Bill Duncan, who has been leading the charge to protect New Hampshire’s public schools, explains the true goal of Senate Bill 372. The proposed legislation would create a school voucher program granting tax credits to businesses to fund scholarships for students attending private schools, religious schools or home schools.
Milton Friedman, the godfather of the movement for private school vouchers, said in his famous paper, “Public Schools: Make Them Private”: “Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system.”
This week, the New Hampshire House of Representatives is expected to vote a plan to do just that.
Our public schools are being privatized, and New Hampshire communities will pay the price.
Cherylyn Harley LeBon — who established her partisan Republican bona fides working for archconservative Sen. Orrin Hatch and serving as deputy press secretary and spokesperson for the Republican National Committee — notes efforts by the New Hampshire GOP to eliminate the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and declares the party has lost its way.
In the State of New Hampshire, however, Democrats have exercised reasonable, sound judgment, while my Republican brethren are being led astray.
Some Republicans in the New Hampshire state legislature believe that the IB program is a pilot program of the United Nations and UNESCO that promotes a socialist agenda. I have my share of criticisms for the UN and UNESCO, but they are a non-issue in this instance and don’t control the IB program.
The IB program prepares our children to function in a global society. The curriculum is challenging and encourages students to hone critical thinking skills, engage in community service, and learn a second language. … We should be proud of and encourage education through programs like the IB program.
The always informative email update from Bill Duncan at Defending New Hampshire Public Education has the latest details on the New Hampshire GOP’s War on Education. Here are some excerpts. If you care about the future of public education in the state, I strongly recommend you read the entire report and subscribe to the updates.
CACR 12 — The education funding amendment gets (secret) new language
You may have read about the new language House Republican leadership is circulating. Here is Saturday’s Union Leader report on it. This language is just as bad as all the previous attempts, if not worse. This new proposed amendment gives the Legislature sole discretion over all funding and how it will be raised — effectively taking the Courts out of protecting the rights of every child. The New Hampshire Constitution promises to educate every child. This amendment breaks the promise of public education to all our children.
HB 1403 — The anti-International Baccalaureate bill gets hammered
You can’t be sure the adults in the Legislature will prevail and kill a silly bill like this. So students, parents, teachers and administrators … have spent weeks opposing the bill…. It all became visible at Tuesday’s hearing. Here is great, detailed post from Ryan O’Connor in the Bedford Patch and coverage in the Union Leader and on NPR.
But if you click on nothing else, watch this video of the testimony of Wolfeboro resident John R. White who came down to testify apparently because he just couldn’t believe what he was reading in the paper.
It’s hard to see how HB 1403 survives this assault….
The plot thicken on the voucher bills — SB 372 / HB 1607
The House Ways and Means SB 372 Subcommittee met today, Wednesday, May 2. … [T]hey voted to recommend the SB 372 be sent to Interim Study. The meeting was short and very interesting. Here is the video.
At virtually the same moment today, the Senate voted 17-7 in favor of the sister bill, HB 1607, and sent it to the Senate Finance Committee, which will make a recommendation before the full Senate takes a final vote.
All this amounts to a dramatic turn of events. The voucher plan will probably be voted on several more times by both bodies before it’s over. At this point, the plan is defeatable, but the detailed steps will not be clear for several days.
House Majority Leader D.J. Bettencourt’s feelings were hurt when Gov. Lynch took on House members who believe the state shouldn’t have any responsibility for public education. “That’s absurd,” declared the Governor.
Bettencourt responded by dashing off a letter to Lynch criticizing his “negative comments.” Foster’s, the state’s most conservative newspaper this side of the Union Leader, agreed with Lynch, writing, “[I]t is absolutely, without question, absurd.” The paper concluded with some dismissive advice for Bettencourt: Got a problem? Write it down.
Given the tax structure in the state of New Hampshire and the mandates heaped on local school districts by past legislatures, it is absolutely, without question, absurd that Bettencourt and the rest of the Legislature should be allowed to go their merry way unencumbered by the need to help fund local education budgets.
As always, if the House Majority Leader Bettencourt would like to take exception to this newspaper’s use of the word “absurd” he can send his editorial response to letter@fosters.com — 750 words or less. We will gladly accept his public scolding.
Retired software entrepreneur Bill Duncan has been spearheading a grassroots fight against the GOP effort to dismantle the state’s public education. In an interview with New Hampshire Business Review, he explains why. Here’s an excerpt.
Q. From a business/economic perspective, why is public education vital?
A. New Hampshire’s great public education system is the state’s most prized asset. People move here because of it. It enhances real estate values. Our workforce is a product of our system of education, right up through the community colleges and the university. That’s a much more important factor than the business profits tax in whether businesses start or locate here.
The effort to undermine public education based on political opposition to “government-run schools” is a fundamental threat to New Hampshire’s economic vitality, but this philosophical opposition to public education does not represent the overwhelming majority of voters.
The New Hampshire House and Senate have both passed legislation (House Bill 1607 and Senate Bill 372) that would grant businesses tax credits for contributions to a voucher program that would reimburse the educational expenses of students attending private, parochial and home schools.
Proponents of the private school voucher program claim it would improve the quality of education by offering more school choice and increasing competition. An editorial in the Portsmouth Herald dismisses that canard and denounces the legislation as “a vote to damage public schools.”
The vouchers take money from public schools in two ways. First, a tax credit given to a business is a tax not collected by the state. Second, when a student leaves a public school, the state funding that supported that student goes away, but the fixed costs to the schools remain unchanged….
The result would be either higher local property taxes or more cuts to our public schools, lost educational opportunities for our children, and a hollow victory for those who embrace the deluded notion that somehow our country would be better off without public schools.
Ed Naile, Chairman of the The Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers, is quite frank about the attempt by the GOP state legislature to dismantle New Hampshire’s public schools.
Why are we herding kids into government schools in the first place? Government schools are not mentioned in the US or NH Constitutions. … Remember who pays. The government school experiment in this current society has just about run its course. The sooner Americans let the old German government school idea die a graceful death, the better everyone will be.
House Bill 1607 and Senate Bill 372 would create a school voucher program granting tax credits to businesses funding scholarships for students to attend private schools, religious schools or home schools.
The Carsey Institute reports that, based on the latest WMUR Granite State Poll, New Hampshire voters are virtually universal in their opposition to this attack on the state’s public schools.
The survey found there was very little support among New Hampshire voters for using state funds to help students attend private school. Public school parents were very satisfied with their local schools and were even more opposed than all voters to using state money to help students attend private schools.
55 percent of all voters oppose using state funds to help students attend private schools compared to only 23 percent who support it. They oppose using tax credits to help students attend private schools by a 41 percent to 27 percent margin. The opposition is bipartisan. Republicans oppose both measures by 43 percent to 36 percent and 36 percent to 30 percent margins respectively.
Supporters assert that New Hampshire public schools are failing and parents are demanding alternatives — but someone apparently forgot to tell parents.
68 percent of public school parents saying that they are extremely satisfied (six percent), very satisfied (31 percent) or somewhat satisfied (31 percent) with the quality of education in their local schools — more than double the 30 percent who express some level of dissatisfaction.
The WMUR Granite State Poll was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which interviewed 527 New Hampshire adults between January 25 and February 2, 2012. The margin of error is +/- 4.3 percent.
Bob Sanders continues his excellent review of the 56 bills retained by the House that have been flying “under the radar” but could come up for a vote in January. One that caught my eye is HB 219 (as amended), a brazen attempt to both usurp the role of the executive branch and continue the process of gutting public schools, one bad bill at a time.
HB 219 started out as a study committee that would abolish the Department of Education. The amended bill may not sound as radical, but it would do more. It would prevent the state Board of Education from passing any rule unless it is necessary to comply with federal minimum standards. Otherwise, only the legislature would be able to do that.
The nation’s tradition of fomenting a popular distrust of learning, which Richard Hofstadter documented in ”Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” is on full display today in the GOP-dominated New Hampshire legislature.
Two new reports document how the Granite State now leads the nation in dismantling public education. A study by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities reports New Hampshire produced the nation’s sharpest decline in state funding for public higher education with a 48% reduction from 2011 to 2012.
Not surprisingly, a separate but related report by the Project on Student Debt confirms that New Hampshire college students also lead the nation in loan debt at graduation. The Granite State’s college graduates left school in 2010 with an average debt of $31,048, the most in the country.
When Gov. Lynch opposed the university system budget cuts, he stated the obvious. “We need a well-educated workforce to succeed in the future.” Not so, retorted state House Speaker Bill O’Brien:
“Not only does throwing more and more taxpayer money at funding college education cause more problems than it solves, it inaccurately signals that college attendance is the only route for success in life, insulates an efficient industry for the reality of market needs, and imposes taxes on average working families and blue collar workers to fund others’ tuition,” O’Brien said in a statement.
