More on the Wellesley override

As we noted earlier this week, the town of Wellesley's recent failure (by 17 votes) to pass a $3.6 million Proposition 2-1/2 override resulted in the cancellation of a Spanish immersion program in the Wellesley public schools (the town did pass a smaller override), whereupon some concerned parents took it upon themselves to raise $380,000 to try to save the program.  The school board, however, rejected the offer, and will cancel the program instead.  We wondered aloud whether this was the right call, and got some interesting comments.

In today's Globe, columnist Eileen McNamara continues the discussion by delivering a lecture to the Wellesley parents, who in her view are "confused" about "the definition of public education" and require a lesson on "the concept of collective responsibility."

I was mightily put off by McNamara's pious, high-and-mighty tone, which seems to me completely inappropriate in a situation where the parents (and the kids, who were also involved in the fundraising effort) were simply trying to preserve an educational program that they found to be beneficial.  And, in thinking about it, I don't find much of what McNamara says to be very persuasive.  Read on...

I can see two broad categories of reasons in support of the school board's decision to reject the privately-raised funds.  The "strategic" reasons are the variants on the notion that "if we accept private funds here, the town will never vote for a Prop. 2-1/2 override again because they'll assume that the parents will raise the money."  The "philosophical" reasons go more to the idea that there's something intrinsically bad about public schools accepting private donations.

McNamara's column does not address the "strategic" reasons at all, so I won't discuss them further here (though they're important and are well worth discussing).  She focuses entirely on "philosophical" reasons - in particular, her view seems to be that when the voters spoke by rejecting the override, that should have been the end of the matter.  She writes:

We cast our lot together, for good or ill. The majority rules. That means: Win some, lose some.

And later:

The take-away lesson for disappointed parents might have been the need to do a better job next time convincing townspeople of their point of view, or to do a more aggressive job of getting like-minded residents to the polls. Persuasion and participation usually win the day. Whatever happened to losing gracefully, and living to fight another day? Instead, parents indignant that they lost such a close vote launched a fund-raising drive to use private resources to pay for a core curriculum public-school program.

And still later:

In the face of the fundamental inequity in educational opportunity we do not need Citizens to Save Spanish, parents determined to circumvent the will of a majority when they do not prevail at the polls. No matter how committed they are, no matter how worthy their goal, these parents are sending a message that their cause is more legitimate than the democratic process.

"Majority rules"?  "Losing gracefully"?  "Circumvent the will of the majority"?  "Sending a message that their cause is more legitimate than the democratic process"??  McNamara's entire column is devoted to demolishing a straw-man (a classic technique of misdirection familiar to any litigator).  What the "democratic process" in Wellesley decided was that the town's property taxes would not be raised in order to fund the Spanish immersion program.  No one is trying to "circumvent" that result by forcing people to pay for the Spanish program.  The thing about taxes is that they are involuntary - everyone has to pay them, even if they don't like what they are being used for.  The people who raised the $380,000 were voluntary donors - they didn't want the program to be cancelled, so they shelled out their own money to try to save it.  McNamara's entire argument thus depends on the premise that it is "wrong" for public schools to be funded through anything other than tax money.  But she never defends (or even acknowledges) that premise, and it is not clear to me that it is entirely correct, at least in circumstances like these, for the reasons in my previous post.

McNamara remarks on the fact that our state's system of locally-funded schools means that some towns have much better schools than others.  While that is true, it seems to me as irrelevant as the "majority rules" point that underlies most of her column.  Again, the question is whether public schools should accept private funds.  Would her conclusion be different if precisely the same set of facts had arisen in Everett instead of Wellesley?  The one thing I agree with in McNamara's column is this: "All parents want the best education for their children."  I still haven't been persuaded that parents in a town that rejects a Prop. 2-1/2 override should be barred from replacing those funds with voluntary, private donations in order to keep the quality of the schools from declining.