The New Hampshire Legislature will increase funding for the Educational Freedom Fund by raising eligibility to $150,000 per year for families of four who want to secure subsidies to homeschool or attend school for their children. I was disappointed but not surprised to read that it was being considered. At private schools.
The law, if enacted, would drain millions of dollars from the Education Trust Fund, which funds adequacy grants meant to more equitably fund the state's public schools. was heartbreaking.
New Hampshire's education freedom statistics didn't surprise me, as they are the inevitable result of the weakening of government that began during the Ronald Reagan presidency and has been the centerpiece of conservatism ever since. One of President Reagan's most famous quotes, “Here are the nine scariest words in the English language, are the nine scariest words in the English language. I'm in the government, and I'm here to help.” represents his attitude towards public affairs. The attitude is only getting worse. President Reagan implicitly encouraged the privatization of public services by making “inefficient government'' the enemy and “cost-effective corporations'' the hero.
Over time, this perspective was adopted by both political parties, with Republicans wanting a government “small enough to drown in a bathtub” and Democrats advocating “public-private partnerships.” In public education, privatization movements have led many boards of education to outsource services such as transportation, school lunches, staffing for administration and maintenance, accounting and payroll, nursing, and special education.
During the same period, voters adopted the view that publicly funded organizations should be “run like a business” and should be “responsible for the quality of their products.” This led to the emergence of an accountability movement in public education, whereby schools were evaluated based on how well their students performed on standardized tests.
After a series of false starts in setting federal quality standards for schools, George W. Gained bipartisan support for the NCLB Act. ” If these schools fail to improve after the intervention, parents with children in those schools will be offered an alternative. The underlying premise of NCLB was to allow parents of children who were “trapped in failing schools” to choose more successful schools for their children.
What happened next was completely predictable. The bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB identified schools that serve children who grew up in poverty or were severely underfunded as “failing” and there was no funding to support them. has disappeared. In 2009, the Obama Administration launched Race to the Top, a competitive grant program designed to encourage and support reform in state departments of education and local school districts. Using $4.35 billion in stimulus funds approved by Congress to deal with the Great Recession, President Obama hoped Race to the Top grants would turn around “failing schools.” However, by the end of his administration, more than 30% of the nation's schools were still “failing.”
In 2015, Congress reached bipartisan agreement on education policy and passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which “sets high standards” for all students and “shifts decision-making to local educators, families, and communities.” The aim was to promote fairness by “reverting to ” Teachers' unions appreciated the role expected of educators, and local school boards appreciated references to the role played by local communities. But the new law was most praised by conservative state legislators. By focusing on references to the role of families, states with Republican legislatures and governors enacted a series of “choice” laws that weakened both teacher unions and local school boards. Conservative lawmakers are drawing on model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a nonprofit underwritten by wealthy backers like the Koch brothers, and funded by Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). enacted legislation to expand school choice through subsidies. The first state law funded the grants from a pool of money created by tax-deductible contributions by investors seeking tax shelter. By underwriting subsidies that give parents the option to “break” public schools using voluntary contributions, lawmakers were able to “improve equity” without raising taxes.
New Hampshire's version of the ESA, the Education Freedom Account (EFA), was far worse for taxpayers because it did not rely solely on voluntary contributions. Instead, New Hampshire's EFA grants came primarily from state funds earmarked for public schools. To make matters worse, 72% of EFA grants went to parents whose children were already enrolled in private schools or who were already home-educated. In the words of NEA-NH President Megan Tuttle, New Hampshire's EFA grants “take scarce funding from public schools and give it to private and religious schools that are not accountable to the public.”
In a state where the Supreme Court has repeatedly determined that state education funding is insufficient and unfairly distributed, it is difficult to justify the diversion of taxpayer funds dedicated to public schools. Diverting those funds to pay the costs of parents who choose to homeschool their children or pay tuition to religiously affiliated schools shifts the cost of public education to local property taxes. become.
If Gov. Chris Sununu and Republican lawmakers want to provide aid to parents who homeschool their children or enroll them in religious schools, they must do so explicitly and not through a Byzantine mechanism like EFA. Should. Forbes magazine reported earlier this month that New Hampshire public schools ranked fourth in the nation based on standardized test scores. Given this track record, I believe Congress should invest more in the exceptional public education system that already exists, rather than spending money on homeschooling and private schools.
Wayne Gersen is a former superintendent. He lives in Etna.