Stop Paying for Failure

Wednesday night I got to hear from our three newest, conservative school board members. One of them told this story:

I’ve got a friend of mine. He and I went to school together. He was the failure in our class. That man today owns a barbershop three blocks from my school. Right down the road. He was the number one problem kid in my class. Two years behind me. Number one problem kid. Today he owns a barbershop.

Today, the number one problem in my 7^th grade wanted to work for him. And when he went, and he had a failing grade in that school, on his report card, that man said, “You cannot work for me until you pass.” That young man got his grade to passing. The second he got his grade of passing, he ran the three blocks—left school, ran three blocks—to get to that barber shop and hold up his report card and say, “I passed!” (applause. Someone calls out “Expectations!”)

Expectations. Because that man, being in that young man’s life, said, “I will not allow you to continue to fail yourself—until you get that straight….” And the young man figured it out.

I want to come back to this story.

Scott Henry, Luke Scanlon, and Natalie Blasingame,
three of our school board members,
at a community gathering Wednesday, April 12, 2023

On Monday night our school board met. I watched it online while finishing my work for the day. Near the end they held a vote related to the board’s support of a position to oppose any state funding going to any voucher or school choice program.

During their discussions, one of the board members asked for clarification. There’s already a limited ESA [education savings account] program in place for certain special education students; the way this is worded, would it include eliminating that funding? It would have, so they reworded to carve out that exception. He has a special needs student himself and has a special place in his heart for their care.

Once that exception was made as an amendment, that left him with no visible reason to go against the policy—which the board’s discussion had made clear was wrong on its face, because it could divert funds from public schools, which already need more funding. So they held the vote. Five voted in favor, including two of our new conservative board members. One abstained, and one was absent. So it passed. Since I strongly favor school choice, and have been following the legislature, I was disappointed to see this.

Wednesday night I had a brief moment to talk about this with the board member who abstained. She said not to worry about it; the bill is very likely to pass in the legislature. This was just a game the board is playing, I think she meant, to try to force conservative members to oppose school choice.

There are plenty of questions about the legislation. There are bills related to employing an ESA program, with limited funds that would affect maybe 60,000 students statewide. Small school districts would be paid, I think for up to three years, for any student that leaves to take advantage of the program. This is to calm rural district fears that they would lose school funding that they have no way to make up—rural districts whose legislators have consistently shut down any possibility of school choice over many legislative sessions. So this might work to get through the limited trial.

Meanwhile, in the budget bill in the legislature, opponents to school choice stuck in an amendment saying no state funding could go to any schooling except public schools. (This amendment is what the local school board was supporting.) I’ve been assured that this will get taken out during reconciliation. I hope that’s true, because it’s in direct opposition to the other ESA legislation that is likely to pass. 

The same school board member who told the story above, also pointed out this statistic for our district: only 44% of 3^rd graders are reading at grade level. This is the average across the district, including all demographics. Far below half can read at the minimum level required to be considered acceptable for their grade level.

Teaching reading is not that difficult an undertaking. All but the most severely disabled can learn to read. Nearly all Down Syndrome kids learn to read. Some take longer than others. But, without some interference or neglect, most kids can learn to read. In fact, most kids can figure out the phonetic code well before the end of first grade—unless they’re not taught the phonetic code.

But not in our public schools in this relatively prosperous suburb of northwest Houston. Here, far under half are reading at a 3^rd grade level in 3^rd grade—probably because they didn’t figure it out in 1^st grade.

The one basic thing we expect from schools is that kids learn to read. Our school board  pointed out that math is reading. Every problem is a word problem. If you don’t learn to read, you also fail math.

By the way, another school board member said that across the state, across all our curriculum, only 19% meets grade level. Our district, Cy-Fair Independent School District, has an A rating, even though it's teaching less than half of students to read. But I guess the rest of Texas is failing even more catastrophically.

One more story. I’ve told this in more detail. But I had three kids in this district. Two of them had already been functioning well in a gifted magnet school in the state we moved from. This district thought they might not qualify (they did). And our daughter qualified as well. But this exclusive program the district thought they probably wouldn’t qualify for was essentially nonexistent.

Back in the day, I got a year of calculus in high school. We had two classrooms full of calculus students, close to 8% of the graduating class. Here in Texas there wasn’t a track my kids could get on that would allow them to take calculus in high school. Advanced math, by that point in high school, was considered an elective. So were foreign language, music, and PE. They offered one gifted class, a different version of world history—also elective. A kid was only allowed up to two electives in their four-year high school plan, and the district’s recommended plan was zero electives.

The basic education I got back in the 70s, before a Department of Education even existed, with three AP classes and plenty of options, simply wasn’t available for gifted students in this district. So, after two frustrating and stultifying years, we pulled them out and homeschooled.

Private school wasn’t an option. We didn’t have the additional funds for one student, let alone three. That was for the best, since homeschooling—and later combined with dual credit classes at the community college—was the best fit for our family and our kids with their particular quirks. Gifted kids are special ed, I think I mentioned. They need to be taught differently. We could accommodate that. It can be done in a classroom; we saw that in our previous state. But nobody here seems to know how or care to bother. After all, those kids are smart enough to learn to read and do math no matter how little you offer them, right?

Right. In this case because our kids had parents who cared and took on the responsibility. What did that mean for the schools? They didn’t have to bother with our kids anymore—but they still get our tax money. They get a per-student amount of money, so they didn’t get to count our three kids. But the overall amount is budgeted based on taxes. And they got ours. Meanwhile we paid in addition for the education of our children. No tax break to us. No stipend.

The purpose of education is to prepare the next generation of students to be good, contributing community members—not to preserve a particular government institution called public schools. So their failure to teach my kids is a mission failure. It's not about the money; it's about the principle.

What happens to them when they fail? They claim they need more money in order to improve.

Over the years the per-child amount has tripled or more—since my kids were there. It has grown much faster than inflation. And yet the results are abysmal. It looks as though the more money you give them, the more they will fail.

Is it possible that, at some upper backroom level, the plan is to fail? In the case of my kids, the more they fail them, the less is required of them and the more money they get. And the more money it costs parents who take responsibility for the education of their children.

Back to that story I told at the beginning, of the boy who was failing. He was told he couldn’t have the paying job he wanted until he stopped failing himself in school. That was the incentive he needed. He needed someone who cared to hold him accountable.

Maybe our failing schools shouldn’t be paid for failing. Maybe they need to have an actual and real threat of loss of money when they fail. Maybe then they would focus on the basics that are essential: reading, writing, math—and, as is required of homeschoolers, good citizenship. Schools don’t need to teach sex education at all. We can argue in favor of science, music, arts, PE—when a student is a successful reader.

How do we pull the funding for failing schools? ESAs might be a way. Thirty-two other states have tried some form of ESAs, in some 72 programs, and the result has been—not a sudden exodus from the local public schools, but an improvement in public schools.

Prager U has a video, explaining why public schools should favor school choice. This is the best 5-minute video you’ll watch today.

The video highlights Texas. Will this be the year we finally get a tiny amount of “the money follows the child” in Texas? We’re so far behind where we should be, we ought to abandon any fear that schools might lose the funding they need. Funding they need to do what? Keep failing? The status quo is absolutely unacceptable. Other states have tried this, and the result was significant improvement—in their public schools, not just for individual students.

The state is not the parent. The state should get out of the way of parents who are responsible for the education decisions for their own children. The bonus is that doing so will improve the educational outcomes for the whole state.