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The War on Public Education Hurts the Most Vulnerable Students

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2025 //
3

Garry Rayno, veteran journalist in New Hampshire, understands the war on public education. He knows that privatization is meant to diminish public education. He knows that it is sold by its propagandists as a way to help the neediest students. He knows this is a lie intended to fool people. He knows that the children who are hurt most by the war on public education are the most vulnerable students.

You might rightly conclude that the war on public education is a clever hoax.

Rayno writes:

“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” 

The quote is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but is also similar to words from British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft.

What better measure of treating the most vulnerable than the public education system open to all, not just those with the resources to send their children to private or religious schools.

Public education is often called the great equalizer providing the same learning  opportunities to a community’s poorest children to the richest in stark contrast with today’s political climate driven by culture wars and fear of diversity, equality and inclusion.

Public education has provided an educated citizenry for businesses, government and political decision making for several hundred years.

Public education is the embodiment of “the public good,” as it provides a foundation for a well-lived life that is both rewarding and useful to others.

But for the last few decades there has been a war on public education driven by propaganda, ideology and greed.

While the war has intensified in the last decade, it began with the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 declaring racial segregation in public schools a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

The decision overturned the court’s earlier Plessy vs. Ferguson decision which established the separate-but-equal provision for public education.

The Brown decision required the desegregation of public schools sending a tidal wave through the south reaching north to Boston.

The southern oligarchs who never really believed the South lost the Civil War soon colluded with others like them to develop a system to bypass their obligation to pay to educate black kids. Instead they established “segregation academies” where their children could learn in a homogeneous setting.

The system was created with the help of libertarian economist James Buchanan who touted the belief that the most efficient government is one run by the wealthy and educated (the oligarchs) because the regular folks are driven by self interest which makes government inefficient, and most importantly, costly through higher taxes.

This philosophy continues today as libertarians and other far right ideologues want to privatize public education because it takes too much of their money in taxes, and a humanities-based public education induces children to develop beliefs different from their parents, which once was the norm for American families.

It is not by happenstance we see parental bills of rights, opt outs, open enrollment and greater and greater restrictions on what may be taught, along with increased administrative work loads piled onto public education by politicians in Concord as they double down on refusing to do the one simple thing the state Supreme Court told them to do 30 years ago, provide each child with an adequate education and pay for it.

Instead they have pushed a voucher system costing state taxpayers well over $100 million this biennium, with 90 percent of it paying for private and religious school tuition and homeschooling for kids who were not in public schools when their parents applied for grants if they ever were in public schools.

Most of the voucher system expansion occurred under the Chris Sununu administration with his back-room-deal appointed Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut.

Edelblut nearly beat Sununu in the 2016 Republican primary for governor for those with short memories.

Sununu sent his children to private schools while he was governor and Edelblut homeschooled his children.

Public education during the eight years of the Sununu administration was not a priority although 90 percent of the state’s children attend public schools.

And it is not coincidence that after the Republican House resurrected House Bill 675 which would impose a statewide school budget cap, that Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s small DOGE team — led by two “successful businessmen” — issued its long awaited report and one category targeted schools following the legislature’s Free State agenda of greater transparency and efficiencies, seeking Medicaid and insurance reimbursements and reforming school audit requirements. 

HB 675 failed to find enough support last session because it violates the once sacred “local control ideal” often touted for local government.

House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, R-Auburn, issued a press release linking the report and the bill.

“HB 675 applies the findings of the report where they matter most. When dollars are committed and taxpayers are on the hook, HB 675 puts power back into the hands of the voter by requiring a higher threshold of consent,” he said.

Yes a higher threshold which means the will of the majority is nullified by a minority.

State lawmakers fail to acknowledge they provide the least state aid to public education of any state in the country. Instead local property taxpayers pay 70 percent of public education costs and should be able to set their school budget and various other realms usurped by state lawmakers without a “higher threshold of consent.”

The battlefield in the war on public education shifts over time. It began with religious and political ideology; moved into gender and sexual identification; parental rights, including who decides whether school materials and books are appropriate; school choice such as open enrollment, which will exacerbate the already great divide between property poor and wealthy school districts; and is now positioned to impact the most vulnerable of public school children, those with disabilities.

Last week special education administrators gathered for their annual meeting and to celebrate 50 years of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve access to education and to integrate classrooms to include those with disabilities.

Today’s special education services and supports are lights overcoming the darkness of institutionalization or stay-at-home kids separated from their peers in public schools.

Many children with disabilities were told to stay home and not to attend school as there were no specialized services or therapies for them.

But services are expensive as federal lawmakers knew they would be, promising to pay 40 percent of the cost, but reneging on that promise and paying only about 13 percent.

In New Hampshire, most of the remainder is paid by local property taxpayers.

The state pays little until a student’s costs reach three-and-a-half times the state’s per-pupil average or about $70,000.

But state lawmakers have also failed to live up to their  obligation to pay their state of the catastrophic costs, so local school districts are reimbursed at less than 100 percent.

Last session lawmakers approved an 80 percent threshold as the low end of the reimbursement scale.

Special education costs are difficult to predict and a budget can be blown quickly if a couple students needing costly special education services move into a district.

The federal government is potentially moving the Office of Special Education from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services which local special education administrators said would change the goal from education to a health model which would imply there is a remedy or an illness.

And they said it is the first step back down the road they began traveling 50 years ago when students with disabilities were institutionalized or warehoused in one facility.

Several bills to come before the legislature this session will explore going back to centralized facilities to provide services and supports and explore if the private sector can better provide the services, which is consistent with the libertarian ideal of private education.

Great strides have been made in the last 50 years allowing people with disabilities to lead productive and rewarding lives independently, but that could change as lawmakers focus on costs and greater efficiencies, and the political climate seeks a homogenous environment without minorities, disabilities or vulnerable people.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Lies, New Hampshire, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Vouchers Are Robin Hood in Reverse

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2025 //
2

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH keeps a close watch over the legislature in New Hampshire. He is particularly interested in the state’s relatively new voucher plan. It was sold, as usual, as a plan to help poor kids “escape failing schools.”

That wasn’t what happened.

Predictably, the legislature removed income limits and the program now subsidizes affluent families whose children never went to public school.

The program this year will cost $51.6 million. Almost $50 million goes to students already enrolled in private or religious schools.

Meanwhile, the funding for vouchers is drawn from the state’s Education Trust Fund, which was intended for public schools. That means the subsidy for nonpublic schools comes right out of the public schools’ budget, with no tax increases to compensate public schools. The vast majority of New Hampshire’s students are now subsidizing the nonpublic schools.

There is a new regime at the Department of Education that has released more than the most basic information about the Education Freedom Account program.

For the program’s first four years, the department released spreadsheets detailing the numbers of students, where they live and how much each student received in grants with a total cost of the program and the quarterly state distributions to cover those grants.

The money does not really go to the parents, its goes to the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which takes its cut and sends the rest in the child’s name to ClassWallet, a company that received early stage investments twice from the Chinese-based venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures.

A 2018 Defense Department report flagged the company as participating in China’s “technology transfer strategy,” a state initiative to acquire foreign innovation.

Several states that also use ClassWallet for voucher money distribution have raised concerns about data security and foreign influence like Arizona and Missouri, but not New Hampshire, although Gov. Kelly Ayotte issued Executive Order 2025-04 which would appear to prohibit doing  business with a company with investors like ClassWallet.

ClassWallet does not technically work for the state, but it was hired by a state contractor, Children’s Scholarship Fund of NH, which administers the EFA program.

How many parents of EFA students would want their education spending data potentially accessed by a foreign country like China?

That information is not what was released late last month by the Department of Education, but is easily found with a Google Search, which ironically also brings up that Sinovation Ventures was co-founded by former China Google President Kai-Fu Lee.

The information released last month provides far greater detail than released under former DOE Commissioner Frank Edelblut, who kept the program’s details out of the public’s eye, such as where the money went and if the children’s foundation was carefully vetting income levels and other requirements to access additional grant money.

A small sample compliance report by the now long gone DOE overseer of the EFA program, indicated it was not following guidelines.

The 100 applications sampled for the report over the first two years of the program had a 25 percent error rate that resulted in a rebate to the state for only those applications improperly approved not for 25 percent of the program’s costs.

One of the biggest criticisms of the program is that very few of the students using the state’s money are actually leaving public schools to join the program. Instead the vast majority of the students using EFAs were already in religious or private schools or homeschooled when their parents applied to participate in the state-funded program that draws its funding from the Education Trust Fund, which also pays for the bulk of state aid to public schools, no matter how meager compared to every other state in the country.

This year the program is projected to cost $51.6 million and will cost an additional $61.9 million next year, totaling $113.5 million for biennium, which makes it $26.7 million over budget.

And if you read the fine print of the data released last month, only $1.68 million on the low end, to $4.42 million on the high end for this school year, and $2.52 million if you use the four-year average is going to kids who were not in public schools when they joined the program out of the $51.6 million for this school year.

The data from the DOE notes that for the current school year only 343 students left public schools to join the program whose enrollment is now 10,510 students, which is nearly double what it was last year before the Republican-controlled legislature removed any earnings cap for the program.

That 3.26 percent of the students is the low end of the estimate above, and if you use the number of new students this year compared to last school year, which is 4,745, the new students from public schools is 7 percent and the high figure.

If you add the kids leaving public schools for the last four years, the number is 1,162 which compared to enrollment over those four years of 23,937 and the number is the four-year average.

That means state taxpayer money going to support students who were not in public schools when they joined the EFA program for this school year would be between $49.92 million and $47.18 million.

That is money the state was not paying to educate these kids because they were in religious or private schools or homeschooled and not supported by state dollars.

In essence that is a new education cost for the state, but no new taxes, or fees or anything was created to pay for it.

Instead, it is money drawn from the Education Trust Fund which was established after the Claremont education decisions to support public education.

As Rayno writes: For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

So when lawmakers say the state doesn’t have the money to increase its share of public education costs, it really means “we do not want to increase the state’s share, but we are OK subsidizing religious and private schools and homeschooling.”

For those receiving the money on the upper end of the income scale, the little less than $5,000 grant average is a subsidy that allows another ski trip to Aspen or Tahoe this winter.

But the above figures are probably a little generous because they do not account for the kids who joined the EFA program from public schools and then returned to public schools either before or after one year.

Data released by the department indicates that last school year, 101 of the former public school students who switched to the EFA program, re-enrolled in public schools.

For the 2023-2024 school year, 75 EFA students returned to public schools, and for the 2022-2023 school year, 38 re-enrolled in public schools.

But those are not the only ones leaving the EFA program every year.

It also does not include EFA students who either graduated or completed their course of instruction that school year or left for unexplained reasons.

For the 2024-2025 school year, 151 EFA students left the EFA program because they graduated or completed their course of study along with the 101 who returned to public schools, and the 887 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program that school year was 1,139 or 21 percent of the total EFA enrollment for the year. 

For the 2023-2024 school year, 108 students either graduated or completed their course of study, with the 75 who returned to public schools, and 525 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the EFA program that school year were 708, or 19 percent of the total EFA enrollment.

For the 2022-2023 school year, 76 students graduated or completed their course of studies, along with the 38 who re-enrolled in public schools and the 344 who left for unexplained reasons.

The total number of students leaving the program was 458 students or 15 percent of the enrollment that year.

Total students leaving over the three-year period was 2,305 from a total three-year enrollment of 12,557 or 18.4 percent.

What would we say about a dropout rate of nearly 20 percent if it were a public school? 

This is not the widely successful program its advocates tout on the floor of the House and Senate and does not save school districts the amount of money Edelblut used to claim because more than 90 percent of the students in the program were not in public schools, but he counted them as savings to school districts.

This program is not serving the children of low-income parents who want an alternative to public schools, but those parents who can already afford to pay for their children to attend those alternatives without the state’s taxpayers’ help.

That is not government helping the most vulnerable, it is Robin Hood in reverse, a system New Hampshire knows very well.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Hoax, New Hampshire, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Parents Complain that Voucher Program is a Scam

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2025 //
2

Parents in New Hampshire are outraged by the state’s new voucher law. It is siphoning money from public schools, which are attended by 90% of the state’s students, and 95% of those with disabilities. When the state legislature debated vouchers, parents overwhelmingly opposed them. But the legislature ignored the public and parent opposition and approved a modest voucher plan. The original plan was based on the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing schools,”

That plan has since expanded dramatically; no longer modest, it now supplies vouchers to any student, regardless of family income. Currently, 80% of the vouchers are claimed by kids who never attended public schools. Now that the legislature has lifted income limits for those who seek vouchers, the program has become a subsidy for families that can afford to pay the tuition.

Garry Rayno of InDepthNH has the story:

CONCORD — Public education advocates said the state’s universal voucher program is putting students, taxpayers and education professionals at risk as more and more taxpayer money is diverted to the unaccountable program.

At a press conference celebrating American Education Week, Megan Tuttle, president NEA — NH, said the program takes money away from public schools as the state now funds two school systems, one public and the other private.

“As we celebrate American Education Week, let’s recommit to strengthening, not destabilizing public schools,” Tuttle said. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Our students deserve fully funded public schools, not policies that erode them. And our state’s future depends on getting this right.”

She noted private schools do not have to follow the same guidelines as public schools who have to accept all children no matter how expensive their education or their educational needs.

Nor are private schools bound by federal civil rights provisions, she said, such as the Disabilities Education Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

“The only choice in a voucher system,” Tuttle said, “is that private and religious schools get to pick their students, not the other way around.”

The state voucher program, Education Freedom Account, was initially sold as providing opportunities to low-income parents to find the best educational environment for their students if they do not do well in the public school environment.

Initially the program was limited to students whose parents earned 300 percent of the federal poverty level or less, but earlier this year the program was opened to any parent whose child is eligible to attend public school in the state regardless of earnings.

The change doubled the number of students in the program from 5,204 last school year to 10,510 this school year and the cost increased from $28 million to $52 million this year to date.

While the program was sold as an alternative to public education, more than 80 percent of the students to date were in religious or private schools, or homeschooled when they joined the EFA program as is the case in other states with universal vouchers.

Public schools in New Hampshire educate 90 percent of the state’s students and 95 percent of those with disabilities.

Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, who is the deputy ranking member of the House Education Funding Committee, said her party is fighting every day to ensure every child regardless of income or zip code has access to a high quality education, while the governor and Republican lawmakers have doubled down on their reckless school voucher scheme.

“A few years ago, we were promised that vouchers, these so-called EFAs, would serve families in need,” Damon said,  “but it’s clear that was just a ploy for Republican lawmakers in Concord to open up the floodgates and push through an over-budget, universal school voucher program.” 

Now some of the wealthiest families receive taxpayer-funded handouts that pay for private schools, she said, while just 19 percent of the students in the EFA program are from low-income families.

“Our most vulnerable families are being left behind,” Damon said. “Our public schools are already punching above their weight, scoring very well nationally despite extremely limited resources from the state. Vouchers just make their job harder.”

She said the program strains taxpayer dollars and increases property taxes, while it is already $12.3 million over budget at a time when the Republican controlled legislature voted to significantly cut funding for University of New Hampshire.

“This universal voucher scheme is expensive. It flies in the face of fiscal responsibility,” she said. “There’s very little accountability and oversight on how vouchers are used.”

New Hampshire’s future depends on its students having a high quality public education, she said.

Republicans have long argued parents should decide how best to educate their children and are in the best position to determine whether their child is receiving an adequate education.

Longtime school choice advocate, former Rep. Glenn Cordelli, R-Tuftonboro, argued repeatedly that if parents do not like the education their child receives in one EFA educational setting, they are free to move their child to a new one.

“Education freedom is not theory. It is accountability that begins at the kitchen table, where a mother or father can say this is not working and choose what does,” Cordelli said after he received an award earlier this year from the Children’s Fund of NH, the organization that administers the program for the state. 

During the press conference David Trumble of Weare, a business owner, educator and former State Senate candidate, said the state has to invest more in its students just as a business has to invest to grow. 

Republicans focus their efforts on diverting tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund private school education, he said, expanding the voucher program to cover wealthy families who can use these funds to pay for tuition or skiing lessons.

“The Republican voucher scheme is dangerous because public schools continue to go underfunded and students lose out on the resources they need to ensure long-term success,” Trumble said. “The state is long overdue in living up to its constitutional mandate to fund the public schools.”
He noted the current situation in Claremont where the school district faces a $5 million deficit building up over the past three school years due to fiscal mismanagement at the Supervisory Administrative Unit level.

He said the city would probably not be in this situation if the state had been meeting its constitutional obligation to fund public education.

Earlier this week, the Senate Education Committee approved a revolving loan program for the city to meet its cash flow needs this school year and into the future by allowing early borrowing from the state adequacy grants it will receive in the future.

That plan included a provision allowing the parents of students to apply for EFA grants mid year to remove their children from the school district, due to the uncertainty.

The plan also requires the city to place a school budget cap warrant article on its next annual school district meeting, both pet projects of GOP lawmakers.

“Claremont’s the canary in the coal mine,” Damon said. “It is not the only district that is in significant financial distress, but attaching even more unlimited vouchers to that bill is a further way to defund public schools. It’s a very, I think, inappropriate attachment.”

When asked what lawmakers could do to bring more transparency, accountability and fiscal constraints to the program, Damon said “the Free State-influenced Republican Party does not want vouchers to be diminished at all, but we’re not going to stop trying.”

Tuttle suggested voters make a change in the composition of the legislature. 

“We know the majority of voters in New Hampshire, they believe public funds belong in public schools,” Tuttle said. “And looking ahead to 2026, we need to be electing leaders in the state of New Hampshire who are going to . . . put in some new policies.” 

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Voucher Program Grows Beyond Its Budget; 80% of Vouchers Used by Students Enrolled in Private Schools

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2025 //
4

Garry Rayno of InDepth NH reports on the status of the New Hampshire voucher program, called Education Freedom Accounts. The program is growing beyond the budgeted amount, and the number of students it serves is expected to grow as family income limits are removed.

The program was sold, as it always is, as a way to save low-income children from low-performing schools. Actually, that claim is simply a hoax. By now, we know that vouchers mostly subsidize students who were already in private and religious schools. That’s the case in every state with vouchers. In New Hampshire, 80% of the students who take vouchers never were enrolled in public schools. In Arkansas, it’s 88%. The state is subsidizing their tuition, which was previously paid by their parents.

Garry Rayno writes:

CONCORD — Information released by the Department of Education this month shows the Education Freedom Account program has 10,510 students enrolled this school year.

The figure is based on average daily membership as of Oct. 1.

The program is capped at 10,000 students with exemptions for continuing students, students in the same family and students from households below 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $74,025 for a two-member family and $112,525 for a four-member family.

According to the DOE information, the program with the current enrollment level will cost the state $51.6 million, while the program is budgeted for $39.3 million, or $12.3 million over budget this fiscal year.

Because the program hit the 10,000 cap this year, the cap will be increased to 12,500 next school year, which with similar distributions of children from lower income households, special education needs and English as a second language students, would project to be $61.4 million while $47 million is budgeted for fiscal year 2027, or $14.4 million over budget.

The total cost of the EFA program for the biennium would project to be $113 million, or $26.7 million over budget for the biennium.

The average grant under the program for this school year is $4,911, which is down from last school year when it was $5,204 when the program cost $28 million and served 5,321 students.

The percentage of low-income students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and receive additional money of $2,393 per student has fallen with the expansion of the program this school year to any student qualified to attend school in the state regardless of family earnings.

The percentage of students for low-income families dropped from 37 percent last school year to 19 percent this school year, while the percentage of students needing special education services increased from 7 to 9 percent, while English language learners totaled 20 this school year while there were only two students the year before.

Students qualifying for special education services receive an additional $2,185, and English language learners receive an additional $832 per student.

The base adequacy grant every EFA student receives is the same as public school students $4,266, which goes to the school district.

At the Joint Legislative Performance Audit Oversight Committee meeting Friday, the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office said the audit of the EFA program is expected to be presented to the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee by next summer.

Christine Young, director of the LBA’s Audit Division, said her agency is currently doing field analysis and reviewing observations, which are concerns raised about practices or following statutes or rules.

The performance audit is required by law, but the LBA was unable to access program data because the DOE and the Attorney General’s Office said that information belongs to the administrator of the program, Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, which the state hired.

The LBA sought the information from the company, but was denied under the advice of former Department of Education Commissioner Frank Edleblut and told the committee the audit would have to focus on the DOE’s oversight of the program.

Young told the committee to date 40 observations have been noted with 15 finalized, most dealing with eligibility.

She said another 20 observations are being drafted.

A compliance report done by the DOE several years ago of the first two years of the program found about 25 percent of the applications to the program and for additional money for services were approved without the required documentation by the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH.

The organization may retain up to 10 percent for administering the program, which would be over $10 million this biennium.

The program was touted as an opportunity for low-income parents to find alternative educational programs for their children if they do not do well in the public school environment.

But as is the case in other states with similar programs, the vast majority — or about 80 percent — of the students enrolled in the program were not attending public schools, but attended religious and other private schools, or homeschooled when they joined the program.

With the expansion this year, many families whose children attend religious and private schools or homeschools, receive what is essentially a state tax paid subsidy.

The cost of the program when it was expanded to all eligible students in Arizona nearly bankrupted the state, and similar problems occurred in Ohio and North Carolina.

In the only vendor listing published by the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, was for the first year of the program and is no longer on the Children’s Scholarship Fund’s website, the vast majority of grants went to religious and private schools.

Critics of the program have long claimed it lacks guardrails and accountability, but program supporters say parents are the best judge whether their child is receiving a good education.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Hoax, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

New Hampshire Refuses to Pay to Educate Its Children

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2025 //
4

Garry Rayno, veteran journalist, explains how New Hampshire’s politicians of both parties have failed to approve equitable taxes to educate the state’s children. The libertarians, who play a large role in the state legislature, would prefer to have no taxes at all. The Koch machine has funded candidates who oppose fair state funding. This does not bode well for the future of the state.

Rayno writes in IndepthNH:

The courts have spoken many times over the last three decades about the state’s public education system and its funding.

In the ensuring 30 years since the Claremont I and Claremont II decisions were released by the state Supreme Court, little has changed in a meaningful way.

The Claremont I decision simply said the state has a constitutional obligation to provide every child in New Hampshire with an adequate (or worthwhile) education and to fund it.

Claremont II was a tax decision that says the current funding system is unconstitutional because it relies on a tax that is not assessed on every property owner in the same way with the same rate. Under the New Hampshire Constitution state taxes have to be proportional and reasonable.

The Legislature has yet to address either of the two basic decisions — there have been others — in the most fundamental way.

In New Hampshire, property owners in a school district’s community or communities primarily pay for public education.

Property taxes of one kind or another pay about 70 percent of the cost of education, other state funding accounts for a little over 22 percent and federal money about 8.5 percent

The local property taxes pay for about 61 percent and the statewide education property tax for about 8 percent.

That does not all add up to 100 percent because there is other money raised through tuition, food and other local contributions and insurance settlements, etc..

The national average for state contributions to public education is about 47 percent or more than double what the state pays even with the statewide property tax.

What makes the state system unconstitutional and inequitable for both students and taxpayers is the over reliance on property taxes to pay for the bulk of the cost.

Local property taxes have varying rates across the state ranging from a little over $5 per $1,000 of valuation in New Castle and Moultonborough, to nearly $35 per $1,000 in Colebrook and Orford.

The statewide property tax is supposed to have the same rate for everyone in the state, but doesn’t because property wealthy communities retain the excess money they raise to pay for their students’ adequate education, and unincorporated places have negative local education property rates to offset what they would pay in statewide education property taxes.

That ought to be enough to acknowledge the system is broken, but it isn’t for lawmakers who frankly lack the political will to fix the system so that it is more equitable — I didn’t say fair — for both students and taxpayers.

Students whose parents are fortunate enough to live in a property wealthy community receive a more robust education than do those students whose parents live in a property poor community.

Likewise the parents and other property owners in the property wealthy communities pay far less in property taxes than those in property poor communities do to educate their children.

Judging from the bills filed for the upcoming session, most of the offered solutions tinker around the current system’s edges.

One interesting bill from Rep. Walter Spilsbury, R-Charlestown, proposes raising the statewide education property tax rate to $5 per $1,000 of equalized evaluation, producing more than $1 billion for public education to provide about $10,000 per student.

Currently the tax assessed for the 2025 tax year is $1.12 per $1,000 and the current per pupil state aid is $4,266.

His plan would have exemptions and offsets that essentially would mean the bulk of the collection would be on second homes and non-residential properties.

His plan would be very helpful to property poor communities that should see a significant reduction in their property taxes, but residents in property wealthy communities would see a hefty increase in their property taxes.

But like several other plans that use the statewide property tax as the base solution, it is still a property tax, which is the most regressive tax in the state’s quiver of levies.

Property taxes are not tied to a person’s income or resources, which can go up or down, while it does not. In fact, the trend is for property taxes to increase as the state downshifts more and more of its financial responsibilities to local government, which lawmakers do every time they have trouble balancing their budget, like they do now.

One shortfall of the state’s current tax system is it no longer has any mechanism to tax an individual’s wealth growth since it repealed the interest and dividends tax last year.

The tax was largely paid by individuals with investment income at the top 10 percent..

The state business profits taxes 7.5 percent of companies’ profits with multinational conglomerates paying the largest share.

The largest source of funds from the business enterprise tax comes from its assessment on all compensation paid or accrued, and also from the amount of interest paid and on its dividends.

But like property taxes, the BET has to be paid whether a company makes money or not.

Wealth generated by individuals is not taxed in New Hampshire, but it is for businesses and that is what makes New Hampshire an outlier to most other states and why billionaires and millionaires — or the oligarchs — want to use New Hampshire as an example for the rest of the country.

That is why the Koch Foundation and other similar organizations have poured millions into state elections over the last decade to place libertarian leaning Republicans in the State House in sufficient numbers to run the place.

The slogans are no new taxes at any cost which means much of the cost of public education has been shifted more and more to local property taxpayers.

At the same time, these oligarch-backed libertarians put a more than $100 million obligation on funds reserved for public education in the Education Trust Fund through the Education Freedom Account program.

That is money that could otherwise be used for public education.

Coming into the next session, the Republican leadership does not want to do what needs to be done if the state’s public education system is to be made more equitable for both students and taxpayers.

State lawmakers need to find another source of money to bring the state’s obligation to local children and property owners in line with what other states pay and provide.

That is what the New Hampshire legislature does not want to do and has not wanted to do — both parties — since the first two Claremont decisions were released three decades ago.

It is not as though New Hampshire cannot afford to live up to its constitutional obligation to its children and its property owners, it is one of the richest per-capita states in the country, it does not have the political will to live up to that obligation.

Until enough lawmakers are elected with a backbone, nothing will change. The state’s medium age will continue increasing, fewer and fewer children will call New Hampshire home, and more and more young adults will leave for greater opportunities elsewhere.

Under that scenario, New Hampshire is not a sustainable state going forward.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, New Hampshire

New Hampshire: Vouchers Are Costly Subsidy for Mostly Affluent Families

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2025 //
2

Garry Rayno, veteran statehouse reporter for InDepth NH, writes here about the now-familiar voucher scam. Republican legislators claimed that low-income students would use vouchers to transfer to private schools that better met their needs. When New Hampshire removed income limits on families that want vouchers, the voucher program proved to be a subsidy for students who were already enrolled in private schools, mostly religious schools. The program is more costly than predicted, and public schools will see cuts to finance vouchers.

Rayno has the story:

Free money is free money so many New Hampshire parents in the last month lined up at the non-public schoolhouse door to grab what they can.

The parents of the 11,000 students who applied for grants from the newly opened vault in the state treasury are not the ones advocates tout as the beneficiary of the Education Freedom Account program if New Hampshire resembles other state’s experiences when they transitioned to “universal vouchers.”

In those states like Arizona, Ohio and North Carolina very few students left public schools to take a voucher, almost all of the new enrollees are students currently in religious and private schools or homeschooled as they are here in New Hampshire.

These are parents who did not qualify when there was a salary cap of 350 percent of the federal poverty level or $74,025 for a family of two and $112,487 for a family of four, because they made too much money.

Consequently, most of the new Granite State enrollees will have family incomes above $112,487 and if the average grant is similar to what it was last school year, $5,204, the state will be liable for well over $52 million this fiscal year because there are a number of exceptions for the cap that could add 1,000 or more students.

As has been the history of the program, the number of students and the cost have always been way more than the department’s estimates.

Lawmakers used estimates from Drew Cline, the State Board of Education Chair and the head of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a Libertarian organization, that were substantially less than 10,000, and they only budgeted $39 million for the first year of the biennium and $47.8 million for the second year when the salary cap will rise to 12,500 or when the cost is likely to be over $65 million.

For the biennium, the program is likely to be $30 million more than budgeted or more than what was spent last school year for the program.

The money comes from the Education Trust Fund which also pays for the state adequacy grant to school districts, charter school per-pupil grants (about twice the public school per-pupil grant), special education costs and the school building aid program.

The fund was expected to be in deficit this year and require an infusion from the general fund to meet its obligations, when general fund revenues are shrinking and not be able to cover the cost.

You can see where this is headed. The current crop of lawmakers in the majority will say they will have to cut back on state aid to public education just as the state Supreme Court agreed with a superior court ruling in the ConVal case that the state has failed to meet its constitutional obligation to pay for an adequate education for its students.

The decision did not say the state is obligated to pay for an adequate education for students in religious and private schools or being homeschooled.

The greatest vendor beneficiaries of the new state obligation according to out-of-date data from the administrator of the EFA program, The Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, are religious schools, followed by private schools and homeschooling parents.

But the students in those programs are not the ones touted to benefit from the EFA program.

Even before its beginning, voucher advocates touted the EFA program as an opportunity for low-income parents to find the best educational environment for their students if they do not do well in the public school environment.

How many of these students actually left public schools since the program began to take EFA grants?

The Department of Education lists the number of “switchers” for each year and a couple extra years before the program began. 

The total for the first four years is 1,417 if you remove the two years prior to the start of the program that the department uses to derive its suspect 36 percent figure.

The agency’s statistics also list the number of students who re-enrolled in public school after the first year and that number is 214, so the actual switchers over the first four years are 1,203.

The total enrollment over the first four years is 14,192 which would be 8.5 percent and if you just account for the new students every year it would be less than 20 percent of the students that left public school to join the program at the most optimistic.

More than 80 percent of the students who have enrolled in the program were not in public schools when they were awarded EFA grants that were as high as $8,670 last school year when students received the base per-student aid, as well as differential aid by qualifying for free and reduced lunches and special education services, at the same rates as public schools.

While students in public schools and the EFA program have to meet the same criteria to receive the differential aid for free and reduced lunches, the students in the EFA seeking special education aid only need a medical professional to say they need the services and not the elaborate process students and parents have to traverse in the public school system.

The next question is if EFA grants are a determining factor in being able to send your kid to a private or a religious school or is it essentially a subsidy allowing the family to take a trip to Europe or a ski vacation in the Rockies.

Paying to send your child to the best private schools in the state is not cheap, for example attending St. Paul’s School in Concord costs $76,650 according to the school’s website including room and board, while Phillips Exeter costs $69,537 for boarding students and $54,312 for day students.

Holderness, Dublin, Kimball Union, and Proctor Academy all cost about $80,000 a year for boarding students, with different rates for day students, and New Hampton costs about $75,000 for boarding students and $45,000 for day students.

Derryfield, which only takes day students, costs $43,650 a year according to its website.

Religious schools tuition varies a great deal, but Concord Christian costs $7,600 a year, while Laconia Christian, which received the most in EFA money for the 2021-2022 school year of any private or religious school according to data from the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, the only year the organization reported vendor receipts, has a sliding rate of $7,536 for Kindergarten to fifth grade, $8,087 for grades six to eight, and $8,570 for high school.

Trinity High School in Manchester costs $14,832 for the coming school year, while Bishop Brady in Concord charges $15,250 and Bishop Guertin in Nashua charges $17,225 plus $600 in fees, according to the schools’ websites.

You can see why the religious schools are the prime beneficiary of the free money that is now available to every parent of a school age student in the state.

If nothing else is done, about $120 million will be spent on the EFA program in the next two school years without much accountability.

With that kind of tax money flowing mostly to religious schools, the program’s administrator should have to provide a yearly breakdown of where the money is being spent several months after every school year for public consumption.

The Children’s Scholarship Program NH retains up to 10 percent of the grants as its administrative fee, which would be about $12 million over the biennium, making the organization the biggest beneficiary of the EFA program.

This organization, with the blessing of former Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut, refused to make program data available to the Legislative Budget Assistant’s Office for a performance audit of the program required by state law. 

The limited audit is expected to be released by the end of the year.

When a compliance check was done in-house by the Department of Education after the first two years of the EFA program of 100 applications, 25 percent contained errors that allowed students to enroll when the information provided was inadequate.

People need to tell their state representatives and senators to make the program more accountable for the millions of dollars of state taxpayers’ money it spends.

Because if they don’t demand transparency, the current crop of lawmakers will shift more public school costs on to your future property tax bills while blaming the public schools and not themselves for irresponsible spending.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Failure, Fake, Funding, New Hampshire, Privatization, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Governor Selects Nonpartisan Bureaucrat as Superintendent

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2025 //
5

Former Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire made a horrible choice for state school superintendent. He picked Frank Edelblut, after beating him in the election. Edelblut is a homeschooler of his 10 children with a low opinion of public schools. He successfully promoted vouchers and every other kind of school choice. He didn’t see the point of public schools.

The overwhelming majority of students in New Hampshire attend public schools. As soon as vouchers passed, most of them were used by families whose children never attended public schools. In other words, the state is spending many millions of dollars to subsidize the tuition of students already enrolled in private schools, whose families could afford the tuition.

Sununu was replaced by Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte. She did not reappoint Edelblut. Instead, she selected Caitlin Davis, a 15-year veteran of the state Department of Education. The selection of Davis was cheered by members of both parties, as well as the teachers’ union, no doubt thrilled to be rid of Edelblut.

Unlike Edelblut, she is unlikely to attack public schools but will collaborate with all sectors.

Davis, who most recently served as the director of education analytics and resources, had worked in the department for 15 years. She built a reputation as a neutral, data-driven financial expert, often sitting before lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee or Finance Committee to brief them on complicated budget spreadsheets. And she vowed to lead the department as a nonpartisan executive, carrying out both lawmakers’ and the governor’s policies without injecting her own politics…

In seeking the job, Davis styled herself as an experienced administrator. Near the start of a multi-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday, Executive Councilor Joseph Kenney, a Wakefield Republican, asked Davis whether she considered herself a “passionate educator” or a “passionate bureaucrat.”

“I suppose I’m a passionate bureaucrat, but I don’t like the term bureaucrat,” Davis replied. “… When you use the term bureaucrat, I think you take away all of the effort that state employees and the legislators and the citizens are putting into the system.”

. 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Home Schooling, New Hampshire, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

New Hampshire: Republican Governor Vetoes Rightwing Bills

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
2

Governor Kelly Ayotte stunned some of her fellow Republicans by vetoing bills that are part of the rightwing assault on public schools. Among the bills she vetoed was one that allowed any parent to get a book banned because that parent considered it offensive.

She also vetoed an anti-trans bill, as well as other rightwing obsessions.

She highlights the split between the rightwingers in the GOP who want to control the lives of everyone and the conservatives who want to let people make their own decisions. Sibce New Hampshire has a significant number of libertarians, Ayotte’s decisions must have pleased them.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Gender, New Hampshire

New Hampshire: GOP is “Willfully and Knowingly” Sabotaging Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2025 //
2

Gary Rayno is a veteran journalist who writes about politics and government in New Hampshire. He knows more about school finance than most members of the State Legislature.

He wrote recently about the nefarious plan to privatize public funding and undermine public education in the Granite State, even though 90% of the students in the state attend public schools. New Hampshire has an unusual problem with a libertarian party called “Free Staters,” who don’t want government to pay for anything. They are well represented in the legislature.

He wrote:

If you watched the House session Thursday, you had to realize the message the Republican majority is sending on public education.

Republicans quickly passed expanding Education Freedom Accounts, or vouchers, that will cost the state’s taxpayers well over $110 million for the next biennium with most of the money going to higher-income parents who currently send their children to religious and private schools or homeschools.

The expansion to vouchers-for-all has been a goal of the Free State/Libertarian controlled GOP for some time and they are likely to reach this year by daring Gov. Kelly Ayotte to veto the budget package, something she is not likely to do although she wanted the students to actually attend public schools before they join the EFA program with few guardrails and little academic accountability.

Instead much of the debate was over two bills that would significantly change the educational environment in public schools.

Senate Bill 72, would establish a parental bill of rights in education, and Senate Bill 96 would require mandatory disclosure to parents. And for good measure they added Senate Bill 100 which could cost a teacher his or her teaching credentials if they violate the divisive concepts law and school districts could be fined $2,500 plus attorneys’ fees and court costs. 

The second offense is a permanent ban from teaching and school districts would have to pay a $5,000 fine and the penalties for third-party education contractors are even more onerous.

The state is prohibited from enforcing the law because a US District Court judge found the law unconstitutionally vague and the changes in Senate Bill 100 do nothing to change that except encourage more litigation.

These are just the latest attempt to convince the state’s residents that public schools are filled with far left teachers who want to indoctrinate students, to shield LGBTQ+ students from their parents and to encourage deviant behavior.

Nine-nine percent of parents with children in the public schools would tell you that is not true and the other 1 percent are in the New Hampshire legislature or related to someone who is.

Public schools are not perfect but the Free State/Libertarian talking points about public education are not being created in New Hampshire. They are the work of far-right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, the same groups that generate the wording for these bills.

The legislature has not addressed the real problems facing public schools, but have instead been exacerbated by the GOP controlled legislature. The bills passed this session have created more work for educators and school boards and they divert time and money away from educators’ first responsibility: to educate students and prepare them to survive and compete in today’s world.

The elephant in the room is the lack of state funding for public education at the elementary, secondary and postsecondary levels where the state of New Hampshire, one of the wealthiest per capita in the country, is dead last behind such educational meccas as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and West Virginia.

Public schools do not need to spend more money for their educational system that continually ranks near the top nationally, but the state needs to pay its share of the cost which nationally averages a little less than 50 percent.

In New Hampshire local property taxpayers pay 63 percent of the cost of public education, while the state contributes 28.8 percent, leaving a little over 8 percent for the federal government to contribute, the 45th lowest for states.

Property taxes pay about 70 percent of the cost of education when you add in the Statewide Education Property Tax which is included in the state’s share although it all comes out of property owners’ pockets.

This legislature did two things to address the funding issue this session, one would be to bring the Statewide Education Property Tax collection methods in line with a superior court judge’s ruling that requires the property wealthier communities to turn their excess revenue not needed to cover the cost of an adequate education for their students over to the state and to stop the Department of Revenue Administration from approving negative local education property tax rates allowing unincorporated places to avoid paying the statewide property tax.

That action does not require any more state money and in fact increases state revenue by about $30 million.

The Legislature increased spending on special education in the second year of the biennium, but the Senate budget reduced that figure by $27 million.

Just a few years ago, the Education Trust Fund, which pays for state adequacy grants to public and charter schools, special education, building aid and several other educational needs, had a surplus approaching $250 million, but since that time the EFA program has also drawn its money from the same source of funds totally $76 million through this school year.

The additional draw from the EFA program and declining state revenues have combined to substantially change the financial picture. At the end of this fiscal year at the end of the month, the surplus will be around $100 million. 

At the end of the upcoming biennium the surplus in the Senate’s budget will be less than $20 million, with the fund in deficit under the House’s budget, and $14 million in the governor’s plan.

All three plans reduce the percentage of state revenues that go into the Education Trust Fund and increase the amount going to the state’s general fund.

Drying up the Education Trust Fund was a plan hatched long ago to have vouchers competing with public schools for state education money. When that happens, if you think your property taxes are too high now, just wait until the money goes to the voucher program first before adequacy grants to school districts.

The Free State/Libertarians have long sought to have public schools house only special education students and kids with disciplinary programs. The rest of the students and their parents will be on their own to find and pay for their education, meaning the rich will do just fine and everyone else will scramble to find an inferior education they can afford.

That is a pathway to retaining the oligarchy.

Another significant issue facing public education is the dearth of teachers as many school districts cannot find certified teachers to hire and instead have to rely on non-credentialed personnel or para educators to fill the gap.

See above and and you could reasonably ask, with these kinds of bills that put teachers between their students and their parents and make schools less than safe spaces for many kids, who in their right mind would want to be an educator.

At last week’s session, Rep. Stephen Woodcock, D-Center Conway, a retired teacher and school principal, said “Parental rights go hand in hand with parental responsibilities. It is not a teacher’s responsibility to do the parents’ job, which is talking with their children.”

And you could argue that public education ought to be more rigorous than it is now, but society has pressured schools to “make every child succeed,” and that translates into lower academic standards.

And that describes the new state education standards recently approved by the State Board of Education in the name of competency-based education.

If this group of legislators continue to control the agenda, it will not be long before public education will be in tatters, which will suit them fine.

But with about 90 percent of the state’s children in the public school system, it is hard to believe that is their parents’ or their desire.

Categories Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire: What’s Next for Vouchers: Champagne or Storm Clouds?

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
5

Jennifer Berkshire has both good news and bad news about vouchers. The idea of public funding for religious and private schools had some big wins this year, especially in Texas. But most vouchers are subsidizing kids who never attended public schools; that’s a feature, not a bug as it creates strong support for the giveaway among the highest-income people. But, lo! The real cost of have the state pay for everyone’s tuition is beginning to get the attention of taxpayers. And that could cause a backlash against welfare for the wealthy. Florida is already paying $4 billion a year for vouchers. Will taxpayers object?

She writes:

Champagne corks, storm clouds—I’m mixing my metaphors here. But as we survey the steaming wreckage of the 2025 state legislative sessions, both are present in spades. Let’s start with the popping corks: the school voucher movement really did notch some big wins this year, adding Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho and the biggest prize of all, Texas, to the list of states with “education freedom.” Now add in the sneaky move to slip a voucher program that is really a tax shelter for the wealthy into the tax code and it’s easy to feel despondent, and not just about the future of public education. 

Listen in on the debates that played out in these states, though, and you’ll come away with a very different view. As the economy sours and the tide of red ink rises, alarm bells are sounding and a backlash is brewing.

Let’s start with a quick trip to my neighboring state, New Hampshire, where a familiar series of events has transpired. Now, in the Granite State, vouchers are known as Education Freedom Accounts, and they were sold to notoriously thrifty Yankees as a way to save money as students abandoned “government schools” for less expensive private religious schools, home schools, microschools. But nothing of the sort happened, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of students who’d never attended public schools. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s revenue situation has been deteriorating rapidly thanks to yet another round of slashing taxes on businesses. 

All of which adds up to some pretty bleak math as the state must now figure out how to pay for an expensive—and expanding—school voucher program even as New Hampshire’s budget pie keeps shrinking. Which is how GOP lawmakers seem to have landed on the worst of both worlds: an austerity budget that slashes funding for the state’s public higher education budget in order to pay for the cost of further undermining the state’s public education system. (If you’re wondering why this recipe sounds familiar, you’re thinking of Indiana, star of a recent episode of Have You Heard, and a cautionary tale about what happens when a state expands school choice while simultaneously cutting school funding and divesting from public higher education.)

Different state, same story

While the libertarian paradise known as New Hampshire may be unique, the dynamic playing out here is the same as in virtually every state that has now adopted school vouchers. 1) Ever-shifting goal posts regarding the purpose of these programs? Check. 2) Ballooning voucher costs as states now pick up the tab for students already attending private schools? Check. 3) Deep tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, meaning less revenue to spend on public education and other social programs? Check. 

Consider Louisiana, which last year enacted the so-called LA GATOR program—short for Giving All True Opportunity to Rise. Now if you know anything about the recent history of school vouchers in Lousiana (spoiler: not good!), this is the time for a chuckle of the bitterest variety. What IS rising rapidly is the program’s cost—nearly $100 million in its second year, estimated to reach as much as $520 million as the program scales up. But when Governor Jeff Landry tried to collect the cash from lawmakers, something interesting happened. They said no, or at least, not so much. 

“I was not remotely expecting that,” [Senate President Cameron] Henry said about Landry seeking an extra $50 million for the program. “Somehow there was a misunderstanding, which we will rectify.” Despite Landry’s request, Henry said he will hold firm to spending roughly the same amount as vouchers cost this school year: $43.5 million “It will be no more” than that, he said, “because that was the original agreement.”

And it wasn’t just Louisiana. Over in Missouri, lawmakers axed their governor’s request for $50 million to scale up the voucher program known as MoScholars. The GOP senator behind the move offered a simple explanation. “I want to make sure that we’re fully funding our obligation to public schools before we start spending 10s of millions of general revenue dollars on private schools.”

If you’re wondering what’s going on, the answer is fairly simple. As voucher programs have ballooned in size and cost, they’ve become a bigger target, especially in states where they’re now hoovering up state funding at the expense of the public schools—which are still attended by most children in every state. And years of tax slashing in these same states is exacerbating what we might call the ‘pie’ problem. Factor in the worsening national economic forecast and things look even more dire. Texas, which is now on the hook for $1 billion a year to pay for vouchers, plummeting oil prices due to Trump’s tariffs is likely to lead to a recession as soon as this summer. 

Theory of change

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I’m an avid reader of conservative treatises. As I type, I’m surrounded by anti-public-education screeds by Pete Hegseth, Kevin Roberts, Betsy DeVos, and Corey DeAngelis. It’s the last one, Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, that has proven to be a particularly useful guide to our times. How, for example, did school choice for the very wealthy become the civil rights cause of our times? Dr. DeAngelis explains:

“Allowing politically advantaged groups to benefit from the program is also a smart way to keep the policy protected for years to come.”

You see, there’s a theory here: that as monies grow scarce and one state after another devolves into a pitched battle over what’s left, the richest and most connected will fight the hardest to keep what’s theirs. For a preview of what this looks like, I recommend a pitstop in West Virginia, where lawmakers just wrapped up another session by shoveling money at tax cuts for the wealthy and school vouchers, while cutting programs that help people get clean water, find work after struggling with addiction and get child care. Oh well…

But for the theory of change to work, people have to want to live in a West Virginia-like reality, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Don’t believe me? Let’s head to Florida, which school choice proponents like to point to as a model for the rest of our states, and which now spends $4 billion a year on vouchers. Since the state made the program available to even the wealthiest Floridians, surprise, surprise, they’ve leaped at the opportunity to have tax payers pay their children’s private school tuition:

More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions.

But Florida is also an example of the bad math, and shoddy assumptions, that drive the push for school privatization. As public education advocate and blogger extraordinaire Sue Woltanski has been tirelessly documenting, vouchers are indeed succeeding in defunding Florida’s public schools:

This isn’t because the money follows public school students fleeing to private options, but because, when families, whose children are ALREADY in private schools, are offered a tax-funded discount for their private school tuition, they flock to apply, and private schools encourage it.

As Sue keeps pointing out, the big flaw in the school choice lobby’s theory is that Florida’s public schools aren’t going away. A state that used to brag about how little it spent on its students is now funding two parallel education systems: “one for the nearly 3 million students still enrolled in public schools, and another for the hundreds of thousands already in private or home education, all out of the same funding formula.”

So what gives? The GOP’s solution is to slash funding for popular programs in public schools: AP, IB, CTE. When I asked a reader in Florida what he thought was motivating the lawmakers, he saw a longer-term conspiracy at work. Get rid of programs that parents care about and eventually they’ll abandon their local public schools. But that assumes that these parents are powerless and that lawmakers can eviscerate programs and institutions that matter to them without paying a price. I’m not so sure. 

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Sarasota to speak to a group called Support Our Schools. SOS is a phenomenal advocacy group, and in partnership with a youth-led group that’s “organizing school boards to fight fascism, protect democracy, and build power from the ground up,” they’re having a real impact in a community that’s been ground zero for the right-wing takeover of public education. I headed south anticipating that my hosts would be despondent over the state of Florida and the nation, but what I found was the opposite. These local activists were energized, convinced that their cause—defending and strengthening public education—is finally breaking through. In their words, the situation for Florida public schools is now so dire that it’s impossible to ignore. 

Throughout my visit, one theme echoed repeatedly. A backlash is coming. It can’t come soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Funding, Lies, New Hampshire, Vouchers
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