Occam’s Razor, or Memory Hole III 
By Martin Harris

If you choose to believe that the reason you can no longer ask (and receive an answer from) either your local educational administrators or even the State Education Department, as you once could, about the official student capacity or the square footage of a particular school building, is that the 3-ring binder in which every school in the State had its own data page, became "too expensive to maintain", then the rest of this column will not be of interest to you. If, conversely, you suspect that the claimed ignorance of such facts as professed by local edu-crats, or the disappearance, down the Memory Hole, of the inventory binder itself, was the result of other causes, then you might want to start by considering a 14^th century English (yes, it was thought up by a now-dead European white guy) philosopher whose name was William of Ockham (no surnames in those medieval years) and whose thesis became known as "Occam’s Razor", and which reads "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one".

William’s analysis would suggest that, when once-readily-available information suddenly becomes unavailable –to test this for yourself, try asking for your local school capacity and square footage—the simplest solution would be that some people want it unavailable. When once-public school stats become unavailable, the simplest solution would be that education people –educators and/or politicians—want it unavailable. The "why" of this relatively new (but unadmitted) policy is equally simple: ever since Horace Mann made the argument for publicly-funded public schools, a century-and-a-half ago, the accepted benchmarks for acceptable building design, cost, and taxation levels have been building capacity (numbers of student spaces in terms of classroom, lab, and similar rooms) and overall building square footage (which measures the net instructional space against the overall gross building area, so as to see the "design efficiency" of the building). With these numbers, taxpayers can judge for themselves whether the spaces being built are needed (or vice versa) and whether the building being built is reasonably functional and efficient. Without these numbers, taxpayers can judge neither. For most of the last century-and-a-half, with constantly growing enrollments, legislative and taxpayer approval of school building investments was based on a simple equation: "we have X in school building capacity now, we have X + Y in terms of present and projected future enrollment, therefore we need Y in new school construction now". Equally simple was the proof-of-prudence in school building design proposals: "we’re asking you to vote for a new (elementary/middle/high) school, for which the national average square footages-per-pupil (100/135/170) are the widely-accepted benchmarks which our proposal matches, thereby demonstrating the fiscal prudence of our request for your tax monies".

The first warning of distress to this comfortable formula came in 1957, when post-WWII birth rates began turning down, and in 1963, when enrollment growth began slowing as a result. By the 80’s, actual enrollments were starting to turn down –Vermont peaked at 106,371 in 1997, and is now down to about 96,000. Further declines are demographically certain. That’s a tough environment in which to sell a new school building project to taxpayers: our enrollments re shrinking, our schools are operating below capacity, but we want more square footage which will further depress our capacity/enrollment ratio while increasing our square footage per pupil. So, tough, in fact, that it helps explain why some schools (Middlebury’s Mary Hogan, for example) have resorted to highly questionable enrollment projections (which, of course, soon proved to be grievously wrong) to help sell bond issues.

It also explains –Occam’s Razor—why the official disappearance of capacity and square footage numbers was deemed the easiest way to dilute taxpayers’ ability to evaluate construction proposals using the traditional measures, and, therefore, why you can’t get the numbers any more. Conversely, you are, of course, entitled to choose to believe that the old 3-ring binder was so costly to keep up that it was dumped down the Memory Hole in the interests of governmental frugality and concern for taxpayers. You decide.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights.