A few weeks ago, Democrats in the New Hampshire legislature’s Fiscal Oversight Committee rejected $46 million from Betsy DeVos and the federal Charter Schools Program. The vote was 7-3 on partisan lines.
The grant would have doubled the number of charters in the state at a time of declining enrollment statewide.
The Republican State Commissioner of Education, Frank Edelblut, came back to the committee with the same request, reminding the committee that the previous Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan had supported charter schools.
The Democratic-controlled committee again voted 7-3 to reject the $46 million, warning of additional costs to the state when the federal funds were expended.
Edelblut is a home schooler who was appointed by the far-right Republican Governor Chris Sununu.
Congratulations to the wise Democrats of New Hampshire, who practiced fiscal restraint and protected the state’s public schools.
Be sure to read Peter Greene’s detailed account of this happy event. He points out that the existing New Hampshire charter schools have produced no lessons for public schools and they have empty seats.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I hope more school districts realize that charters, vouchers, the common GORE, and testing are just BIG SCAMS.
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Good for N.H.
Sourcewatch reports that N.H.’s Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a member of the State Policy Network (Koch), is on the ALEC bandwagon, specifically relative to vouchers.
JBCPP’s President, Charlie Arlinghaus, was on Sununu’s transition team and was appointed as his budget director.
In typical billionaire messaging as they destroy common goods so as to gain money, power, and achieve oligarchy for themselves, we see the bogus, shifting campaign, “privatization redresses discrimination against races… the religious ….”.
It’s just the opposite. Billionaires fund organizations like BAEO, Catholic University of America and, I speculate (without access to data), state Catholic Conferences for the communication they want transmitted. Billionaire ed deformers don’t fund public K-12 and that puts on display the fraud of the discrimination propaganda
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“An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.”
Why aren’t public schools worthy of any investment or support in their own right?
If Frank Edelblut spends all his time advocating on behalf of charters and vouchers, shouldn’t public school students and families have an advocate in state government too? Why not?
They, and their schools, deserve public employees who work on their behalf. Why is that considered an outrageous request in ed reform circles?
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It’s really amazing how ed reformers in state government never seem to get around to doing anything for public school students.
Proposal after proposal- never directly benefits any public school kid, anywhere.
Ohio ed reformers spent all of 2019 promoting vouchers. Either completely irrelevant to public school students and families, or actively harms their schools. They will now spend all of 2020 defending their massive voucher expansion.
Why do we continue to hire and pay these people if they return no value to 90% of students and families? Couldn’t we find public employees who value public schools and public school students? Shouldn’t that be a minimum?
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Not when the legislators are ALEC.
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