I was reading innocently along. I’ve been interested in school funding since the 1980s when I worked for an education planning agency in Oregon. I know how complicated it is; I know there are no perfect answers.

Even so, the alarm bells went off when I read this paragraph in an October 11 piece by Troy Closson in the New York Times.

“The new system has raised ethical questions. Is it fair, for example, for a girl with the same academic and behavioral troubles as a male classmate to be classified at lower risk, simply because girls overall tend to have better outcomes than boys?”

Here’s what the reference to “the new system” means. An AI program provided by a company called Infinite Campus combs through a huge amount of data [1] about students and calculates which are most likely to graduate without additional help and which will need more help—the “help” comes in the form of additional state funding.

As you would expect, the goal of the program is to used state money efficiently. Nothing wrong with efficiency, certainly. But the paragraph that startled me places efficiency and equity as potentially opposing values. Did Nevada really hire an AI program to determine the most equitable distribution of state funds? I’m quite sure they did not.

And how, exactly, would you determine equity in the context of gender? Is it fair, the cited paragraph asks, to spend less money on girls on the grounds that they are more likely than boys to graduate from high school.Well, let’s see. You could ask a program to propose a program that allowed equal numbers of boys and girls to graduate from high school. The algorithm would be inexact, but the goal would be clear. Is that—equal graduation rates by gender—what Nevada is trying to achieve? Certainly not.

This is a triage problem. If there were a catastrophic explosion with hundreds of victims and if the girls affected by the explosion were more likely to recover than the boys, would you give more medical attention to the boys? Of course you would. Is that fair? Nope? Does it save lives? Yup.

Now what?

I know there is no answer to this dilemma. You cannot simultaneously optimize efficiency and fairness. You can choose one or the other or you can try to balance one with the other, but you cannot optimize both. And, if you are a state school funding system, you also cannot say candidly what you are doing.

[1] According to the Times article, “It weighed dozens of factors besides income to decide whether a student might fall behind in school, including how often they attended class and the language spoken at home.”