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.