“More money doesn’t make better education.”
Lamar Alexander
Efforts to improve education continue to be dominated by ancillary issues, most politically motivated. New Hampshire’s gubernatorial race appears be shaping up as no exception.
The seeds for this year’s debate were sown by the supreme court’s December ruling that the state was obligated to provide every educable child an adequate education and provide adequate funding to accomplish that task.
Whereas subsequent focus should have centered on methods of improving the quality, delivery and effectiveness of educational services, politicians, bureaucrats, educators and even the media instantly riveted on two words, “adequate funding”. A considered and probing discussion on how to improve the education system degenerated into an angry confrontation over money.
The Arneson-King coalition saw an opportunity to rejuvenate their efforts to enact statewide sales or income tax. Their primary antagonist, Steve Merrill, positioned himself as the latest guardian of New Hampshire’s “pledge”, promising to veto any such taxes which reach his desk. The Governor’s plan, slated for unveiling by July 15th, is unlikely to be more than yet another funding formula.
Their solutions all boil down to the same answer, money, only disagreeing over the levels and sources of funding. Meanwhile, they remain content to leave the public monopoly which has dominated and compromised our educational system untouched, thereby avoiding any clash with the state’s powerful education lobby.
However, there is an outspoken exception to this narrow-minded vision and lack of political courage. Libertarian Steve Winter has latched onto an idea with the potential to lessen the fiscal burden of public education while injecting market forces into the quality of the services being provided.
In comments to reporters after filing for governor, Winter called for a choice-in-education plan, similar to one enacted in Epsom, although later declared impermissible by the state supreme court. His plan would allow parents to have a rebate on their taxes of up to 50% of the average per-student cost for use to enroll their children to any non-publicly funded school.
An admirable start, but better still would be a full-blown voucher system permitting parents to send their children to any school, public or private. Schools would then be challenged to compete on the basis of the quality of education they provide. In the process, parents would reclaim a rightful empowerment over their children’s education.
Concurrently, Derry and a handful of other towns throughout the state are exploring the privatization of school management. Here again, they demonstrate their inherent belief market forces can deliver a more cost-effective system than can be realized by a public monopoly.
These and similar proposals have sent the education unions, teachers, administrators, SAU staffs and their educate allies into orbit. They deride the authors of these proposals and, like most people threatened by a change in the status quo, come armed to crush new ideas rather than accepting the challenge they pose.
These critics cite examples where parental choice and/or privatization have been less effective than advertised, but neglect to report such failures are rarely the norm. Conveniently ignored are the massive, documented failures of the public education system which continues to graduate students whose abilities to read with comprehension, write
critically, articulate coherent thoughts or test on a level with their counterparts in other developed societies are sorely lacking.
Equally discounted are the nation’s thousands of private schools ranging, from strict religious and military milieus to freewheeling Montessori environments, which have consistently graduated well-educated students year after year … and whose faculties would be out on their ears if they failed to measure up to often highly competitive standards of scholarship, leadership and accountability.
Clearly, public schools need to be an integral part of the educational mix. However, they cannot continue to cry for more money absent guarantees the students they educate and whose lives they shape will be challenged, measured against demanding standards and fully prepared for college or the work force.
Fifty years of lofty educational theory has produced a nation of graduates less literate, less secure and less well-equipped to enter a competitive marketplace than their fathers and grandfathers. Recent inane trends in political correctness, sensitivity training and historical revisionism threaten to exacerbate this crisis.
The education of the nation’s youth is too important to be placed solely in the hands of the public sector; which, you will recall, brought us the post office, Superfund, welfare system and a host of other well-meaning programs which failed to deliver as promised but consumed ever larger sums of the taxpayer’s monies.
Former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander noted, “A constitutionally adequate education should determined by whether students can meet high academic standards … not by how much is spent on each student.“
Vision and leadership, possibly embracing such heresies as choice, competition and privatization rather than public monopolies, unchecked budgets or doomsday prophesies offer the best hope for reestablishing American education as the world’s finest.
