Paul Levy lives in Concord. More of his writing can be found at paullevywritings.com.
Disruption is a prerequisite for big change, according to Jim Peschke in his defense of Croydon’s recent, extreme school budget cut (“Why disruption in education is essential,” Monitor 4/27). No doubt, disruption can provoke big change, but it is important to note that this formula applies equally to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
With such shake-ups, it’s vital to ask, what’s the end game? What change do disruptors hope to unleash?
One might imagine that Croydon’s budget cuts are intended to save taxpayers unnecessary expense, but that assumption would be wrong. For the disruptors, those cuts are a mere way station on the road to a very different goal.
The disruptors are Libertarians, committed enough to that philosophy to have moved to New Hampshire with the express purpose of creating a Libertarian state. Libertarianism and far-right conservativism see unfettered free markets as the ideal way to produce and distribute wealth.
Essentially, the government’s only legitimate functions are to provide national defense and policing and to adopt and enforce the property and contract laws that underpin free markets. Libertarianism rejects most taxation, deeming it “theft” of private property; and it rejects redistribution of tax dollars as promoting dependency.
This philosophy envisions a fully private education system in which schools are businesses and parents pay to educate their own children. As with other consumer goods, parents decide what is best for their children, what they can afford and wish to pay, and which product, price and school best fits their personal desires and pocketbooks.
Of course, the idea of self-sufficiency and living within one’s means has some attraction for us rugged American individuals, but unfortunately, it runs into a brutal reality. Our big corporate economy produces an immense amount of wealth, but it distributes it so unevenly that most people, working as hard as they can — and Americans work harder and more productively than most other workers in the world — don’t earn enough to obtain a decent share of modern basics. It results, for example, in a few people who are able to buy hospitals and many others who can’t even afford health insurance.
If a good education is as cheap as owning a computer and Googling, a position recently advanced by Ian Underwood (“HB 1393 brings education in line with the standard model,” Monitor, 3/30) who designed the Croydon budget cut, digging into their own pockets would pose no hardship for parents. But the entire modern world has found that good education is pretty costly.
I’m going to assume it is and explore the impact of the Libertarian vision on an average family.
Suppose a good education costs $15,000 per-child-per-year (PCPY). This is a low figure, one-quarter the cost of attending an elite private school, and a third lower than our state’s 2020-21 PCPY of $21,843. Suppose further that you and I are about 30 years old, married, employed and with a combined income of $70,000 (we’re lucky because about half the state’s working households bring in less, often a lot less). And finally, suppose that we have twins and, can you believe it!, they’re about to start Kindergarten.
Under the parents-pay rule, we owe the school $30,000 before dropping the twins off. We’re frugal but we can barely make ends meet on $70,000. We’ve learned, maybe you have too, that an average home in a decent neighborhood, utilities, health care, retirement savings, cars and other major basics are expensive.
Also, not cheap are such customary expenditures as church dues, computers, a dog, a short vacation, holiday and birthday gifts, a rainy-day fund, and a college fund. We feel we’ve worked hard and deserve these modest, modern basics.
The bottom line is that there’s no way we can enjoy that standard of living and squeeze an added $30,000 out of our budget. And, of course, we’d have to squeeze another $30,000 next year and so forth for 13 years (K-12).
Maybe I should home-school the twins, but that just means we’d lose my $30,000 income. So maybe we’ll borrow the money ($390,000 overall) and stretch out payments for 40 years until we retire. Unfortunately, we don’t have collateral (our home is already security for our mortgage), so no lender will give us an unsecured, long-term loan. And, if one did, the interest rate would be exorbitant, given the high risk.
But let’s fantasize and imagine we get a $390,000 loan for a 40-year term at 6% interest. Our annual payments would be $25,750 until we retire. That’s no solution either. We seem to be stuck between not providing a decent education for our kids and settling for some be-frugal-just-Google standard of adequacy.
Be careful. Disruptors hide their goals by promoting budget cuts (as well as vouchers, CRT opposition, and denigration of teachers). So, make sure that, as they shake you up, they’re not shaking you down.