Despite public hearings in which a huge majority of citizens showed up online to oppose vouchers, the New Hampshire Senate Finance Committee approved voucher legislation. The legislation already passed the House and will certainly be signed by the Governor. Governor Sununu and the legislative majority are Republicans. Before the 2020 elections, the legislature was controlled by Democrats, who rejected vouchers. Governor Sununu’s state education commissioner home-schooled his children; he has tried repeatedly to defund public schools by allowing students to use their state funding anywhere they pleased.
The vouchers are called “Education Freedom Accounts.” They explicitly guarantee that the private voucher schools will not be required to alter its creed or its admissions policy. The $4,600 voucher will be insufficient to pay tuition at any of the state’s elite private schools.
Senator Jeb Bradley stated at the bill’s hearing that its purpose is to provide choice for parents so that students can succeed whereas they may not be doing so in public school. He estimated the bill’s cost at an average of $4600 per student.The bill hands oversight of EFA applications, notifications, payments and accounting to an independent scholarship organization. Currently, the Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire is the only such organization. It has one employee. This organization will also approve Education Service Providers [ESPs}.
According to the bill:194-E:7, II – Education service providers shall be given maximum freedom to provide for the educational needs of EFA students without government control…
In order to be approved, an ESP must submit a request to receive payments and agree to follow the rules of the EFA program and to comply with anti-discrimination laws.
V – An education service provider shall not be required to alter its creed, practices, admissions policy, or curriculum in order to accept payments from an EFA.
Clearly, the Republican party has abandoned the principle of separation of church and state as it pursues the goal of using public funds for religious schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Republicans have abandoned democracy.
additionally they have lately abandoned any attempt at hiding their lack of interest in democracy
Amen. That is the bottom line. They have an agenda that is beyond the common good.
You can hear former Republican Joe Scarborough. on Morning Joe – echo that sentiment daily.
Voucher schools in a state with a high rate of heroin and opioid addition. What could possibly go wrong?
The recklessness is just amazing. No analysis at all of the effect on public schools and public school students. They banned analysis.
Thousands of full time, paid ed reformers and this is their plan for privatizing public schools? “Do it and hope it works out okay”?
You can’t say you value public school students and treat their schools this cavalierly. Once again public school students were the absolute last priority in an ed reform scheme.
They simply perform no productive work on behalf of students who attend public schools. Our students are obstacles to be gotten around while they create their preferred privatized system. There’s no effort or interest expended on their behalf at all.
Public school students need advocates in government.They deserve them. This “movement” doesn’t serve them and they should not be stuck with people who don’t support the schools they attend speaking on their behalf.
No charter or private school would accept direction from lobbyists who work against charters and private schools. Why should public schools?
They spent the last year on this. Another year goes by where none of these public employees lift a finger on behalf of students who attend public schools.
Maybe they’ll get around to performing some actual work for the vast majority of students in that state next year, but if Ohio is any indication next year will be completely consumed with expanding the voucher program.
Get used to it New Hampshire. Once the “ed reform movement” capture your statehouse all investment, effort and interest in public schools goes away.
They took over in Ohio about ten years ago and they haven’t done a lick of work on the public schools in this state since. We send state taxes to Columbus and they disappear into privatization schemes. We can’t PAY them to pay attention to our schools. They’re busy “reinventing” and taking direction from this lobby.
Welcome to the wonderful world of ed reform New Hampshire. Get ready for a decade of neglect of your public schools.
The ed reform echo chamber are, right now, launching a program to demand “transparency” in public school funding expenditures.
The same people who just successfully lobbied to spend hundreds of millions in public funds on vouchers with no regulation or reporting requirements of any kind.
Completely incoherent. The only unifying principle seems to be “market ideologues”. On that they’re all on the same page. The rest is utter nonsense that contradicts itself daily.
“To explain how this is accomplished, Rep Jurius writes, “A student whose family chooses an ESA instead of his or her assigned public school would receive an average of $4,578 in state per-pupil funding in 2021-2022 and $4,803 in 2022-2023. This money would leave a district school. But so would the student, and thus, the need to spend additional money raised by local taxation to educate that student.”
This is the ed reform voucher pitch to the public. Get rid of your public schools and you’ll save money.
Just working hard for public school students every day, these folks. Such great advocates for “public education”. We should definitely hire and pay more of them. Why, look what they accomplished here! They got funding for the schools they prefer and used our schools and students as the political lever to get it!
Is New Hampshire one of the states that are policing speech in public schools to ban mentions of racism?
Anyone want to guess how they square that with publicly funding schools that aren’t subject to this policing?
Still searching for one possible benefit to any public school student, anywhere that has been contributed by the ed reform “movement”. Still coming up empty.
We should think about hiring people who work for our students. We don’t seem to have any.
“Education Freedom Accounts”
The frauds, liars, racists, and grifters behind the privatization “School Reform” movement know how to pick titles that sound great enough the mislead a lot of people, but no matter what they call a turd, it’s still a turd.
Advancing New Hampshire Public Education.org wrote in 2017, “Is the Catholic Diocese of Manchester lobbying behind the scenes for SB 193 (a voucher bill)?…Bishop Libasci …urged his parishioners to contact their representatives”.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation wrote on a page titled, “Dispelling the Myth of ‘School Choice’ “, “Voucher schemes primarily benefit Roman Catholic schools.”
The number of Catholic school students in N.H. is 5 times greater than the number of Christian school students. The number of Catholic school students exceeds the number of charter school students by about 50%.
(fill in) have abandoned democracy…
Which one?
“No consensus exists on how to define democracy – indeed, one study found that at least 2,234 descriptions of democracy exist in the English language.”
Cultural standing, based on mythology, continues to hand
the folded flags into the mother’s hands.
Continues to spill blood over all the lands.
Continues to “separate people into believers and non-believers. Catholics and non-Catholics. Baptists and non-Baptists. Christians and non-Christians. Jews and non-Jews. Muslims and non-Muslims,Sheep and goats, Godly and ungodly. Worshipers and infidels, Saved and unsaved, Redeemed and rejected, Resurrected and damned, Red and Blue…”
The proof is in the pudding. Justification by mythology
is BULLSHIT.