Darla is a monitor on the test floor of the LEARNS Academy I own through a shell in the Arkansas Delta — a woman whose job is to watch 45 third-graders stare at state-mandated ATLAS tablets for 7 hours and to wipe the desks when they’re done. The state pays me $6,864 per child in voucher funds to educate them. I pay Darla $11.00 an hour to keep them quiet. You drop your child off at my door and call it school choice. I call it a payroll subsidy the legislature wrote for me. Your tax dollars fund Darla’s wage. You get the bill. I get the margin. I do not teach children. I sort them.

Jonathan Turley argued on Fox News this week that Arkansas has proven education can be improved by breaking the teachers’ unions and expanding vouchers. He celebrated the soaring proficiency scores — math up 7.8 points, science up 8.4, overall to 42.2%. He is correct on every count. What he did not itemize is the receipt, because the word “voucher” does the same work the word “stipend” does in a labor contract: it obscures the direction of the money.

The state authorized $6,864 per pupil through the Education Freedom Account. I hired Darla because she doesn’t hold a teaching certificate, which means I’m not bound by the state salary schedule for licensed staff. Her annual wage is $22,880. For a room of 45 children, the state wires me $308,880. I pay Darla $22,880. The rest is margin, and I itemize it under instruction.

Now.

Darla’s lower back is compressing. She sits on a plastic folding chair for 7 hours because the ergonomic mesh chair runs $189 and I bought the plastic ones in bulk at $14 a unit. I kept the $175 difference. I kept it because the posture of the monitor does not appear on the ATLAS scoring rubric. The anti-fatigue mats run $42 each. I declined. Across the 6 testing locations I hold through shells in the Delta, the $42 I save per monitor compounds into a line item the board noticed at the quarterly review. Darla shifts her weight on the plastic chair and the camera in the corner logs it as a distraction event.

Stay with me. The rubric is not a measure of learning. The rubric is what I co-designed with the testing vendor. ATLAS is administered four times a year. Each administration requires answer sheets — printed, packaged, distributed, collected, scanned. The vendor charges $1.27 a child for the genuine article. I don’t purchase the genuine article. I print the bubbles in-house, on 20-pound copy paper, on the Risograph in the supply room, and the toner costs me $0.08 a child. The saving is $1.19 a child. The pencil smears. The scanner misreads 4% of them, and a misread counts as a zero on the rubric. The algorithm optimizes for what can be measured in a forty-question multiple choice. Which is to say: for what cannot surprise me. Read that sentence twice.

Penny is a body in the third-grade classroom at Jacksonville, and she teaches your children the rubric for $42,000 a year because I don’t pay her the $58,400 the public scale would have cost me. The saving on one body is $16,400. She has a class of 28 because I refused the aide the LEARNS framework recommended for cohorts over 24. The aide would have cost $58 a day. I kept the $58 a day. Penny teaches what is on the rubric. She does not teach what is not on the rubric. The column determines where the child works at thirty, and where the child works at thirty is what determines what I pay her.

Marcus is a body on the bus that takes Penny’s third-graders home from Jacksonville, and the bus is colder in January than the state minimum would prefer, because I refused the heater repair in October. The repair was $1,140. The fuel cost on the new heater would have run $0.14 a ride. I pocketed the $1,140 and the $0.14 a ride, and the children rode in 38-degree air in their coats. Marcus drives for $11 an hour, the Arkansas state minimum, and the LEARNS Act did not touch his wage, and the difference between his wage and the union scale went into the voucher pool, which routes back to me. Marcus is Penny with a steering wheel and a colder seat. Different surface, identical math, one operator. When the bus driver and the third-grade teacher are running the same column, you are no longer looking at 2 cases. You are looking at a model.

The company store in the coal camps of Harlan County paid scrip redeemable only at the store owned by the man who set the wage. The worker was paid in a currency he could spend in one building, at one price, owned by one man. I am paid in a currency I can spend in one building too — the school — except the currency arrives from the state, the building is mine, and the price I pay the woman inside it is mine to set. The architecture hasn’t changed. The vocabulary has improved considerably.

The common school was never a school. It was Horace Mann’s cheapest mechanism for taking a child off a farm and putting her in a column. The voucher does not threaten this arrangement. The voucher perfects it. The voucher moves the cheapest sorting mechanism from the state to me, and the state pays me to do what the state used to do for itself, and the saving is mine, and the saving on the children is a column I do not keep.

Blessed are the meek, for they accept the posted wage.

“Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.” — 1 Peter 2:18. The apostle understood the question Turley will not yet bring himself to ask. The union is the committee. The committee is the mechanism by which the biological capital has, for 60 years, insisted on negotiating with the person who owns the schedule. The voucher is what happens when the committee is starved out and the person who owns the schedule reclaims the room. The froward master is simply the one who read his own ledger first. Scripture did not abolish mastery. The apostle simply forbade the master’s subjects from filing a grievance.

I am not the only one who grades these examinations. I sit on the advisory board of the education program at the state university whose graduates fill your chairs. The young woman who runs Jacksonville took my seminar 4 years ago. Second row. Case study on teacher attrition. She ran the bonus-versus-salary calculation in 7 minutes and reached the procurement conclusion before I did. She was correct. I was pleased, and I will use the word. The arithmetic isn’t dying with me. I have graduated eleven classes of it, and each one is colder than the last, which is exactly what you want from a discipline that’s maturing.

One of them priced your child’s teacher. You don’t know which district you operate in. You don’t need to.

The children I sort into the lower column will arrive in my warehouses in 12 years. The children I sort into the upper column will arrive in my offices in sixteen. I have not priced the wages they will be paid at thirty. I haven’t looked. The rubric is the only column I keep.

Her hand was on a child’s tablet at 2:47 yesterday, steadying the screen, and the camera logged it as a productivity event.

Thank you for your business.

— SAV

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.