don’t pay for anything else that way, nor would you accept such shoddy outcomes and then pay more for what will likely be even less.
Funding an adequate education actually means financing the machine that produces fewer good widgets. Adequate means more supplies, larger facilities, and administrators and staff, who turn capable young minds into idiots who hate learning. 30 to 50% of any given graduating class cannot do math or read at grade level, where grade level is on a declining scale. That’s just an average.
I didn’t listen to any of the hearings; I simply do not have that kind of time, but I would have hoped someone would have challenged the word adequate in search of some sort of definition, given what we know to be true.
More money produces worse outcomes. It has no evidentiary connection to improved learning, unless the lesson is how to get blackmailed or strong-armed into throwing money down a hole into the hands of people and institutions that appear to hate parents, students, and education.
One thing I can say is that, whatever the Union leader wrote about those hearings in that article, they and the rest of the handmaiden media, it is unlikely anyone tried to glean the true meaning of ‘adequate,’ challenged the lopsided interpretation of cherish, or dared to ask why we don’t connect adequacy “funding” to results?
We all know the answer. If we did that, schools would have to lobby to dumb down the tests until their miserable output looked like educational adequacy, which the media would then publish as a demonstration of success and a reason to increase funding.
