One of the casualties of the 2020 election was public education in New Hampshire, because Republicans regained control of the legislature. They already hold the Governorship (Chris Sununu, son of John Sununu, who was also Governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff to the first President Bush).
The Republicans’ top priority is school vouchers. Their program, if enacted, would be the most expansive voucher program in the nation. At least 95% of students in the state would be eligible to apply for a voucher.
A new bill that would create the country’s first nearly universal voucher program has been introduced as the top priority for lawmakers in the 2021 session. House Bill 20(HB 20) would require the state to use state dollars currently allocated for public education to fund “Education Freedom Accounts.” Parents could then receive between $3,786 and $8,458 per student in state dollars, depending on eligibility and fees, to use for private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, and other school-related expenses.
The bill creates the same voucher program that lawmakers originally introduced in 2017 under SB 193 (though they were called “Education Freedom Savings Accounts” then), which was killed because of the deep inequities it would cause for students, as well as the steep costs to the state and local towns. The current version of the bill, HB 20, has no accountability requirements to ensure that students are receiving an adequate education or that public funds are being spent for the stated purposes, aside from self-reporting by the independent scholarship organization.
“Our communities are struggling under an inequitable funding system which will culminate in an $89 million cut in state funding next year. However, lawmakers have stated that one of their top priorities this session is to enact the most far-reaching voucher program in the country,” said Christina Pretorius, Policy Director at Reaching Higher NH.
“A question that I think our state leaders should ask is, what kind of state do we want 5, 10, 15 years from now? Will this program help to strengthen our state, our economy, and prepare our students — current and future — for life in the 21st century? This proposal, along with the funding crisis, presents a reckoning for our state, that I think we all need to grapple with,” she continued.
Here’s what you need to know:
- HB 20 would create a nearly universal voucher program, where students attending both public and private schools would qualify for a voucher. Students who enroll in the program must disenroll full-time from their public or charter school.
- There are no provisions in the bill that would protect students from discrimination, but the bill does protect educational service providers from being discriminated against based on their religious affiliation.
- Parents could receive between $3,786 and $8,458, minus administrative fees, depending on the student’s eligibility for state aid programs. The funding would be placed in an “Education Freedom Account,” or voucher, managed by an independent scholarship organization and funded from the state’s Education Trust Fund.
- Parents could use the voucher for various education-related expenses, including private and religious school tuition and program costs, homeschooling costs, tutoring services, computers and software, summer programs, college tuition, or other approved expenses. Recipients are permitted to “roll-over” unused funds from year to year.
- Students with disabilities might waive their rights under federal and state disability laws, including the right to an IEP, the right to services, and the right to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.
- There is little public oversight for state funds. There is no financial audit requirement for the scholarship organization to ensure that they are appropriately using public funds, nor are participating students required to take, or submit, the statewide assessment that public and charter school students are required to take. There is no requirement that participating students take any assessment of any kind, in order to ensure that public dollars are going towards programs that provide the opportunity for an adequate education.
- HB 20, as proposed, would be the most far-reaching voucher bill in the country. Other states with voucher programs are targeted to low-income students, students with IEPs, and other identified or discrete student cohorts. HB 20, however, would be a nearly universal voucher program that is not targeted and is open to nearly all New Hampshire children.
- Voucher programs have been shown to hurt student outcomes. Long-term studies of voucher programs have shown that participants in voucher programs have significantly lower math and reading scores than those who do not, and that those dips persist for years after the initial study. Other, short-term studies by independent research organizations and universities suggest that voucher programs hurt, or have an insignificant impact, on student outcomes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This was always the end game for ed reform- universal, low value vouchers.
It’s really an amazing feat of political bait and switch, I must say.
The “movement” sells itself to the public as “improving public schools” then aggressively pushes policy to destroy public schools and replace them with thousands of unregulated private contractors, where each family will receive a low value voucher that won’t come near to covering the cost of a comprehensive public school.
Welcome to the ed reform vision for public education- they’ll hand you a cheap voucher and give you a list of a huge group of low quality, completely unregulated educational services contractors from which to “choose”.
It’s just such a blatant rip off. They should be ashamed.
It’s a shame our kids and grandkids will get this crappy “educational marketplace” instead of public schools. What a bad trade.
Are liberal ed reformers actually innumerate? They do understand this is a massive funding cut for public education, correct?
“Parents could then receive between $3,786 and $8,458 per student in state dollars, depending on eligibility and fees, to use for private school tuition, homeschooling expenses, and other school-related expenses.”
Can they add and subtract?
So the ultimate achievement of the ed reform “movement” will be a massive cut in public education funding? Can they really be this naive, that they fell for this?
That’s the plan. They want to spend as little as possible. So many poor students will get plunked down in front of a screen. Child abuse will increase as many children will no longer be under the watchful eye of professional teachers.
innumerate: a perfect word for two decades of harmful invasions
Yes, they can be that naive and they don’t see the problem!
We finally got some numbers from the “money follows the child” crowd:
$3,786 and $8,458
That’s what ed reformers will give each family to purchase educational services when they reach their ultimate goal. So working class people will get about 5k, which is of course a huge cut and a rip off.
The billionaires who back this “movement” must be thrilled. It’s a 50% cut in public education funding.
This is a sign that the Republican leaders care nothing about equity and opportunity for its populace. Worthless, low value vouchers that can be used a low quality voucher school and perhaps even for home schooling are no answer to improving education. It signals, instead, that New Hampshire is ceding its responsibility to educate its young people to the whims of the free market. This reckless policy shift will entice profiteers and capitalist carpetbaggers to flock to the state to make some easy money. It is the young people that will suffer the consequences of this recklessness. In a state that already has one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country, nothing good will come from outsourcing its education.
You would think that NH would no longer be able to draw people to work in the state. You have to be making a really good income to afford a good private school. Not many people would make enough. If you have a choice who would want to try to raise a family there?
If anyone is wondering why no one lifted a finger to assist the country’s public schools during the pandemic, I think I know the answer:
“House Bill 1005 would expand private school vouchers and for the first time “give tax dollars to unsupervised home schools,” he said. The non-partisan Legislative Services Agency says the bill would cost $202 million dollars over two years, Smith says.
The House Education Committee is expected to conduct a hearing on the bill this afternoon. Bills addressing similar issues, Senate Bill 412 and 413, are also scheduled to be heard in committees today.
State Rep. Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, chair of the House Education Committee, said late Tuesday afternoon, “Ultimately, I authored this legislation to do what’s best for kids and to give families the flexibility to choose a school that best meets their student’s needs. We are listening to input from Hoosiers, and working with parents and educators on this proposal.”
They were all busy frantically lobbying to jam voucher bills through.
That’s why public school students were ignored- the ed reform lobbies voucher bills took precedence.
They simply don’t serve public school students. They accomplish absolutely nothing for our kids.
We rejected Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos nationally, and while we were doing that the national ed reform lobby was energetically lobbying to put in the Trump/DeVos agenda at the state level.
They actively work against the interests of public school students, and we’re paying THOUSANDS of them in government, at every level. Complete capture by this lobby- no real analysis or debate, just lock step marching along with all privatization legislation.
They don’t even pretend to care about public school students anymore. Our kids are not even mentioned in the ed reform legislation.
Every public school student in the country goes under the ed reform ideological bus. Our students are disfavored because ed reformers are ideologically opposed to public programs. 50 million public students sacrificed for the ed reform vision.
You’ll see public schools fragmented and diminished. They’ll offer only bare bones reading and math instruction- their whole community function destroyed.
It probably harms rural poor and working class the most- they’re the most dependent on public schools as the center of communities.
Public schools are often the hub of community life. They help define communities. If we dissolve the fabric of a community, poor and rural people will suffer the most. This is what happens when individualism is valued over the common good. The rich get richer and the poor get whatever. When so many poor immigrants came to our cities, it was the settlement house and public schools that helped them find their way and define themselves as “American.” Now you’re on your own.
I just hope there’s some accountability for the all the academics and lobbyists and politicians who pushed this if the Grand Ideological Plan fails to deliver for lower income families.
When this huge experiment in free market economics doesn’t deliver, will any of the zealots in ed reform who worked to destroy public schools and replace them with contractors be asked about their work?
Ed reform is 100% responsible for the end of public schools. This is their plan. I insist they be held accountable and asked if their experiment in privatization was a success.
What was it in their public education that these anti-public education zealots feed on?
Or are these mostly home-schooled, or graduates of private school, religious and otherwise?
Many of the wealthy vandals that want to dismantle public education never attended one. Some wealthy supporters of privatization resent that public schools remain unionized, and they hate unions more than public schools. Some supporters of privatization are religious, they want to shift money to religious schools. Conservatives, especially with the rise of libertarian ideology, have been taught that most public services are terrible and inefficient. Some just see an opportunity to make lots of money. It is mixed bag of public education misanthropes.
Regarding vouchers and charters, Miguel Cardona said many good things in his Senate confirmation hearing this morning about so-called school choice, although much of the focus of the questioning was rightly on student debt. Many of the Republican questions were about transgender athletes. Cardona said public schools, not alternatives, need to be supported. He was vague about standardized testing, though. That’s my take.
Recent books arguing for public education and against privatization will be influential to the Biden administration’s approach to the subject, riding partly on a resurgence of unions Biden has promised he will bring about.
His “unions built the middle class and the middle class built this country” approach, will, I believe, help bring back a reconsideration of the potential loss of public education and the role it plays in community unification privatization threatens.
Diane’s influence can’t be over stated.
The origin of these latest voucher bills seems to be ALEC, which is not surprising.
ALEC Bill SF 159 Steppingstone To Larger Voucher Programs
Here is what everyone needs to understand about the Voucher bill that was passed by the Iowa Senate on Thursday and is heading to the House this week:
Republicans in Iowa and many states have been advocating for Vouchers for years. Betsy Devos elevated this campaign nationally, and ALEC created bills, now being pitched as “School Choice Legislation” are popping up in Republican controlled states across the country. The bill making its way through the Iowa legislator isn’t the effort of Iowa Senators, and it’s not Governor Reynold’s creative plan to help needy kids in Iowa like she wants everyone to believe. It’s an ALEC bill that was created as a steppingstone to larger Voucher programs that will completely reshape our state’s education system. It will damage our public schools, divert tax dollars to private schools, and it will widen existing inequalities. It will further segregate our communities by race and socioeconomic status. It will hurt Iowa’s Public Schools.
https://blogforiowa.com/2021/02/01/alec-bill-sf-159-will-hurt-iowas-public-schools/
You forgot the quotation marks, Máté. I was pretty sure you didn’t live in Iowa, so I went to the blog link. The rest of the post is highly useful in understand how the argument for vouchers has been framed to misrepresent reality.
Are italics the new quotation marks?
Yeah, that’s what I have been using for years, since in case of long quotations or several quotations it’s hard to keep track of where quotations begin or end. Maybe it’s time to use asymmetrical quotations marks: one for the beginning and one for the end. Several languages already do that. Like in Hungarian we use ,,quotation like this” so we start with a double comma (but the the commas are closer to each other).
Italics work (if Bob says so 🙂 ) for me. It’s been quite awhile since I had to worry about such things. I was thrown by no author identified in the beginning. “So and so reports…”
It’s a new world! Sometimes I wish there were “good old days.” That probably just means a time when I was oblivious, say about six, and knew little about writing much less where to use what punctuation. One of my granddaughters, age 6, recently wrote a piece about dinosaurs, which she excitedly shared with her father. She had obviously been consciously practicing the use of periods. Each sentence ended with a seriously black dot. Capitals must be the next lesson.
From now on, I’ll use both italics and quotation marks. Hopefully your granddaughter won’t lose all these serious dots and capitals when she starts texting (next year?),,, 🙂
Nah, You’re fine. My problem, not yours, and it’s not even my problem now that I have spent a little time actually paying attention! It’s too easy to blather online without engaging my brain first.