There are better answers!
Less than a month ago, the Supreme Court redefined the state’s educational landscape. In its unanimous decision, the justices advised the state it had an obligation to ensure an “adequate education” for every child and to guarantee “adequate public funding”.
While the court deliberately avoided defining “adequate”, advocates of nearly every educational lobby eagerly provide lengthy proscriptions. Since then, those lists have inexorably lengthened.
This past week, a coalition of educators, parents, senior citizens and other special interest groups, organized under the umbrella of “The Kindergarten Campaign”, laid siege to the State House to promote their effort to mandated publicly-funded kindergarten statewide.
Among their claims, without a kindergarten experience, a child does not receive an “adequate” education … and thus must be required of all communities. While providing a kindergarten education to all children is a noble goal, its advocates seem conveniently oblivious to several realities.
First, there is no hard evidence to justify claims students, deprived of a kindergarten experience, will be any less educated by the time they complete high school. To the contrary, several studies suggest whatever head start preschool gives some children is made up by those who did not have such an opportunity within two or three years.
Then, there are the logistics of public kindergarten.
In many communities, available physical facilities which would meet acceptable “state standards” are at a premium. Teachers, materials and supplies will also be required, as will overhead costs including heat, light and routine maintenance. As most kindergartens are run on half-day schedules, two-way bus transportation for morning and afternoon sessions, present potentially significant personnel and equipment impacts. All cost money … lots of it!
Predictably, the proponents of publicly-funded kindergarten will roll out their own studies to justify their case.
However, their argument that New Hampshire is the only state without mandated kindergarten is irrelevant. We must stop the insanity of using a comparison of means as a substitute for measurements of results!
As for the other problems, we’ll be told they’re easily solved with a healthy dose of education’s universal cure-all, tax dollars. Waiting in the wings is their champion fund raiser, Chichester’s Doug Hall, who has introduced yet another bill to once again open the public checkbook for education.
His latest proposal would increase the cigarette tax by five cents and add a three percent tax on booze … the same source being eyed by the framers of President Clinton’s health care reform package. Ever wonder what would happen if Americans really decided to get healthy and stopped smoking and drank less?
Yet throughout the debate, one subject has been conspicuously ignored by the advocates of a more intrusive governmental role over education … the participation of the private sector.
Today, while many communities across New Hampshire do not require nor fund kindergarten, few of these cities and towns are without such facilities. Government inaction has provided an entrepreneurial opportunity … a niche which has been filled in a professional and competent manner by literally hundreds of private kindergartens.
Admittedly, not all New Hampshire’s children attend kindergartens, private of otherwise. For some, financial realities preclude this option, while transportation creates obstacles for other families. For still others, it is a matter of choice … a conscious decision not to send their kids to kindergarten.
While options to overcome the first two impediments should be a challenge to be investigated, freedom of individual choice must not be infringed upon lightly, even by those do-gooders who invariably know what’s best for everyone.
If bills to require communities to have public kindergartens are stampeded through the Legislature, what is to happen to the network of private kindergartens? Will their owners and dedicated teachers, having devoted years to teaching preschool children suddenly be forced to pay taxes to a support a competitor … threatening their jobs or businesses in the process?
Any such outcome is clearly unacceptable, an anathema to the spirit of the American tradition!
A better solution can be found in utilizing the existing and efficient, private-sector infrastructure to assist in making a kindergarten education available to all New Hampshire children.
In the process, perhaps it will provide a unique model, absent emotional rhetoric, to objectively examine alternatives to our costly, often inefficient and unaccountable publicly-funded educational monopoly.
