LTE: In Response to McIntire

In Response to McIntire

I was pleased to see that Tanya McIntire was willing to go back to the state constitution as her starting point when considering what the state should be doing about education, and how it should be paid for. Too few people are willing to do that, and she should be commended for her efforts.

However, she seemed to have glossed over the essential word ‘and’ in the phrase ‘seminaries and public schools’. No branch of the state government has even attempted to say what it would mean for legislators and magistrates to ‘cherish’ seminaries and public schools, but native speakers of English understand that whatever it means, it must apply to both.

I believe that Ms. McIntire would agree that the state cannot fund, regulate, or operate a seminary. So it’s curious that she seems so sure that it is constitutional for the state do those things for a public school.

I wish that she had read a little further in Article 83, to the part where it recognizes that the people have an inherent and essential right to free and fair competition (an actual right, as opposed to the ‘right’ to an education invented by the court); and obligates the state to protect that right from monopolies that would hinder or destroy it (an actual obligation, as opposed to the ‘obligation’ invented by the court to pay for its invented ‘right’).

By any conventional or legal definition, the public school system is a monopoly. By any reasonable understanding, it undermines free and fair competition in the industry of education. By any understanding of English grammar, the seminaries and public schools cannot be treated differently. Ms. McIntire is therefore placed in the uncomfortable position of trying to embrace both the constitution and the court, when they are saying exactly opposite things.

Note that the court, in its Claremont decisions, did actually provide a definition for an ‘adequate education’, which has been completely ignored by the other branches of government. It consists of ‘the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government’.

Almost nothing that the General Court and the Department of Education are doing is aligned with that definition, especially where the words ‘opportunity’ and ‘necessary’ are concerned. I refer interested readers to my book, Rethinking Fairness in Education, for a more detailed discussion of how this misalignment can be addressed in a way that benefits the students, the taxpayers, and ultimately all the residents of New Hampshire.

Ian Underwood

Croydon, NH