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 oday,
May 15th, is voting day in my school district, when we approve tax
and budget increases for the coming school
year. My local school board is looking to raise taxes nearly 8 percent,
citing inflation, slightly increased enrolments, and some new unfunded
mandates from the state. So I get to think about education; which,
as a responsible person, I should probably do more often. Better
yet, as a columnist, I get to sound off about it.
If anyone should be happy with the current system of school funding,
I should. I have two kids in public elementary schools. According
to my county free sheet, David Willmott's excellent
Suffolk Life , 70 per cent of my property taxes go to
fund the school system. My property taxes are $4,100 a year, so
this means I'm paying $2,870 for schools — $1,435 per child.
I'm actually paying more than this, because some part of my state
and federal income taxes go to the schools, too; and money I hand
over for local goods and services has sales and business tax components,
some portion of which ends up in school budgets. Still, I'm getting
my kids educated for less than $2,000 each, which is a bargain.
No local private nor even parochial school can match this. If I
gave up my own time to homeschool, reckoning lost earnings for that
time at a reasonable hourly rate, homeschooling would cost me ten
times that, at least. I further note that if I had followed my grandfather's
example and had 13 kids, my town would be educating them at a cost
to me of $315 per. Whoo-eeeee! (Though I might then have some trouble
with local occupancy ordinances.)
The trick here, of course, is that a lot of other people are paying
for my kids to be educated. My neighbor Ruth, for example has a
house the same size and age as mine, and so I suppose pays similar
property taxes. Ruth, however, is close to eighty, and her kids
are both in their fifties, so the $2,800 or so that she is paying
into the school system per annum is all gravy to me and my kids.
(Though the math here gets complicated. Ruth is on Social Security
and Medicare, funded--never mind all that squid ink about "lockboxes"
and "trust funds" — by a large chunk of my income taxes…
I'll leave this one to Larry Kudlow to figure out.) Local businesses,
too, pay heavy taxes; yet, while we all know that a business corporation
has a legal "personality", no method has yet been found to permit
corporations to make babies.
So the costs of public education are smeared out over all persons
and entities to whom some reasonable appeal can be made. To Ruth,
the taxman would say: "Your present property taxes are a sort of
installment payment on your own kids' education 40 years ago, which
— like Mr. Derbyshire today — you got way below cost at
the time." The idea underlying this is that people with school-age
children are probably young and hard up, and appreciate getting
their kids' education below cost in return for helping pay for the
schooling of other people's kids when they are middle-aged and affluent
(or, like Ruth, retired and flush with benefits funded from general
taxation). To local business folk, the taxman would say: "How can
you run your business without educated workers? We are one of your
suppliers." The idea underlying this — which can easily
be extended to appeal to childless homeowners, too — is that
education is a social good, like street lighting, that all citizens
should be willing to chip in on.
These two underlying ideas — that people welcome the opportunity
to amortize the costs of their kids' education through a lifetime
payment of property and income taxes, and that education is a social
good to which all should contribute, seem to me to be very questionable.
The first of them could be covered equally well — much cheaper,
in fact, if you do the arithmetic — by parents taking out a
bank loan or a mortgage, as they do for other large expenditures
they are unwilling to meet immediately. As to the second: Is education,
as currently practiced, really a large social good? (I note in passing
that even if it is, it does not follow that it ought to be publicly
funded. The authorities consider it a social good for me to have
auto insurance, and have legislated to that effect, but they expect
me to pay for it myself.)
Personally, I think it is…but only up to about 5th grade. I
want to live among people who can read, write, give correct change,
and name the capital of their state. Beyond that, I think education
is a luxury that people should pay for themselves. Most of what
people learn beyond 5th grade is anyway forgotten. I have argued
in a
previous column that foreign language learning is a waste of
time. Same with higher math or history: try stopping adults in the
street and asking them to recite the formula for solving quadratic
equations, or to state the causes of the 1812 War, things everybody
learns in 9th grade. I think it is hard to make a case for compulsory
public education after about age 12 under any funding scheme.
This is not to say that there might not have been a case once, when
information about the world was hard to come by; but information
dearth is not a problem we suffer from much in A.D. 2001. The young
Abe Lincoln walked 30 miles to hear a lawyer give a speech. Nowadays
he could flip on the TV or surf the web. Am I the only person who
finds something ludicrous in the spectacle of great hulking testosterone-oozing
15-year-old youths squatted in school desks under legal compulsion,
listening to someone explaining Shakespeare's imagery? What do they
care? What will they remember? What use is it to them? It is hard
to keep away the thought that we pen them in schoolrooms like this
mainly because we can't think of anything else to do with them.
Thirty years ago the Austrian radical anarchist Ivan
Illich proposed a "deschooling"
of society, to benefit the poor. Sample quote: "The poor in
the United States…are making the discovery that no amount of
dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions,
once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced
society that their ministrations are morally necessary." You don't
have to be a radical anarchist to see that the guy had a point.
(Radical anarchists aren't all bad, by the way: Illich quotes Milton
Friedman with approval.)
Shall we deschool American society, then? Or reform the education
system in any other way? Of course we shall not, and we all know
why. It's the unions, stupid. Just one of our teachers' organizations,
the NEA, is the biggest labor union in the world. It owns the Democratic
party, an entire Cabinet department, and most state legislatures.
(According to the Wall Street Journal, if you go to the capital
city of any state, the grandest building you will see is of course
the State Capitol. The second grandest, usually close by, is the
headquarters of the state's NEA.)
Here is where I start to foam at the mouth. (You might want to back
away from the screen at this point.) I grew up in Britain in the
1960s, when that country's industry was being systematically wrecked
by over-powerful labor unions. Union-directed work practices, as
portrayed hilariously by Peter Sellers in the 1960 film I'm All
Right, Jack, had reduced Britain's once-famous manufacturing
skills to a hollow joke. The writer Clive James, growing up in Australia
about this time, says that when import rules were relaxed so that
Australians could buy Volkswagens and Hondas instead of the terrible
products of Vauxhall, Austin, and Morris, his countrymen hailed
the new vehicles as if they had come to liberate Australia from
a foreign tyranny. It was not unusual in those days, on opening
the trunk of your newly purchased British car, to find a small rectangular
protuberance jutting out from the trunk floor. This would prove,
on close examination, to be an empty cigarette pack, left there
by a line worker and spray-painted into place by another, equally
indifferent, line worker later in the production process. The union-led
decline continued until even the stoical, apolitical British public
at last got fed up and elected Margaret Thatcher (whom God preserve!)
to put things right. By that time my own young mind had been indelibly
impressed with the following principle. It's hardly original, must
in fact have been stated thousands of times, but since I have never
seen any name attached to it I hereby claim it as my own:
Derbyshire’s
Law
The quality of any product or service varies in inverse proportion
to the political power wielded by those labor unions to which the
producers or service providers belong.
And that miserable British experience was mostly about private-sector
unions, for which there is actually a strong case to be made, so
long as their powers to cause antisocial trouble are carefully circumscribed
by law. Labor unions in the public sector? I don't get it.
Labor unions exist in private business to prevent unscrupulous bosses
from maximizing their profits at workers' expense. In the public
sector, however, there are no profits, and the ultimate bosses are
the electorate themselves. So why are public-sector workers allowed
to have unions? And why are those unions allowed to gather as much
raw political power to themselves as the teachers' unions have?
Won't they just use that power to enrich themselves and their members
from the public fisc? And to slacken professional disciplines? And
reduce the burden of professional responsibilities? You bet they
will.
Now I shall go and fill some sandbags. An early mentor of mine in
journalism told me that you can say anything you like about the
government, the IRS, Big Business, the media, the Irish Republican
Army, the PLO, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, or even Barbra Streisand
without coming to much harm; but take on the teaching unions, and
you better get steel mesh over your windows, and one of those mirrors
on a long handle for finding bombs under your car, and sandbags
round the front door. These people have p-o-w-e-r, and they
know how to use it. Honey, where's the shovel?
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