King Andru’s Magic Mirror

Once there was a kingdom called New Hampshire, which was having an educational crisis. 

Well, crisis may not be the right word.  A crisis is something that happens suddenly.  This was more like a situation, which had been going on for decades. 

The problem was that, even though the amount of money that the people paid for their schools kept increasing much faster than the costs of other things, student achievement remained unchanged.  

Which is to say, it remained pretty lousy.  Fewer than half of students could read or do math at the levels of proficiency required to participate in the political, social, and economic systems of a free government. 

The king of New Hampshire, Andru the First, constantly had to look for ways to distract parents and taxpayers from this situation.  In his chambers, he had a magic mirror that would answer his questions. 

One day, he asked, "Magic mirror on the wall, how can I keep my subjects from asking inconvenient and embarrassing questions about student performance?"

"That's easy," the mirror replied.  "Get them to obsess about money instead.  If they stopped to think about it, they would see that there is no connection between what gets spent and what gets learned.  So don't let them stop to think about it," the mirror said. 

"How can I do that?" the king asked.  

"Persuade them to fight about fairness in how they're being taxed, so they won't have time to think about the quality of the education they're paying for but not getting.  Just always remember that even the right answer to the wrong question is still wrong, and that where schools are concerned, any question about money is the wrong question," the mirror said. 

So the king followed the mirror's advice.  He traveled around the kingdom, proposing different schemes for raising money for schools.  Each of these schemes pitted groups of citizens against each other:  Citizens with more expensive homes against those with less expensive homes; citizens with higher incomes against those with lower incomes; citizens with children against citizens with no children; and so on.

So the citizens of the kingdom continued to argue over money, a subject that divided them.  They never did get around to discussing the subjects that could have united them:  What schools should be doing, and why, and how.  Eventually, the kingdom fell into bankruptcy -- financial, intellectual, and moral.  

But the king — whose own children had been educated in private schools — fled with his family, his personal fortune, and his magic mirror, to another land, where he could find more people that he could “help”.