A falsehood is a statement that we say is false, but when we look at what we do, the system and structures we support and the policies we enact, it’s clear on some level we believe it. It’s a distinction between thoughts and actions.
One of my favorite examples in education is our beliefs about standardized testing. For decades, we’ve used standardized tests to determine a school’s efficacy, equating higher overall scores with better schools.
As individuals, we don’t use standardized test scores to describe our actual skills and abilities. Instead, we share what we’ve built, what we’ve participated in, and what projects we’ve completed. We share a story of what we know and can do, not a proficiency score.
And yet, we hastily apply a different standard to everyone else. What makes a good school? How do we know if a student is educated? What’s the number one argument for not giving more money to our underfunded schools? Proficiency scores.
Another falsehood we believe about education is that kids from wealthier households deserve more than their less wealthy peers. In New Hampshire, this falsehood has been baked into our public education system.
To note, this falsehood isn’t about “rich” kids versus “poor” kids, as if there is a distinct cut off between the two. This falsehood is about the spectrum of income levels across the state and how the systems and traditions we cling to prove we believe some kids deserve more than others. More opportunities, more resources, more support.
Our belief about wealthier kids has been reinforced by our steadfast commitment to local control, New Hampshire’s favorite catch phrase used across the political spectrum for expediency. Want to convince someone a statewide law is bad news? Local control is a good place to start.
Honestly, “local control” has given wealthier towns the permission to wash their hands of the poorest among us.
What one small community in New Hampshire “controls” can have negative consequences not only for those in their town, but the neighboring towns and sometimes the entire state. What happens upstream ultimately affects the river downstream. Zoning choices in one city can shape the surrounding town’s desirability or undesirability. Economic development here can affect traffic there.
Local decisions on educator salaries and benefits ensures wealthier communities have teachers that commit to longer tenures, improving those schools over time. Local property tax rates mean some kids go to schools that look like children’s museums with resources galore, while others in an adjacent district attend school in buildings that are 100 years old with infrastructure that doesn’t always support a 21st century education.
And we can’t ignore that high school graduates and drop-outs for that matter, go where the work is, where the resources are, and they take their skills, or lack of skills with them. They don’t stay in the same town their whole lives.The point is we might have local control for a lot of issues, but good or bad, we don’t only have local consequences.
When it comes to catering to those with more, however, local control has only gotten us so far.
So, our lawmakers introduced new ways to ensure those with more, who happen to live in property poor towns, still get more even though their local public school systems have been eroded by the state’s funding structure.
We started with charter schools, a type of open enrollment that has affected funding at the local level. Then we moved to Education Freedom Accounts, a coupon for private and religious school kids that siphons money away from public schools. Now we have the aggressive push toward open enrollment.
I have to note here that open enrollment as a concept is not a bad idea. In an equitable, statewide funding structure, I imagine it working quite well. But New Hampshire does not have such a structure. Instituting open enrollment in New Hampshire before fixing systemic inequities is sinister.
Yet, the legislature marches on, using local control and individual choice of wealthier parents to justify their actions — harming economically disadvantaged students and disparately impacting special education students, as property poor towns can attest.
I don’t think I can get used to hearing the falsehood “Wealthier kids deserve more” or understand how easy it rolls off the tongue of the New Hampshire Legislature year after year. Actions, or inactions, speak louder than words after all.
Carisa Corrow of Penacook is co-author of “126 Falsehoods We Believe About Education” and founder of Educating for Good.