This past week I had dinner with an old friend. Our conversation evolved into a friendly discussion about the different economic and governing approaches of liberals versus conservatives. These days, the competing philosophical approaches appear nearly irreconcilable as each camp’s view of the world, culture, sociology, and politics are fundamentally different — although I have long believed the ideological spectrum is more circular than linear. While the desired outcome of the far left and the far right may differ, the functional means to their ends are similar, which typically means individual rights and liberties are subordinated to government power and control to advance a preferred cultural/political/economic ideology. Obviously, most people fall more in the middle, and they have become increasingly cynical about politics, cultural institutions, and economic systems in general.
As we debated, I was reminded of a good example of the differing philosophical approaches from back in my Washington days. The goal was to help make college more affordable. Congressional Republicans favored education savings accounts, which are like individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for education. The Bill Clinton administration and the congressional Democrats favored education tax credits. In those days it was framed as a “fairness” argument. These days, it is an “equity” argument.
The Democrats argued that everybody should receive the same amount of credit, or subsidy, toward their higher education costs. Republicans argued that disciplined savings should rewarded and that education savings accounts would generate real cost savings because not every student would have the same amount of money to apply toward their college costs. In short, if everybody receives a $5,000 credit, the cost of tuition will simply increase by $5,000, so such an approach does nothing to reduce the cost of higher education. Whereas, if individuals can bring different amounts of money to the table, they have real market buying power because colleges and universities cannot simply increase tuition by a fixed amount. In this case, education savings accounts prevailed in negotiations between the Republican Congress and the Clinton administration. Regardless, the debate between market economics and social subsidy rages on today.
With the Summit School District Board of Education burning through its reserve funds to backfill operating expenses and facing a potential budget deficit in 2025-26, local school funding became the next topic. While my friend and I agreed that we would like to see greater fiscal accountability from the school board, my friend believes that higher education spending produces better academic results. However, if spending per student were the primary driver of quality education, student achievement, and academic excellence, the Baltimore and Washington public schools would be among the best in the country! Instead, they struggle to graduate functionally proficient students, despite spending enormous amounts of money.
In Summit County, the modern school funding cycle has been to spend liberally and then ask voters to approve higher school taxes. If the past is prologue, voters will approve higher taxes, the status quo will prevail, and a new, unsustainable funding cycle will start again. With Summit County voters facing significant property tax increases, it will be interesting to see they change course and demand the school board reign in the budget before approving higher school taxes? Only time will tell.
On the broader ideological front, over the past generation, education at all levels, from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary, has become almost exclusively the domain of progressive left. While purportedly inclusive of all cultures, ethnicities, ideologies, lifestyles and genders, America’s education establishment has become the hotbed of hate speech codes and other byzantine social codes of conduct that functionally serve to stifle debate, chill free speech and insulate progressive ideology from intellectual scrutiny. The progressive left decries U.S. Supreme Court decisions that strike down race-based preferences, but the same activists would never embrace philosophical affirmative action throughout the faculty. This philosophical/ideological imbalance is now entrenched in U.S. education.
The same philosophical/ideological divide pervades social, environmental and economic policy at all levels of our country. Personally, I favor free market economics, individual liberty and less government involvement in everyday life. To my friend, I stand with Voltaire, who famously said, “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Cheers!
