A Legislative Agenda for School Reform

With regard to education, I think that there are two broad legislative goals that we should be pursuing.   

The first goal is to move school districts away from doing things that flatly contradict the written state constitution. 

The second goal is to move school districts toward doing things in the same ways that they are done in the rest of society.

Consider the first goal. The written state constitution (in Article 83) recognizes that ‘free and fair competition in the trades and industries is an inherent and essential right of the people’, and requires the state to protect the people ‘against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it’.

But isn’t this exactly what teachers’ unions do? Destroy competition in the industry of education by setting up a monopoly? 

We should be pushing to remove any special status that unions have under the law, so that unions can form (like book clubs, or bowling teams), but can’t force anyone to deal with them.

Consider the second goal. Outside the topsy-turvy world of schools, you pay for work after it’s done, and only if it’s completed satisfactorily. You specify in a contract what will, and will not, be provided. If you’ve paid in advance, but the work turns out to be incomplete or defective, you get a refund. If you no longer trust the provider of a service, you’re free to seek out alternatives.

Only where schools are concerned do we find it acceptable to be forced to pay for something without even knowing ahead of time what it’s supposed to be; hope that we’ll get something we like; and acquiesce to returning to the same provider because it is able to maintain — with the state’s blessing and support — a monopoly.

The value of organizing legislative efforts under these overarching goals — which make up a mission statement, if you will — is that it gives some guidance about what we should be trying to accomplish, and how we should be looking to accomplish it.

For example, Article 83 requires the legislature to ‘cherish … seminaries and public schools’.  Whatever cherish means, it can’t mean one thing for seminaries and something else entirely for public schools.  

This suggests that a bill should be introduced to require seminaries and public schools to obtain public funding using a single, shared mechanism.  What is forbidden for one would be forbidden for the other. 

Or let’s look at special education.  Here are two more bills that ought to be introduced. 

One bill would require special education services to be provided via the same kinds of contractual agreements as services in the world outside of school.  That is, the goals to be met must be spelled out ahead of time, in sufficient detail, using verifiable metrics, so that the asking price can be fairly evaluated; and refunds must be issued if the agreed-upon goals are not met.

The other bill would require repealing all truancy laws, in keeping with the state supreme court’s rulings in the Claremont cases that the state is responsible for providing the opportunity for an education to each educable child. It has no duty towards children who are not ‘educable’. 

The term educable has never been defined. It needs to be defined. And that will be a long, contentious process. But we can start with this basic fact: You can’t teach anything to someone who doesn’t want to learn it. 

A child who does not want to be in school is, by definition, not educable.  So the state has no responsibility toward him, and no legitimate basis for forcing him to attend school. (I realize that this responsibility was invented out of whole cloth by the state supreme court, and is part of the oral constitution rather than the written one.  But in this case, both constitutions agree:  The state has no power to require anyone to attend school.  Providing someone with an opportunity does not mean you can force him to take advantage of that opportunity.) 

Are such proposals too radical? Think back to the early 1980s, before Florida passed its ‘shall-issue’ legislation concerning concealed carry.

Wouldn’t the idea that nearly all states would issue carry permits by default — and that more than half of them would drop the requirement for a permit— have seemed ‘too radical’ to be worth pursuing? 

What seems radical at first becomes mainstream after enough conversation has ensued. The important thing is to get that conversation started.

As Wayne Gretzky used to say: You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. There are thousands of small problems with the way schools are run, but I believe that the giant problems always come back to letting school districts get away with ignoring (1) the written state constitution, and (2) the lessons that we’ve learned about customer service in the world outside schools. 

The Granhattan Project: 95% Literacy By 2030

For any enterprise to succeed, it has to take actions that will move it towards its goal. Perhaps more importantly, it has to say no to actions that won't do that.

This means it has to articulate a goal, in a simple, straightforward way, so that whenever it is contemplating a possible action, it can ask: Will this move me closer to the goal? If so, it's worth doing. If not, it isn't.

That is the role of a mission statement. It's a kind of guiding star, a way of deciding when to say yes, and when to say no.

For example, this is the mission statement of Southwest Airlines: 'To be the world's most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline.'

Here was President Kennedy's mission statement for the space program: 'This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.'

Simple, but not easy. Ambitious, but achievable. And very, very clear.

One of the largest enterprises in New Hampshire is its public school system. What is the mission statement for this enterprise? Unfortunately, no one seems to agree on that.

The more people you ask — legislators, judges, bureaucrats, parents, teachers, taxpayers — the more answers you get: To provide children with bright futures (college and career readiness) and pleasant presents (sports, hobbies, opportunities to socialize with friends); to create a workforce for employers (with subsidized daycare for employees); to allow us to compete in the global economy; to promote tolerance and inclusivity, and so on.

But the public school system does have a mission statement of sorts, at least on paper.

The state constitution is clear in saying that education is 'essential to preservation of a free government'. That's the why.

The state supreme court is clear in saying that it is the responsibility of the state to provide 'each educable child an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government'. That's the what.

The legislature has been clear in saying that 'schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment'. That's the how.

That last bit is buried so deeply — in RSA 193-H:2 — that you almost have to be Indiana Jones to find it. And it recently survived an attempt to repeal it, on the grounds that no one was really taking it seriously.

But what would happen if we adopted RSA 193-H:2 as the mission statement for our public school system? That is, what if New Hampshire embarked on what we might call the 'Granhattan Project', a program similar to the moon landing, or the development of the atomic bomb? A program attaching a real sense of urgency to a goal that is simple but not easy, ambitious but achievable, and very, very clear.

Something like: 'This state should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of bringing 95% of students to a 12th grade level of proficiency in reading.'

Note that in achieving this goal as a society, we would position students to achieve their own goals as individuals: To create their own bright futures. To attend college, or train for a career, or start a business. To learn more about whatever they want, whenever they want, for the rest of their lives. To be active creators, rather than passive consumers, of public discourse on subjects like tolerance and inclusivity — or taxes, or public health and safety, or criminal justice, or welfare, or any other matter of public policy. They would be able to participate intelligently in the political, economic, and social systems of a free government. And in doing so, help preserve a free government.

But we can only do this if we have a yes that is clear enough, and understood to be essential enough, to let us say no when we need to. To turn away from incidentals that distract from essentials. To follow our guide star, instead of veering after each new shiny bauble that appears on the horizon.

And if teaching every student to read is the wrong mission statement, let's come up with a better one.

How might we do that? One way would be to encourage stakeholders to make lists of all the things they think schools should be doing. Compile the lists, and see which items show up 95% of the time.

(It's the same basic idea as voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame, but with a higher threshold.)

The idea is to find consensus, in order to avoid contentiousness; to cooperate with our limited resources, instead of competing for them; to pull together in a common direction, instead of pulling in a dozen directions at once. To chase just one rabbit, and catch it, instead of chasing a dozen and missing them all.

Zig Ziglar expressed the idea behind a mission statement this way: 'You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.’ And even more simply: ‘If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.’

I have yet to see a more accurate description of our public school system. We can do better, and we need to do better. A great first step in that direction would be embracing RSA 193-H:2, instead of eliminating it, or continuing to ignore it.