Jeanne Dietsch, former state Senator in New Hampshire, reports here on the predicted cost of the state’s new voucher program.
Voucher Update
Costs at 60 times budget, so far!
Taxpayers are in for a surprise when the bill comes due for vouchers. Instead of the $140,000 budgeted for 2022, current projected spending is $6.9 million, with 800 more applications pending! Applications soared after Americans For Prosperity [the Charles Koch organization] sent out mailers and
canvassed door-to-door urging parents to apply. Many applicants are parents already paying for religious, home or private education who might apply for free money. The NH scholarship organization decided that it could not handle program administration. It subcontracted Florida firm Class Wallet to distribute and track the funds. Class Wallet will take the lion’s share of the 10%-off-the-top administration fee.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What is the rationale for vouchers (as if we didn’t know)? There is already a public school system in place which accepts all children no matter race, creed, color or economic situation. Why incur additional costs at the expense of the public school system which educates most of the children. But of course, that’s the whole point of vouchers (and charter schools): to undermine, impair, cripple and destroy the actual real public schools.
Vouchers are wholly political as they serve no real purpose in education. The education they offer is generally worse, and they are used by the affluent to supplement private tuition they often pay for anyway. Their real purpose is to damage the public schools most students attend.
States should stop voting for libertarians in state elections. They do not believe in any “common good” services or social safety nets. Their vision of society is basically survival of the fittest, and that will always be the wealthiest people.
Taxpayers are in for a surprise if they seem to think
their vouchers are “free” money or their “choice school”
selection, is somehow a disconnect from public schools.
By the time they enter the “dirt nap”, they will have
paid back all that “free” money, and “funded” public
schools to boot, via their taxes.
Paying for Christian fundamentalist madrasas for the children of the American Taliban in our cultural backwaters turns out to be pretty costly, despite the incredibly low quality of the “educations” offered in these fundie schools, where they teach that people from Africa immigrated to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries so they could be free, that Cain and Abel rode around on dinosaurs, that Charles Darwin, on his deathbed, recanted his belief in evil-ution, and that Joshua commanded the sun to stop in the sky, so it must be a little ball that travels back and forth through the heavens.
You forgot that it is taught that when Jesus said for us to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us he was just speaking figuratively and did not mean we should not go to war to protest ourselves.
The voucher corruption will make the charter corruption look like peanuts.
They’re not regulated at all. Within a year the first reports of scams will start rolling in.
There’s this conceit in the ed reform echo chamber that only public schools have to be regulated, because they have contempt for the people who run and work in public schools so assume they’re all bad actors. No amount of evidence to the contrary will dislodge this belief in ed reform.
Charter and private schools don’t require oversight or reporting because they’re simply better people. Pure, uncut bias. Pure ideological preference.
Come on down to our “Race to the Top of Mount Zion Enrollment Jubilee” in the old K-Mart parking lot this Saturday and sign yore kids up for Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Floruhduh School. You can use yore Floruhduh State Scholarships to pay for it, and so its absolutely FREE!!!! No longer due you havta send yore children to them gobbermint schools run by Socialists whar they will be taut to be transgendered! We offer compleet curriculems, wrote by Bob’s girlfriend Darlene herself, including
World HIS-story (from Creation to the United States of Dimocrat Babylon to the Rapshure)
Political Science (We thank you, Lord, for Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis; the Second Amendmint; and fer the patriots tryin’ to stop the steal)
English (the offishul langwidge of the United States, and the langwidge the Bible was wrote in)
Science (the six days of creation; how to make yore own buckshot; and how Cain and Abel survived among the dinosaurs)
Economics (when rich people get tax brakes, that makes you richer)
And much, much more!!! Plus, you don’t havta worry yore hed about safety, cause all are teachers is locked and loaded!
Bob’s Real Good Florurduh Skool, located across from Bob’s Gun and Pawn, right next to Wild Wuornos’s Adult Novelties and down the road a piece from Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
It’s been real good runnin’ this here skool. Free innerprize! So much better then tryin to live on Darlene’s disability! Make America Grate Agin!
Akashic Kakistonics, or Opening Heaven’s Gate to Every Child:
Tired of those failing public schools? Want to send your child a true Akashic Academy where he/she/they can receive nourishment for the mind AND the soul?
Then enroll him/her/them in Enlightened Master Bob’s AYAHUASCA SCHOOL FOR LITTLE COSMIC VOYAGERS.
Here at Enlightened Master Bob’s, your child will learn how he or she can skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner and draw nourishment directly from Father Sun in our Solar Temple.
We offer complete holistic health training, using our proprietary textbooks on the Ethereal Body, including uncapping and aligning children’s Chakras so they can download DIRECTLY from the Mother Ship the Cosmic Light necessary for the coming Transformation from Earth-bound Homo sapiens to Interdimensional Beings.
In our history classes, students will learn all about Atlantis, Lemuria, Camelot and Glastonbury, the Black Rock Desert, and other Places of Power throughout the Ages.
Students will also learn how to protect themselves against the forces of the Evil Galactic Emperor Xenu and his band of sometimes invisible, shape-shifting reptilian aliens from Alpha Draconis.
But don’t delay! Soon, as our galaxy moves into proximity to the Pleiades, the vibrational tone of the entire planet will rise to such a pitch that we will either undergo Ascension or explode, and everything—the FATE OF THE PLANET– depends on how many young Lightworkers we can bring into Alignment and Cosmic Consciousness before then!
Of course, all this is absolutely FREE because you can use your New Hampshire State Scholarship Voucher to pay for it.
And best yet, all classes are taught by the Spiritual Wives of Enlightened Master Bob himself!!!!
It’s a real betrayal by “liberal” ed reformers that they all pushed these voucher programs.
They misled their voters, for years. People said this was about eradicating public schools and privatizing the whole system and it is now clear that is, in fact, what the objective is. Is anyone in ed reform ever going to address that what they claimed for twenty years – that they were working to “improve public education” – was just a lie they told the public?
We’ve sunk billions into paying for this “movement” and its engineers and they haven’t returned any value at all to students who attend public schools. How long are we supposed to fund this insular echo chamber of professional public school critics who offer no practical value at all to public school students? Are we just stuck with the echo chamber forever?
The public apparently sunk billions of dollars into demolishing their own public school systems. Is this what they thought they were paying for?
Just curious- what did the “student advocates” of ed reform get for New Hampshire PUBLIC school students in these voucher negotiations?
Let me guess- they delivered nothing for public school students, again.
They simply don’t serve students in public schools. They offer no benefit of any kind to our students, year after year, session after session, yet they utterly dominate “public education policy”
How is it fair that public school students are stuck with such lousy advocates? Can we possibly look outside the echo chamber and hire someone else, or is that forbidden?
” It subcontracted Florida firm Class Wallet to distribute and track the funds. Class Wallet will take the lion’s share of the 10%-off-the-top”
Our county sub-contracted substitute teachers with a computer-based service. What they pay for this service is unknown to me, but the reason given for paying these people was that substitutes were hard to find. Now we can get a sub easily. Click here and there and our responsibility is done. Just leave the plans and go get a colonoscopy. Unfortunately, you might return to learn that the position was not filled, and your underpaid associates were asked to fill in, which is the way it was before the sub-contractor became involved. Other than ascertaining that the subs receive less pay than they used to, I have no idea how the matter is working, but I suspect that the system is benefitting the sub-contractor.
It’s another scam.
The 500th ed reform essay that rests on finding new words for “voucher” and then promoting vouchers as a new idea:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/use-pandemic-recovery-funds-empower-both-schools-and-families
Echo chamber.
If we want a wholly privatized system funded with low value vouchers we should continue to hire and fund ed reformers. If you want to “improve public schools” you should not. They don’t actually have anything to contribute to public schools, other than demolishing them.
The right-wingers point out that New Hampshire spends $17,400 per pupil on public education and that the “Education Freedom Account” vouchers are for only $4,600. So, they say, there is a net gain to taxpayers.
But let’s look a little more closely.
First, New Hampshire allows families whose kids are already in private school to apply for these vouchers. So, no gain to taxpayers there.
Second, public school systems have a lot of fixed costs and can’t afford to lose this $17K per student. The student leaves and takes the entire $17,400, but leaves behind what was his or her share of those fixed costs.
Third, the average private school tuition in New Hampshire is $19,967 per year. $4,600 isn’t gonna cut it–isn’t going to get kids into the higher quality private schools. What would schools that can operate on $4,600 a year per student look like? Well, I feel a Saturday Night Live Sketch coming on. . . .
Where’s Rosanne Rosannadana when you need her?
“What’s this I hear about education grouchers? It’s hard enough for teachers without a lot of people grouching.”
The schools I have had contact with up there cost way more than 20 thou. Some of those places charge enough to easily cover the cost of their vine-covered education.
yeah, 19K is the mean, the average. Many are much more expensive–35-50K per year.