This clear and thoughtful article was written by Michael Turmelle, director of education and career initiatives, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. The Republican-controlled legislation intends to pass sweeping voucher legislation that would harm the public schools attended by the great majority of the state’s children.
He writes:
If you have ever needed a hospital or a pharmacy; driven on well-engineered highways; eaten food that was grown and shipped safely; felt the protective assurance of our armed forces and intelligence services; used a cell phone; gotten a vaccine to guard against a deadly disease, then you have benefited from public schools.
This is the social contract we have made: since we all rely on an educated populace to do countless things we all depend on every day, we all chip in to a system of public schools to educate people. We all agree to support this common good that benefits us all — whether our kids happen to be in school, or if we even have kids of our own.
We all need strong public schools because we need all our children to be able to get the robust education that will allow them to go on to become the nurses and doctors, the engineers and entrepreneurs, the public-health researchers and food-safety inspectors, the firefighters and intelligence analysts and teachers who will support our communities and economy tomorrow.
The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation is in the midst of a 10-year initiative to improve outcomes for New Hampshire children and families who face significant barriers to opportunity.
Public K-12 schools play a critical role in providing that opportunity by delivering on the very American promise of an education for all — no matter how much money your parents have, or where you live, or the color of your skin or if you get around on your feet or in a wheelchair. null
But the public good that is public education is being imperiled in New Hampshire in ways that put children’s education and the well-being of our communities and our economy at risk.
How?
By inequity.
Some schools in New Hampshire have well-paid veteran teachers, top-notch facilities, state-of-the-art equipment and resources. Some districts struggle to pay dedicated educators, have constant teacher turnover, patched-together buildings and outdated resources. The former are in wealthy towns, the latter are not.
And disparities in funding correlate with disparities in outcomes.
In New Hampshire, according to an independent report produced for the state’s Commission to Study School Funding: “The highest poverty school districts have the lowest student outcomes. The negative relationship between poverty and outcomes is very strong.”
New Hampshire’s state constitution mandates that the state provide an “adequate” education to all children. Since a coalition of “property-poor” towns sued the state in the 1990s, various funding formulas have been applied by the legislature — all of which have continued to rely predominantly on local property taxes to foot the majority of the bill for public education. The amount the state sends to districts remains far below what districts must spend. Another group of districts sued the state in 2019, asserting state adequacy aid would need to triple to meet the basic requirements set out in state law. The state Supreme Court sent the “ConVal lawsuit” (so named for the Contoocook Valley school district, one of the districts that brought the suit) back to Superior Count in March for a trial. Manchester and Nashua, the two largest districts in the state, joined the suit this month.
All children in every public school in New Hampshire (not just the ones in wealthy towns) should have the resources, facilities and teachers needed to ensure them a world-class education and the best outcomes possible. Our current unequal system of supporting schools creates two separate and unequal classes of education for our kids, robbing too many of them of the American promise of equal opportunity.
By a troubling move toward privatization.
Running through some recent proposed legislation and public discourse is a disquieting attack on the idea of public education as a public good.
The school voucher program being considered by the legislature is a system under which taxpayer-generated state aid earmarked to educate children in public schools is redirected to private schools or home education.
Voucher programs would risk further exacerbating funding inequity in New Hampshire schools and leaving the most vulnerable children — the ones who rely most on the promise of public education – in schools with fewer resources, increasingly inadequate facilities and diminished opportunity. An analysis by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Reaching Higher New Hampshire shows that the program would cost the state nearly $70 million in new state spending over three years.
Vouchers do not help kids do better. Multiple independent studies from states that have implemented vouchers have shown that voucher programs do not improve academic outcomes. Voucher programs also deepen racial segregation in schools (which has also shown to diminish outcomes for all children) and leave LGBTQ students vulnerable to discrimination.
Taking public funds from our public schools to pay for private education is not a good answer for how to make our schools stronger for the nine out of 10 of New Hampshire’s children who use them.
Just like public fire departments, highways and health departments, public education is a public good that benefits us all. And just like all those other things, it deserves robust investment, access to it should be equitable — and we absolutely cannot do without it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s just so revealing that the ed reformers rammed through a huge voucher bill with no analysis OF ANY KIND on how it would impact the state’s public schools.
That’s how little regard there is for public school students. No one even bothered to look. Public school students only exist in ed reform in regard to how their schools get in the way of the privatization agenda. There is no interest in them or work performed on their behalf. It’s “there’s a public school- I wonder how we can pull funding from it to advance our agenda without alerting the public that’s what we’re doing?”
New Hampshire public school students may or may not be harmed by the ed reform voucher political campaign, but no one in the ed reform echo chamber was even interested in them enough to find out. “The Movement” agenda and goals took precedence over students who currently attend public schools. Once again, ed reformers threw them under the bus.
We should think about hiring some people in education policy who support public education. Hiring exclusively from inside the ed reform echo chamber is not serving public school students. It’s not fair to them. They deserve real, effective advocates. As long as we are stuck with the same set of policy people who all come out of the same sets of lobbying groups and charter/voucher promoting orgs public school students will be poorly served. They simply do no work on behalf of students in public schools- they return no value to students.
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One can go read across the ed reform echo chamber and see the reaction to these voucher laws they all lobbied for. There’s no analysis at all. 100% unrestrained cheerleading. They don’t even read the laws. If it says “voucher and charter expansion” the echo chamber lines up and shakes the pom poms.
Pure ideology. They have no earthly idea if any of this will “improve education” or if it will harm students in existing public schools or destroy the whole notion of education as a common good and they don’t care. The voucher laws meet the ed reform ideological test so it’s rubber stamp approval across the board. There are no dissenters.
One good thing will come out of it. They’ve gone further towards abolishing public schools and privatizing systems in the last 2 years than they did in the prior 20 years. Eventually someone from outside the echo chamber will check their work. If the big privatization push doesn’t meet the miraculous “results” they all promised, we’ll finally see some accountability for people who have blithely escaped all critical review for decades.
They jammed the ideology in- now we see how it works.
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Just a wild guess- as in Ohio and Florida and Arizona the ed reform lobby got NOTHING for public school students in New Hampshire?
One huge group of students were “left behind” and it’s once again the public school students who ed reformers have deemed ideologically incorrect because they attend the hated public schools?
We’re past a decade of ed reformers holding an absolute lock on public education policy in Ohio. NOTHING accomplished for students who attend public schools other than testing. Apparently we hired and are paying hundreds of these people to mandate and police testing our students. They contribute nothing else. Skip the middleman and just hire a testing contractor. You’ll save millions.
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AMEN, Chiara.
AGREE. Sickening.
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Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he doesn’t need you.
Cultivate individuals to require social custodians.
Cultivate individuals with true vision and you’re out of a
job.
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well said: I think of that strange line from the WWII era, “How are you gonna keep them down on the farm when they’ve seen gay Paree…”
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Here’s one of the hundreds of pro -charter articles the ed reform echo chamber churn out every year:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/charter-schools-30-looking-back-looking-ahead
Go look across the ed reform echo chamber and read their public school articles. 100% negative. Relentlessly, consistently negative.
It is laughable to be outside this echo chamber, read their work, and conclude that they are somehow “agnostic”. It just isn’t true. They CLEARLY prefer privatized systems and all of their work goes toward that goal. So how have we ended up with a “public education policy” echo chamber that functions only as a charter/voucher promoting mechanism? We have a huge group of people who are employed full time in acting as a professional public school critics and professional charter and private school promoters.
Where are public school students in this agenda? How did it happen that they disappeared and no one, no one, works for them?
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“Joanne Weiss
Thanks to Checker Finn and Bruno Manno for this brief primer on the charter movement. Educating the public about charter schools is an apt way to commemorate their 30th anniversary”
Get ready for yet another week of charter school promotion and marketing and nothing getting accomplished for students who attend public schools.
Rah rah for charters, boo hiss for public schools. That’s the extent of the “analysis”
I don’t have any problem with this “movement” working exclusively on behalf of the schools that meet their ideological “market” beliefs, but isn’t it time we at least hired one or two people to do some actual productive work on behalf of students in the hated “government schools”? Can public school students be permitted advocates, or is that forbidden?
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