Café Chatter
If you’ve read the pamphlet that I handed out (which was published on Grok), you know that this was my purpose in proposing the cut: ‘There are a lot of fundamental questions that never get serious consideration under the ransom-based model of school funding.’
At the school board meetings, the superintendent constantly tries to brush off exactly these discussions, saying that there is no time to consider ‘philosophical questions’. But unless you seriously think about what you’re trying to do, and why, and in what context — if you’re not clear on your goal, and your purpose, and what’s at your disposal — then you can only succeed, if at all, by accident.
I have answers to some of the questions you raised in your article, which you appear not to have considered.
A couple of things worth noting. First, Croydon doesn’t have a ‘school choice’ program. It has a town tuitioning program. People use those terms as if they’re synonyms, but they’re not.
One important difference is that in school choice, parents can send their kids anywhere. In town tuitioning, the school board makes agreements with a set of schools, and parents can choose from that set. So ‘school board choice’ would be a more accurate term for it.
Second, town tuitioning is now being used in Croydon to send students to the very same kinds of public schools that are causing the problem, i.e., raising costs without improving results. For example, next year Croydon would be expected to pay nearly $18,000 to send a student to Newport, which is ranked as one of the worst districts in the whole state.
That kind of thing turns the concept of ‘school choice’ on its head. It’s supposed to be about spending less money for better results, not spending more money for worse results.
I didn’t 'peg the cost as $10,000’. I said that, given that other institutions are doing it for less, there’s no good argument that $10,000 would not be enough.
If I were asked to peg the actual cost, then — taking the word ‘opportunity’ seriously — it would be closer to $2000 per student, to pay for a Chromebook and a Starlink connection, but only for those students whose families couldn’t afford that without help from the town, which would bring the average cost down considerably.
If you have those two things, can anyone prevent you from learning anything you want to learn? They can’t.
What would be missing from that, of course, would be babysitting — which is really what the parents are after. That’s considerably more expensive than education.
The *opportunity* for an education is all you can provide to anyone, and the court was careful to recognize that. The cost of providing an *education*, adequate or otherwise, to someone who doesn’t want it — or who can’t benefit from it — is infinite. There isn’t enough money to make it work.
Which, by the way, is the simplest explanation for the Cato graph:
https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart
Kids who want to learn will find a way to do it, and kids who don’t want to learn will find a way to avoid it, and what you do in the schools is more or less irrelevant to that.
If you consider the constitution to be more authoritative than the court (which most people don’t), the state shouldn’t be providing any money at all, and neither should the towns.
The legislature is supposed to ‘cherish seminaries and public schools’. It’s not clear what ‘cherish’ means, but it has to mean the same thing for both institutions. Can the state, or a town, use taxes to fund a seminary? It can’t. So it can’t use taxes to fund a public school, either.
Of course, this is the kind of thing people have gotten used to. In the same article in the constitution, it says that ‘free and fair competition in the trades and industries is an inherent and essential right of the people and should be protected against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it’. The court has interpreted this to mean that the state must set up a monopoly to hinder or destroy competition in the industry of education. In this case, ‘court-mandated’ is 180 degrees away from ‘constitutional’.
But even if you accept that the constitution means whatever the court says it does, I wouldn’t say that $10,000 per year is required to give an educable kid the opportunity to get an education. Even the $3786 specified in the RSA is higher than it needs to be, because it was chosen to provide kids with *schooling*, and not the *opportunity to get an education*. With each passing year, the connection between those two becomes more tenuous. You need a school to get an education the way you need an arcade to play a video game.
There are clearly people who are intelligently participating in the social, political, and economic systems of a free government without being able to do a single thing on that list.
At the same time, for each thing on the list, there are some people who can do them, because they decided they wanted to learn to do them, and then followed through on that.
Saying that taxpayers shouldn’t fund everything that is interesting or useful is a far cry from saying that those things should be ignored, and it’s disingenuous to say that the former implies the latter.
If you’re old enough, you remember a time when you had to walk or ride to the library to look things up, because you couldn’t afford to have all those books and other reference materials in your own home. Now you don’t have to, because you have a network-connected computer in your pocket.
At a certain point in time, it made sense to provide ‘exposure’ to certain subjects in school, because there was no way for people to get exposure to those things in their homes.
But can you make a list of ideas about physics, or political science, or music theory, or archaeology, that you couldn’t get exposed to without traveling to a school building? I’d be very interested to see that list.
Are you familiar with YouTube? Or Open Culture? Or the Great Courses/Teaching Company? Or Kahn Academy?
The question is, with so many world-class experts competing for the chance to teach you everything there is to know, for free or for minimal cost, why would you want kids to learn about them in the school that happens to be closest to where they live, from a teacher who isn’t likely to be as good, in an environment that will be less conducive to concentrated study?
Where academic study is concerned, the ‘solution’ you’re looking for is already here. It's the internet. Of course, to make proper use of it, you need to learn to read, write, follow and construct a logical argument, and recognize a specious one. In other words, in the world where we live, an ‘adequate’ education is one that allows you to proceed on your own, without taxpayers support.
Where some kind of hands-on experience is needed, the ’solution’ you’re looking for has been around forever. It’s apprenticeship.
— Ian Underwood
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