« A hard death | Main | Plain speaker from the Plains »
March 21, 2006
Another escape plot
Pardon my skepticism, but when I hear a politician say precisely the opposite of what his proposal intends, I always wonder which fairy tale he’s been reading. Is it Alice in Wonderland or Pinocchio?
Ted Gatsas, the Senate president from Manchester, has put forth yet another constitutional amendment aimed at freeing the Legislature from Supreme Court oversight on paying for public schools.
Here’s what Gatsas told a Senate committee yesterday: “It is not my intent to remove the courts.”
Here is what he wrote on today’s Monitor Forum page: “CACR 43 (his proposed amendment) is not attempting to take away the power of judicial review.”
Gatsas is a good guy, relatively new to the school funding frontlines. He wasn’t a key player in the last umpteen efforts by legislators and governors to erase the constitution’s mandate that the state pay for an adequate education for all public school students and do so through a fair tax.
So maybe Gatsas gets a pass. Maybe he’s not Pinocchio.
But can he – or any of the senators who passed this proposed amendment out of committee yesterday – really think it has a chance of succeeding?
I mean, read it:
“The Legislature shall have the authority to make reasonable determinations of the content, extent, funding and delivery of public education.”
Help! As a legislator or a voter, I’d stop and just say no at the key weasel phrase, “reasonable determinations.”
But it gets worse after that. Gatsas not only wants the Supreme Court out of the Legislature’s hair, but he also wants the Legislature to have more power over local public schools. This “authority to make reasonable determinations” would give the Legislature the power to pay less, forcing local communities to pay more. And it could do so while expanding the state’s power over the “content, extent . . . and delivery of public education.”
“Delivery,” of course, is a euphemism for vouchers and charter schools.
So what would stop the Legislature from reasonably determining that charter and parochial school students should get local aid while also reasonably determining that the state had no obligation to reimburse the cities and towns for this?
But I digress. The real issue is that the amendment is one more shot at persuading the public to trust the governor and Legislature, without court oversight, on school funding. They have not earned this trust.
Under their various unconstitutional plans and legislative manipulations of recent years, the gap between the have school districts and the have-not districts has grown again. Even in good times, and even after promises to the contrary, local aid rises and falls unpredictably, causing chaos in school budgeting. Even after repeated reminders by the courts, legislators haven’t defined the “adequate” education they are constitutionally obliged to pay for.
Gatsas’s amendment does exactly what he says it doesn’t: It aims to take the court out of the picture and leave the governor and Legislature to do as they please in determining the funding, content and delivery of public education.
That may not sound so bad at a time when the state’s revenue picture is bright and a benign governor sits in the corner office. But how good would you feel about the prospects of public education under this amendment during a penny-pinching budget season with, say, Craig Benson as governor?
Even if the Senate passes this amendment, the House should bury it in the expanding graveyard of Claremont escape plots.
Posted by Mike Pride at March 21, 2006 08:18 AM
Comments
Glancing down through your blogs, I realized I should have responded to this a few weeks ago. However, having a "senior moment," I perhaps thought I had.
The problem we have with an "adequate education" is no one has stressed the purpose of the public education system, so we can't establish a basis for assessment. It's really simply stated, but complex in design and implementation.
We created a public education system to create the people with whom we will live and work. Keep that in mind: public education is in the business of creating people.
A consultant in the state Department of Education used a comment at the heading of each of her department-wide e-mail messages as I recall them that said it best: "The math and science you teach are important to the extent that they make the student a better person."
I recall an event many years ago when Rudy Vallee, the singer and actor appeared on the "Tonight Show" with. as I recall, Jack Paar. He made a statement about taxes, and I can quote because it is indelibly etched in my memory" "I don't know why I should pay my money to educate someone else's children." An incredible impulse surfaced that wanted to grab him by the collar and say, "If we weren't all investing in a public education system, you wouldn't be living in a society in which you could accrue the wealth you have piled up and receive the recognition that you have."
We need a public education system that mocks the notion of wealthy "donor" communities and low income "receiver" communities. We in Concord are part of a larger system and should be as concerned about educational programming in Pitsfield, Barnstead, Merrimack Valley, Pembroke, and all the other New Hampshire school districts as we are about Concord's system because they are also producing the people with whom we will live and work. As a matter of fact, those school systems are probably situated to do a better job than Concord because they haven't yet succumbed to the notion that "bigger is better."
What factors are there to help us assess the effectivenes of districts in porducing our citizenry? One that comes to mind is the drop out rate. Another is the incidence of criminal prosecution and penal incarceration. We must assess homelessness, its causes, and possibilities for pre-emptive educational measures.
We have to rid ourselves of conventional wisdom measures like numbers enrolled in advanced placement courses. We have to have more aggressive efforts to follow up on school graduates and their judgements of the plusses and minuses of their public school programming in making them a productive part of our citizenry.
The politician will advance superficial approaches like increasing the drop-out age and grade-level testing, but these do not tell what kind of people we are turning loose on the rest of us.
We need laws that ban school expulsion, not establish it as a corrective measure. When we expel a student for misbehavior, we have placed him beyond our efforts and opportunities to change that behavior. We need teachers who will see students as people, not exercisers of subject mater. Despite all the studies of size and resulting evidence, conventional wisdom still says bigger is better, so we build bigger and blame students and the families who produced them for failure of the system.
There is a body of pedagogical knowledge that will make the system work, but educators have got to understand and implement it. Politicians and parents have got to get the hell out of the way.
Posted by: John Stohrer at April 14, 2006 08:26 PM