Garry Rayno just dropped over 1300+ words to explain just how little he actually knows or understands the problem of education funding in New Hampshire. I know. Veteran journalist. Longtime reporter covering NH State politics and the legislature. I’m sure he’s a great guy and knows a lot of stuff, but decades of experience are no excuse for being this wrong.
The problem is simple. He seems to think the state has a constitutional obligation to fund education, that the courts have the power to compel the legislature to do so, and that the legislature’s failure is the problem.
If any of that is true, then, as Sen. Murphy noted, we are deeply in arrears with our obligations to seminaries and artists. I’m sure he heard Keith Murphy’s remarks. I can’t imagine he hasn’t been made aware that we’ve been reading the wrong constitution for several decades, thanks to a significant typo. Or that a change in the sixties, approved by 75% of voters, made any public funding of education unconstitutional.
All of which is relevant but not nearly so much as the way Garry clings bitterly to the idea that money has anything to do with learning, whether we have an obligation to define “cherish” as funding or (perhaps) to ensure that funding leads to adequacy, or something else.
The truth, as inconvenient as it is, tells us that the more money we throw at public schools, the worse the outcomes. At best, there is no reasonable connection between them; therefore, if cherish creates a state obligation, and it does not, whatever we are supposed to do, it isn’t raising taxes or revenue to pour into any education, public or otherwise.
The state has no Constitutional obligation to fund education. Zero. None. The courts have no power to compel the legislature to tax citizens to this end. And money does not learning make. But is learning even the point? Nowhere in Rayno’s piece will you find the words learning, assessment, proficiency, or results. Education appears twenty times and funding, seven, but the only education we get from those words is that someone needs to throw more money down a hole with no bottom to learn what?
That money has no connection to actual learning? We already know that.
What is required to convince these advocates that we have already paid too high a price for failure, and that more of the same will only lead to worse outcomes?
Charter, private, and home-schooled kids can and do learn at a fraction of the cost with significantly better results. Even if we could waterboard a state obligation out of the Constitution, any answer ought to come in the form of ensuring that local tax dollars produce students who can read, write, do math, and demonstrate intellectual agility at a percentage well above what is happening now.
You know, cherish outcomes, not monetary inputs. Any idiot can throw money at a problem and pretend they’ve done good, but New Hampshire has more than enough idiots doing that. That solution is the single biggest reason why people can’t afford their property taxes.
As for adequacy, it always means money: schools that are spending more per student now than before Claremont I or II continue to produce graduating classes in which even fewer of the students can read or do math at grade level.
Claremont’s own mandate proves the point.
Cherish This
The legislature is told it must “cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people…” Can we make the case that, through policy, the state has likely done the opposite, certainly with public schools and arguably with many of the other things we are Constitutionally meant to cherish?
“Cherish the interest” is not limited to any one of those things, but it does reasonably apply to all of them, none of which we are meant to be force-funded by the state, and all of which the state can only begin to meet its “obligation” by not getting in the way.
With schools, the government attempted to secure a virtual monopoly. It financed this monopoly through fear and intimidation (pay the taxes or lose your home). Factions leveraged third-party power in the form of national unions to intimidate locals into believing money meant learning, and an Education industrial complex has risen and worked for decades to use that monopoly to redirect municipal resources away from firefighters, cops, and roads and bridges and into the pockets of decidedly political and partisan special interests who care more about money than teaching or learning.
Who among us is convinced that this is what we are meant to cherish, and not the sober use of other people’s resources to teach children to read to a level where they can then teach themselves anything?
Depending on your level of reading proficiency the State is also delinquent in its funding of “agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people…” not that any court ever had the power or the ability to define any of those or how much they are owed.
You cannot presume to make Rayno’s argument about Ayotte or Republicans or funding make sense without including the entire litany of obligations inferred. And since that is absurd, so then is the notion that the state is required to fund any of it, or a court can demand they do so.
So, what is the State Government’s obligation if schools or seminaries fail “to encourage private and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and economy, honesty and punctuality, sincerity, sobriety, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people…”
Has anyone ever read it that way?
As it applies to the form of government, cherish has to mean refraining from enacting laws or rules that prevent the people from pursuing any of that if they feel generous enough in sentiment (which could mean time, labor, or funding) to see them made available in a form of their choosing.
Nor does the legislature appear to have any obligation to measure the output. It simply must ensure that neither the state nor its incorporated bodies, the towns or cities, do anything to interfere with the sentiments of the people to cherish (or not) any or all of the things listed in Article 83.
Which, of course, would give the courts something useful to do and likely force them to abrogate a long list of statutes and ordinances.
