Ian Underwood is a select board member for the town of Croydon.
In the Claremont decisions, the state supreme court (which most people take to be synonymous with the state constitution) said that an adequate education in New Hampshire is one that provides “each educable child with the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.”
Every word in that sentence is doing important work, none more important than the words ‘educable,’ ‘opportunity’ and ‘necessary.’
Does the state have a responsibility to educate children who will never be able to participate intelligently in those systems? The court says it doesn’t.
Does the state have a responsibility to educate children, or just to provide them with the opportunity to become educated? The court says the latter.
(In the modern world, with a computer and an internet connection, no one can stop you from learning anything, which is what it means to have such an opportunity. Saying that you have to go to a school to get educated is like saying that you have to go to an arcade to play a video game.)
Does the state have a responsibility to fund schooling in subjects that are not necessary to participate in those systems? The court says it doesn’t.
(Are you unable to participate in those systems if you can’t speak a foreign language or play a sport or a musical instrument or use a welding torch or calculate an integral? You aren’t.)
Also, the court hasn’t yet discovered in the constitution a right to subsidized daycare. But in recent school board meetings in Croydon, having a place to drop their kids off while they go to work tops the list of things that parents are demanding, along with giving their kids a place to be with their friends and participate in sports.
Not a single parent has mentioned academic achievement as a priority.
Taxpayers need a better education for students than the one they’re currently getting in a system that has, when judged by the education establishment’s own chosen criteria, been failing for half a century.
Decades of data tell us that the amount we spend on schools is unrelated to the quality of the results obtained by those schools. If we can triple spending without seeing any changes in student achievement, it stands to reason that we can cut it in half without seeing any changes either.
But real improvement can’t come from tweaking a system that is based primarily on astrology (we decide what students are ready to learn based on their dates of birth) and incarceration (schools and prisons are the only two places in society where you can’t leave, no matter how bad things get). Real improvement can only come from returning to first principles, which requires a budget that is too small to allow continuing with business as usual.
HB 1393 is an idea that is long overdue, and not just because it will rein in out-of-control costs while forcing school boards to reconsider exactly what it is that they’re supposed to be doing. It also moves us towards aligning public funding of education with every other kind of welfare that we provide to people who need something but can’t afford it.
When people can’t afford heating oil, food or housing, the state doesn’t set up refineries or start farms or build houses and apartments. It provides assistance to people who can demonstrate that they need it, and that assistance comes in the form of money that can be used to buy what is needed from private providers.
It’s only where education is concerned that we somehow think that instead of providing something to those who need it, we have to produce it for everyone — a scheme that ultimately ends up forcing poorer people to subsidize richer people, which is the most perverse outcome imaginable.
One parent complained at a recent school board meeting, “Now I’m going to have to dig into my own pocket to pay for my own kids.” Well, whose pocket should he be digging into? Perhaps the pocket of the resident whose daughter recently had to take out a personal loan to pay her father’s school taxes?
Tight, zero-sum budgets give parents who can afford to pay a substantial part of the cost of educating their own children an incentive to stop taking money from taxpayers, and other parents, who can’t. This is an important step in the right direction.
HB 1393 isn’t about “dismantling public education,” as some have charged. It’s about bringing it into line with the standard model for providing assistance to people who need it:
■Don’t give it to people who can get along without it.
■Don’t use it to pay for something (education) that you don’t actually get.
■Don’t allocate money for one thing (education), and then let people spend it on other things (daycare, therapy, hobbies, food, etc.).
School funding, as currently configured, ignores all three tenets of the standard model.
The essence of the rule of law is this: We should write down what we want to do, and do it. If we decide that we want to do something else, we should write that down instead, and do that. But what we should never do is write down that we’re going to do one thing, then do something else, while pretending that they are the same.
But this is exactly what we do when we ignore words like ‘educable,’ ‘opportunity,’ and ‘necessary’ — and it’s bankrupting us, not just financially, but morally as well.