Editor’s Notebook: The endgame of New Hampshire’s ‘education freedom accounts’

When the new legislative session kicks off next month, it’s a sure bet that New Hampshire lawmakers will spend a good chunk of time debating school vouchers.

If you’re the parent of a child who struggled or is struggling in public school, the appeal of New Hampshire’s “education freedom accounts” program isn’t hard to see. Everybody wants what’s best for their kid, and so if the state offers an educational alternative to a school that’s a bad fit for whatever reason, moms and dads are going to take it.

There are plenty of EFA success stories, and when you read about them, it’s natural to feel relief for the family. No kid should be bullied. No kid should be marginalized. No kid should be denied a good education just because of their ZIP code. 

Political battles aside, most of us want for our neighbors what we desire for ourselves and our loved ones – the opportunity to thrive. So, on that level, EFAs make sense. 

But that doesn’t make New Hampshire’s voucher program any less troubling.

EFAs are the primary mechanism by which New Hampshire Republicans are working to privatize public education – and they’re using your tax dollars to make it happen. The effort is underway across the country, and those in New Hampshire who are credited, or castigated, for developing the EFA program are not so much policy architects as adherents to market zeal that borders on the religious: an unwavering faith that there’s no societal problem that competition can’t fix. 

Vouchers exist to pit public schools against private, religious, and charter schools, and, ultimately, against each other – all on the path to privatization. One legislative service request for next session, for example, would allow parents “to send their children to any school district they choose.” The unleashed competition will establish winners (the wealthy, as always) and losers (the poor, as always), just as in the overall American economy and its staggering level of economic inequality. But that’s just collateral damage, they’ll say, on the way to competition-driven excellence. Any school, or individual, that can’t succeed in such a system must own the blame, they’ll say, just as the 11.5 percent of Americans who live in poverty must own theirs.  

So how did we get here, on the precipice of a legislative session that will see a renewed push to expand the EFA program even amid climbing costs for taxpayers and lean times?

The puzzle isn’t difficult to piece together, and you can trace the movement’s beginnings back to various times and places, whether 19th-century New England or the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Wherever and whenever it started, the voucher push was supercharged by the Reaganomics of the 1980s and that momentum continues to this day. 

Here’s how it has played out in New Hampshire: The fate of a public school, funded by local property taxes, is directly tied to the economic success or collapse of its host community or district. That also means that inequality is built into the funding system itself. Rich towns will have rich schools and vice versa, and the gap grows a little bit wider every year.

Again, this isn’t inevitable inequality but engineered inequality. 

The problem is with the funding design, but rather than address that issue the free market evangelists offer a different solution: privatization. Just as market competition drives efficiency and innovation in the private sector, it will do the same for public education, they argue. 

To expedite that transition, lawmakers institutionalize a hands-off approach to a broken system (largely through fealty to the “New Hampshire Advantage”) – even when the state is found delinquent by the judiciary. Schools within property-poor districts are suffocated, and amid those systemically engineered struggles an escape hatch is offered: school vouchers. The program begins modestly, maybe a handful of only the neediest students, and then grows and grows until it’s large enough to devour a system it pledged to complement.   

That’s the path under our feet right now. This school year, more than 27 million taxpayer dollars will be removed from the Education Trust Fund to pay for more than 5,300 New Hampshire students to attend classes somewhere other than their traditional community public school. Both of those numbers will grow, especially when the income caps are inevitably removed. Schools will struggle, schools will close.

You will still hear the success stories – stories of equity and new opportunities. They are similar to the stories you hear about those who rise up from poverty in America, people from historically marginalized groups who pick themselves up “by their bootstraps” through hard work and perseverance. The stories may be true, but the mistake we make is believing, through extrapolation, that they are evidence of a major positive shift, a solution in action. Success by some does not mean that poverty is avoidable for most or even many, or that systemic racism does not exist. And, the positive EFA stories do not change the fact that school vouchers are exacerbating a problem proponents claim to be solving.   

The capacity of the human mind is really something – for better or worse. We are able to mentally model situations and potential outcomes, and then make a decision based on which of those imagined outcomes would be most beneficial to ourselves or the whole. It doesn’t always, or even often, work out the way we predict, but the fact that we can run those simulations at all is kind of extraordinary. We’re not so great, though, at grasping the big picture – or even seeing enough to know whether something is ultimately good or ultimately bad. It happens every day: We take a job for more money (a good decision!) and then we end up spending too many nights and weekends working (a bad decision!), but now we can afford to take the family on a dream vacation (good!), back and forth and on and on. 

School vouchers feel a lot like that. If you focus on the happy endings – and whatever our politics we should all be rooting for the kids – they can seem good. But when I try to see the big picture, I can’t help but imagine raising children in a community where neighborhood kids all go to different schools. I think about how fractured society already feels, and how much worse it would be if we allowed our school communities to be dissolved. I think about the inevitable shifting of our educational system even more toward job training and away from the full public school experience that should, when properly funded and staffed, expose kids not only to STEM subjects but art, music, literature, athletics, etc. I think about all the kids who will be left behind in the new educational world we have already unleashed. And I think about the schools struggling right now, through no fault of their own, and their teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets while millions of dollars are siphoned out of the Education Trust Fund.

It seems unlikely New Hampshire will put the voucher system back in the bottle, and Democrats will have their work cut out for them just to persuade Republicans to apply the brakes a little bit. Politically, it feels like there’s no turning back. 

And if that’s the case, I’m left with one overriding wish: I hope that what I imagine is not what comes.