Over the last six months, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has raised $19 million. He has suggested that he will use the money to help primary candidates running against Republicans who voted down school choice legislation. Reform Austin suggests that Abbott funnel that money into government schools. Like most Leftists, the writers at Reform Austin are frequently guilty of cherry-picking facts.
As an example, the article provides a list of what could be done with $19 million, assuming an average annual salary of $58,890 for a K-12 teacher:
– Hire 323 K-12 teachers;
– Give a raise of $7,507 to approximately 2,531 K-12 teachers, to match the national teacher average which is $66,4K per year;
– Hire 394 security guards, assuming an average annual salary of $48,214;
– Potentially provide 6.66 million free school lunches, assuming the cost is $2.85 ( if the household did not qualify for free or reduced-priced benefits).
What the article neglects to tell us is that these expenses are for one year. What will happen next year? Do we fire those new teachers and security guards and rescind the raises given to teachers? Or do we raise taxes to continue dumping money into the cesspool that is the government school system? The article doesn’t bother to address that particular issue.
Cherry-picking facts is a form of dropping context. It means looking at certain facts in isolation and refusing to integrate them with other facts. When one drops context, one is willfully blinding oneself. As Leonard Peikoff puts it,
A context-dropper forgets or evades any wider context. He stares at only one element, and he thinks, “I can change just this one point, and everything else will remain the same.” In fact, everything is interconnected.
Dropping context often involves looking at the short-term while ignoring the long-term consequences and implications. And this is precisely what the Reform Austin article does. It focuses on the immediate benefit of spending Abbott’s money on government schools while ignoring what will happen next.
We can’t make good decisions by dropping context. Pretending that certain facts don’t exist won’t erase them from reality. Pretension does not and cannot enable us to achieve the results that we desire.