“Education is what survives when what has been learned is forgotten.”
B. F. Skinner
In an unexpected landmark decision, New Hampshire’s Supreme Court decreed, the State has a constitutional obligation to ensure “an adequate education to every educable child in the public schools in New Hampshire and to guarantee adequate public funding.”
Few people dispute the foundation of any democracy and thus the preservation of a free society rest on an educated populace … and, to that end, the State has a demonstrable interest in fostering the education. As New Hampshire already mandates compulsory education for all children, the first part of the decision would seem to have a negligible impact.
However, the attendant finding, that responsibility for providing “adequate public funding” rests with the State has potentially dramatic and far reaching implications … and has already defined New Hampshire’s political landscape for the foreseeable future.
It’s unfortunate politicians, educators, concerned lobbies and “ordinary” citizens were not given an opportunity to digest and consider the verdict before the media frenzy began. Bold headlines and carefully crafted sound-bites would have us believe either a catastrophe has occurred or we’re on the doorstep to nirvana.
In reality, neither extreme is at hand. Rather, the Court’s considered decision provides a unique springboard from which to explore a variety of interrelated public issues, too often glossed over with charged rhetoric. Before enactment of any reflex-generate bills, particularly those “reforming” educational funding mechanisms, considerable thought must be given to at least five questions.
- What constitutes an “adequate education”?
- Precisely what correlation exists between public spending and educational excellence?
- How will local control be preserved in the presence of a state funded public education system?
- Will local school districts be able to complement “adequate” standard mandates with other educational, extracurricular and athletic programs and/or to reward staff excellence? If so, how will the monies to fund them be raised?
- If broad-based taxes are eventually utilized to fund public education, what protections will guarantee such taxes will not be expanded to finance the endless and unrelated agenda of the tax-and-spend statists?
Presently, each school must adopt certain minimum state standards, many of which have been under fire this past year. To conform with the Court’s decision, there will eventually have to be a consensus.
Those standards of adequacy should be output based, not a function of a certain number of courses, library books, computer terminals, classrooms or dollars spent. The ultimate metric must be the knowledge and skills retained by students and their ability to think rationally at their appropriate grade level. Administrators and teachers responsible implementing educational programs must be held accountable for such results.
As the Court’s decision seems to mandate statewide equality in per pupil expenditures, a primary argument against educational choice is effectively eliminated. Therefore, the concept of a public voucher system, as an alternative to aggregate payments to individual school districts based on local census figures, needs serious consideration, as even with funding equity not all schools will provide an equivalent education … and because individual choice is a basic tenet of a free society.
Meantime, valid concerns can be raised about reliance on State funding promises, as successive governors and legislatures have repeatedly ignored another Constitutional requirement to fund all state-mandated programs imposed on local communities.
Unfortunately, knee-jerk legislative efforts are already underway. One bill would sunset the present method of funding education without its authors having fully explored the potential consequences of such an action. Interesting, one of the bill’s chief sponsors who is pushing for a state income tax suggests 90% of the monies collected would go toward funding education. Where do you suppose the other 10% is going?
He and his compatriots have also ducked the incumbent size such a tax, estimated at upwards of 11.6%, to compensate for elimination of the current funding mechanism.
Further, the proposal to empower a handpicked group of legislators and educators to develop a new funding mechanism for public education, absent at least an equal number of politically diverse citizens without political or educational portfolio is, at best, an invitation for disaster.
In the final analysis, however, the public holds the ultimate trump card. As a recent editorial suggested, even the Supreme Court is subject to the will of the people who have power to amend the State Constitution.
Happy New Year … the fun has just begun!
