Editor’s note: To avoid social repercussions in a small community, the subject of this story requested that only her first name be used and that her son’s name not be used. We granted the request. 

Christine M. spent three years trying to find the right learning environment for her son. When he started at Stevens High School in Claremont, the city’s public high school, it was a bad fit.

“We really struggled with that kind of environment for him,” Christine recalled. “He was having a lot of issues going to school, wanting to go to school, getting in engaged in school, not getting in trouble in school, that sort of thing. Getting pretty much nowhere with academics.” 

It didn’t help that Stevens High School is not a high-performing academic setting. The school finishes in the bottom 25% in English language arts and math proficiency, at 38% and 26%, respectively. 

“Then we went into our sophomore year. Had many, many more struggles. He was being asked to leave all the time for behavior issues. He just couldn’t engage in the classroom…. Our next step this year was to enroll him in the new charter school that opened in Claremont, River View Public Charter School. We enrolled him in that. He was kind of doing okay for a while, and then it became very clear that that method of online learning was not for him.”

River View is a tuition-free public charter school that uses Edmentum, an online learning platform that allows each student to work at their own pace. This wasn’t the right fit for Christine’s son either.  

“And we were getting nowhere with that, so we took him out of there,” she said. “And currently I have him homeschooling, and he’s working on studying and preparing for his GED test, his HiSET test. That’s the route we’re doing now.” 

After three years and three different learning environments, Christine thought she had finally found the educational setting in which her almost 17-year-old son would thrive. Throughout her son’s high school journey, Christine has had only one goal.

“Try to exhaust all the possibilities to get him successful so that he could a) learn something and b) end up with a diploma at the end,” she said. 

Exhausting all the possibilities finally led to the perfect fit, she thought. Christine found Micah Studios, co-founded by Stacey Hammerlind, a former colleague from the Newport School District. (We documented Hammerlind’s story last September.)

“When I heard she was opening this center for homeschoolers, I thought, okay, finally, this may be an option that will be successful, because we had pretty much…exhausted everything else that I could think of. And, of course, now he’s a junior, so we were running out of time, basically.” 

When Christine discovered that Hammerlind’s learning center, with its emphasis on individualized education and support, was up and running, she immediately reached out. 

“I contacted her when I started seeing that her studio…was taking applications,” Christine said. “So I kind of reached out and was like, ‘I think this might be something that could benefit my son. Can we talk about it?’ And she explained how it worked and all that, and I thought, okay, finally, he could be a homeschooler but have a place to go to do his homeschooling, because my husband and I both work full-time, and I knew that leaving him alone at home was not going to be successful. He wasn’t going to do it; he wasn’t going to do the work. And so that’s when we started talking about tuition, and I quickly found out that there was no way that we could afford it.”

Though they couldn’t pay out of pocket for their son’s education, Christine and her husband learned that enrollment at Micah Studios could be fully funded through an Education Freedom Account (EFA), the state’s largest school choice program. They were very excited. 

Micah Studios was just what they’d sought. 

“That was what we thought would be the best fit for him after exhausting all the other options, basically,” Christine said. 

The environment at Micah Studios fit her son’s individual needs in ways that the public options in the area did not.

“In the past, a lot of the issues were behavioral,” she said. “I know he would work much better in a smaller group with one-on-one instruction versus a classroom, and that’s just something, of course, that couldn’t happen at high school, at Stevens. And the River View Charter it could happen more, but there the kids were kind of just given the format and told to go, and he really needs more direction than that. 

“So I think that that would have been a benefit. I know Stacey’s group is small. I think there would have been more time for one-on-one instruction, one-on-one help with his online learning, with his homeschool work. Not to mention, just the distractions of everyday high school life. I mean, he’s a very social kid—class clown, that sort of thing—and that was hampering his success, to say the least.”

Christine had spent three years trying to find the best fit for her son’s education. When she finally found Micah Studios, she thought it was the long-lost answer. Instead, it was the rules of the EFA program—the very entity designed to help families like Christine’s access alternative education programs—that kept their son out. 

Christine’s family is not eligible for an EFA.

“When I heard about this thing Stacey was doing,” Christine said, “I thought, oh my God, finally, this is going to be success for him, but then the money got in the way.”

Current law caps eligibility for the EFA program at 350% of the federal poverty level. That makes the maximum income for a family of three like Christine’s $90,370. Her family is just above the limit.

Christine works a full-time job and her husband works two jobs, one full-time and one part-time. 

“That’s what we need to do to survive daily,” she said.

Their combined household income is $105,000—too much for their son to qualify for an EFA.

If Christine’s family had another child, both children would be eligible for EFAs. The program’s eligibility requirements are tied to federal poverty guidelines, which are tied to family size. But with one son and three jobs, their family was just over the limit. Now they struggle to homeschool their only child, calculating that this is a better option than sending him back to the two public schools that didn’t work for him. 

​​“Yeah, it’s been stressful,” Christine said. “Luckily my mom, his grandmother, sits with him sometimes and tries to steer him in the right direction, so some work is getting done just not the quantity of work I think if he had been in a place like Stacey’s studio. She’s doing her best to help us out with this, but it’s a burden.”

Asked if she would describe her three-job family as rich, Christine responded emphatically. 

“Yeah, no. I would definitely not,” she said. “We’re definitely not a rich family…. We are a family doing our best to get our son educated in not really the most ideal settings for him.”

An Education Freedom Account would mean a lot to her family, Christine said.

​​“What would it mean to us? I think it would mean that we would not be as stressed all the time. This has been a stress trying to figure out what to do with our son, like how to get him where he needs to go between freshman year and age 18. It would have been a relief for sure. This has been incredibly stressful. We’ve had many, many emotional moments on this journey of high school with him.”

Expanding EFA eligibility from 350% to 500% of the federal poverty level would raise the income threshold for a three-person family from $90,370 to $129,100. This would make Christine’s family eligible. 

The same can’t be said about expanding eligibility to 400% of the federal poverty level, which would increase the income cap to $103,280. At that threshold, Christine’s family would still fall short. 

A cutoff at 500% of the federal poverty level would still exclude a lot of families, but it would cover more than 60% of school-age children in the state. Though universal eligibility is preferable, this increase would allow many more children to find the educational environments that fit their needs.  

“I think being able to qualify for some kind of program like that would have just taken so many stresses out of his high school life,” Christine said, “and I think that it would have made him feel successful at something because I don’t think he feels that way.” 

For now, Christine will continue trying to homeschool her son while she and her husband work three jobs to make ends meet. She said that it’s hard, but it’s better than sending him back to the schools that didn’t work for him.

 

Child care in New Hampshire is often hard to find and, when you do, expensive. A bipartisan group of legislators has offered families some relief in a surprising way: zoning reform.

Child care offered to small groups of children in a caregiver’s home was once a popular option for many families. But professionalization and regulation of the industry produced a shift toward large (and expensive) commercial day care centers. A lot of families looking for cheaper alternatives today wonder where the old-fashioned, home-based child care providers went.

Many municipalities, it turns out, have passed zoning regulations prohibiting or restricting them.

“Many state and local governments have considered home daycares a ‘problem use’ and have therefore used zoning restrictions to ban them. Such restrictions reduce the availability of childcare in the affected neighborhoods and further increase the price of childcare services,” the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne has found.

House Bill 1567 would fix that in New Hampshire by requiring local zoning regulations to allow family child care programs as an accessory use (by right) to any primary residential use. 

Such home-base child care programs would be allowed “as long as all requirements for such programs adopted in rules of the department of health and human services (He-C 4002) are met,” the bill states.

Child care is expensive for many reasons, some of them regulatory. It is particularly expensive in New Hampshire. 

According to Child Care Aware, child care in New Hampshire costs an average of $10,140 per year for an infant in family child care and $10,400 for a toddler in family child care. For an infant and toddler in center-based child care, New Hampshire families are spending an average of $15,340 and $14,235 per year, respectively. 

On the “low end,” then, family child care for an infant accounts for 21% of per capita income in New Hampshire and 11.2% of medium household income in the state, while center-based child care for a toddler represents 29.5% of per capita income and 15.7% of medium household income in New Hampshire.

For context, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers its benchmark for affordable child care to be 7% of income. 

HB 1567 would not solve this problem, but it would help lower costs by largely doing away with “problem use” restrictions in residential zoning districts. This change would open more of the state to home-based family child care, free up the supply of those services, and, in turn, help reduce prices. 

This is a smart and efficient way to help lower child care costs by removing an unnecessary regulatory barrier that prohibits the entry of low-cost competitors into the marketplace. 

Legislators could achieve similar results by applying this same approach to a similar service: education.

Since the COVID-19 school closures, interest in small-scale education alternatives has exploded. Many families would love to send their children to home-based education providers in their own neighborhoods. But as teachers and former teachers have begun offering these services, they’ve sometimes run into the same zoning problems troubling many would-be day care providers. 

Kerry McDonald, senior education fellow with the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote two years ago for the Josiah Bartlett Center about a New Hampshire educator who encountered this problem: 

For Becky Owens in Chester, trying to offer sporadic homeschool programs on her farm property turned into a regulatory headache that likely would have deterred many other aspiring education entrepreneurs from moving forward. Owens had been homeschooling her own five children for several years, after pulling her oldest son from the local public elementary school because it wasn’t a good fit for her shy, sensitive boy. She wanted a more personalized educational environment for him and her other children that would be responsive to their individual learning needs and styles.

A college professor for 15 years with a Ph.D. in education, Owens decided to create that personalized learning environment, and eventually expand her offerings to other children in her community. In 2020, she decided to host occasional nature hikes on her property for small groups of local homeschoolers. She had a handful of students register for one of her hikes, and she placed a chalkboard sign in front of her house with the words “Farm Rich Nature Hike” so families could find her.

This simple gesture set off a cascade of events involving the local building inspector, who issued her a “cease and desist” letter for her farm walks. Over the subsequent weeks, Owens had to prepare numerous documents for local officials, including an aerial view of her property, and appear before the planning board to ask for permission to operate as a home-based business. She also had a property inspection from the local fire chief, even though her program was held entirely outside. All of this was required just so Owens could welcome a few children to her property for a nature walk. Her walks never exceeded 10 kids.

And although these local regulatory roadblocks didn’t stop Owens (eventually she got approved to operate as a home-based business), she’s the exception that proves the rule. Who knows how many other aspiring education entrepreneurs seeking to offer alternative learning environments have either given up when faced with such prospects or haven’t even tried. 

As with child care, some municipalities don’t allow “education” services to be offered in residential zones even if all other regulations are followed and there’s no impact on the neighbors. The provision of the service itself is forbidden.

HB 1567 offers a blueprint for how the state can easily expand the marketplace for needed services simply by allowing home-based providers to offer them on a small scale, provided the service doesn’t violate other rules that offer legitimate protections for consumers and neighbors.

 

The second group of bills to saddle the Education Freedom Account program with onerous red tape will be considered this week by the state House and Senate.

State lawmakers took up the first set of regulatory measures last week, voting down both House Bills 1512 and 1594. 

This week, the House will vote on HB 1418, 1610 and 1654, while the Senate considers Senate Bill 525

HB 1418, 1610 and 1654 seek to impose new controls on the EFA program, both its providers and participants. 

HB 1418 prohibits the purchase of school uniforms with EFA funds. 

In some academic settings, school uniforms are an essential part of a student’s education. The only way to receive an education at these institutions is to purchase and wear the required uniform. The point of the uniform typically is to instill a positive culture and reduce distractions. 

Uniforms “create an atmosphere in our schools that promotes discipline and order and learning,” as President Bill Clinton put it in 1996 when endorsing school uniforms during a visit to the Long Beach, Calif., school district (which still requires uniforms). Uniforms have long been viewed as a valuable tool for creating a disciplined, structured learning environment, so it’s unclear why they wouldn’t be an allowed educational expense.

The two other House bills, HB 1610 and 1654, target providers. Both bills would impose a set of costly requirements on EFA providers that would fundamentally discourage their participation in the program.

HB 1610 would require all educational settings in the state to administer standardized statewide tests in English language arts, reading and math. 

One characteristic of the growing education marketplace is a shift away from using standardized assessments as a primary measurement of student learning progress. In choosing an unconventional educational environment that accepts EFA funds, a parent might specifically seek a learning model that doesn’t assess student progress with standardized testing at all. 

The diversity of curricula and instructional methods among EFA vendors makes it impossible for a single standardized test to measure student learning accurately. Many (possibly most) curricula would not be aligned to the test. HB 1610 would lead to artificially low scores simply because of misalignment, creating the false impression that rich, quality programs are inadequate. 

By requiring all EFA education providers to administer standardized statewide assessments to the program’s participants, HB 1610 would force a one-size-fits-all learning measure on a decentralized and diverse program with a variety of learning models to choose from. Forcing this uniformity on families who strive to escape such constrictions might be the whole point. 

HB 1654, meanwhile, would subject all EFA providers to an annual state review to check their adherence to state and federal anti-discrimination laws. 

The legislation is duplicative, as all education service providers in the EFA program are required by state law to comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws. Adding an additional layer of compliance costs on these vendors only serves to increase costs and further discourage provider participation in the program.

Over to the Senate, SB 525 takes proposed oversight of the EFA program to a new level. Similar to HB 1594 last week, the Senate’s bill would require EFA participants’ household incomes to be at or below the income cap for eligibility (currently 350% of the federal poverty level) each year during the student’s participation in the program. Currently, income is verified upon application.

Were annual income testing to become law, some students would lose their EFA even when parents receive small raises. This would create needless and potentially damaging disruptions to these students’ educations. You can read our analysis of the House’s similar measure here

Beyond that, SB 525 would also set reporting requirements and annual income verification audits for the program. Under SB 525, the state would verify continued income eligibility compliance among participants by subjecting a random one-third of EFA families to an audit every year. 

The Legislative Budget Assistant’s office wrote that it does not have authority to review families’ private records, so the state would have to obtain participating families’ financial records before reviews could be conducted. The large percentage of reviews required in the bill runs against the LBA’s standards and practices for audits, as it bases sample sizes on a program’s risk assessment. The LBA wrote in a fiscal note on the bill that conducting the hundreds of reviews required by SB 525 could add costs to the LBA’s budget and affect its ability to conduct its other required audits in a timely fashion.

Such an intrusive income verification regime would not only burden a state agency with hundreds of additional audits annually but would suppress participation in a program that, as we’ve noted before, saves taxpayers money. 

Any benefits to the state from these bills would be minimal, while the costs to participating families would be significant and the impact on taxpayers would be negative. These regulations seem to serve no other purpose beyond crippling EFAs and restricting their use. 

 

This week, two bills that would take Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) away from children enrolled in the program will be considered in the state House of Representatives. 

We previously summarized a group of bills that would heavily regulate the EFA program to the point that its functionality and growth would be severely curtailed. The House will vote on two of those bills on Thursday. They are House Bills 1512 and 1594. 

HB 1512 would limit funding for the EFA program from the Education Trust Fund to so-called budgeted amounts. Specifically, the bill states that Education Trust Fund payments for EFAs “shall not exceed $19,800,000 for fiscal year 2024, and in subsequent fiscal years shall not exceed the amounts appropriated for such purpose in the biennial state operating budget.”

In other words, regardless of actual enrollment, the bill would limit EFA appropriations to the sums that legislators estimate would be needed to cover EFA enrollment. Critically, the bill misrepresents the program as one whose funding is intended to be fixed annually by a set annual appropriation. It is not. Just like public schools, the EFA program’s funding is based on enrollment. 

The “appropriated” amount to which HB 1512 refers is an estimate. Existing law directs the governor to draw a warrant to cover any costs that exceed the estimate, should program enrollment prove larger than budget writers guessed. The bill would simply forbid that warrant article from exceeding the estimate, effectively capping EFA enrollment.

While presented as a measure to protect the Education Trust Fund from unanticipated withdrawals, HB 1512 is in fact an effort to prohibit the organic growth of EFAs. The bill does not address anything other than EFAs that might result in a larger-than-budgeted state education expenditure. Public schools experience fluctuating enrollment every year, and thus also pose a risk of draining more from the trust fund than was previously estimated. The number of students who have special needs or come from disadvantaged backgrounds also fluctuates annually, and increases in those numbers cause larger withdrawals from the Education Trust Fund.

The truth is that enrollment in all educational options fluctuates from year to year, and budgeted amounts are merely projections (educated guesses). Assuming that actual spending on any form of public education should align with previous budgeted guesses would be a little like assuming that election results should align precisely with pre-election polling. The budgeted amount is the guess. The actual enrollment numbers are reality. It’s not the other way around.

Lawmakers accounted for those annual enrollment fluctuations when they designed the EFA program. That’s why the EFA statute lets its funding shrink or grow depending on actual program participation. 

As written, HB 1512 would change the EFA program to a set line item in the state’s biennial budget, though that’s not what it was intended to be. Funding for the EFA program is based on enrollment, just like public school spending is. This is the appropriate way to fund both.

The main argument for this legislation is the claim that the EFA program is “way over budget.” That’s not accurate, in that the statute funds the program based on enrollment, not a set line item in the budget. HB 1512, however, would bind the program to a set budget line while failing to hold the state’s spending formula for public education to the same standard. 

Taking EFAs away from kids while costing taxpayers more

This fundamental change in EFA funding would forcibly revoke EFAs from some children who currently have them because the program has already grown beyond the bill’s proposed spending limit. 

In the current fiscal year, appropriations for the EFA program are upwards of $22 million. Those appropriations are to meet the needs of the 4,933 enrolled students, a number that’s increased by 201.7% since the program’s inception and is expected to only keep growing, as the program is popular among families who seek an alternative to their children’s assigned public school. 

The bill also would increase, not cut, total education spending. The EFA program provides a publicly funded education at a fraction of the average per-pupil expenditure for New Hampshire public schools, which is currently $20,323 from all sources, state, local, and federal. The average per-pupil adequate education grant for an EFA is $5,255. Every student who moves from an EFA back to their assigned public school costs taxpayers more money, not less. 

Finally, HB 1512 seeks to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist. The Education Trust Fund is growing, not shrinking. Despite funding both public schools and EFAs, the Education Trust Fund ended the 2023 fiscal year with a surplus of $161 million and is projected to finish this fiscal year with a surplus of $232 million. 

Moreover, since public school enrollment has been falling for the last two decades and is expected to continue declining, the resulting extra money in the trust fund (even with the budgeted limit) would simply sit there unused as more and more students leave their government-assigned district public schools and enroll elsewhere. EFAs change that, allowing those students to take their per-pupil grants with them.

Another way to take EFAs away from kids

As HB 1512 attempts to cap the finances behind the EFA program, HB 1594 would further limit those who can participate in the program.

HB 1594 would establish “an annual review and qualification to determine eligibility to participate in the education freedom accounts program.” If a participant’s household income goes over the income cap (currently 350% of the federal poverty level) in any year, then that participant would cease to be eligible for the program and would lose the EFA.

Existing law requires that the income limit be met only when applying. That was done to provide continuity for families and prevent children from being sent back to an educational environment that didn’t work for them just because their family’s income grew during their time in school. 

But HB 1594 would effectively remove an EFA student from the program if, for example, his or her single parent making the average teacher’s salary in the state earned a raise of just $5,000. 

Cloaked under the guise of reigning in a “fiscally reckless” program, these regulations are specifically designed to force children back into their assigned public schools, even though their families have decided that those schools are not the best educational environments for them. 

These bills would remove students currently using EFAs from the program, which could be a jarring or even traumatic experience for some. 

They also would reduce competition in a growing educational marketplace by hamstringing the state’s largest school-choice program—one that saves taxpayers money. (See “Bartlett report shows that Education Freedom Accounts will save taxpayer money, improve student outcomes” and  “As NH public school district enrollment fell by 30,000 students in 19 years, spending rose by nearly $1 billion.”

Ultimately, each of these bills would not just restrict the growth of the EFA program but kick children out of it who are currently enrolled. They would do this in the name of protecting the Education Trust Fund, which enjoys a healthy surplus that is projected to exceed $200 million.   

The rest of the proposed measures to restrict EFAs—HB 1418, 1592, 1610, 1654, and SB 525—are due out of committee next week.



 

The Manchester school district’s proposed 2025 budget continues the city’s trend of spending more to teach fewer students. 

The district is asking for $232,227,530 for its 2024–25 school year budget. That’s an increase of $49,175,526, or 26.9%, since 2020–21. Even after adjusting for inflation,* the increase is still $16,967,892.80, or 7.9%, over the last four years. 

*The inflation calculation assumes 2.8% inflation between December 2023 and January 2025, which is above what the Federal Reserve System is forecasting. This analysis, therefore, likely understates the real inflation-adjusted growth in Manchester’s public school spending in its proposed 2025 budget. 

One might think that such a whopping spending increase must be tied to a correspondingly sharp increase in enrollment since 2021. On the contrary, enrollment in Manchester’s public schools as of October 2023 is 11,851 students, which is a drop of 529 students, or 4.3%, since 2020–21. 

Under the proposed budget, Manchester would be spending $21,921 per pupil, which the district calculates using its enrollment in January 2024 of 12,024 students. (If fall enrollment is lower, as trends suggest, the cost per student would be higher than projected.)

The Manchester school district’s 2020–21 budget was $183,052,004 for its 12,380 students, which represented a cost per pupil of $14,786. The proposed $21,921 per student is an increase of $7,135, or $4,533 adjusted for inflation, from four years before. That’s an inflation-adjusted jump of 26.1% in less than five years.

Since the 2020–21 school year, the district’s budget ballooned thanks in large part to unprecedented federal spending as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state also increased its per-pupil education aid last year. 

Manchester’s school budget was $183,959,257 in 2021–22 and $190,328,128 in 2022–23. It jumped to $226,982,607 in 2023–24, with $20 million of that being capital spending for facilities improvement incorporated into the annual school budget. 

The district added $20 million in the 2023–24 budget and another $20 million in the proposed 2024–25 budget to fund the first phase of the district’s long-term facilities plan. The school district is spending this money on facility upgrades for a declining student body, it should be noted. 

While the budget has consistently grown, the number of students enrolled in Manchester public schools has consistently declined. In the years ahead, the student population is expected to continue falling. But spending continues to rise, and now the district seeks even more money to spend. 

Meanwhile, the number of students enrolled in Manchester public schools has been declining. 

As the district spends more money to educate fewer students, the cost per student rises sharply. 

The city’s school district spending since 2021 continues the trend that dates back to the 1990s. 

In previous research, we found that Manchester school district spending rose by 68% as enrollment fell by 13% from 1995–2018.

Similarly, we showed that Manchester enrollment fell by 22.3% while spending rose by 22.7% from 2001–2019 in our statewide education spending report last year.

Looking back to 2001, the increase in per-pupil spending is quite stark. Manchester spent $8,698 per pupil in 2001, adjusted for inflation, according to last year’s report. That’s $13,223 less than the $21,921 the district proposes to spend per student next school year.

For nearly three decades, Manchester taxpayers have spent ever-increasing sums of money, even after adjusting for inflation, on a steadily shrinking number of public school students. 

Parents and voters might think they’ve bought better performance with all of that money. 

In 2023, proficiency in English language arts, math, and science sat at 28%, 19%, and 14%, respectively—all in the bottom 25% in the state. Proficiency in English language arts has remained largely stagnant since 2021, while math proficiency rose by 5 percentage points and science proficiency declined by 3 percentage points. 

The Manchester school district’s spending and test scores together reveal the flaw behind the idea that struggling school districts “just need more funding” to improve. 

City residents might want to look into these budgets in more detail and ask city officials why shrinking class sizes and tens of millions of dollars in higher spending haven’t led to better academic results for students.

By Andrew Cline and Jason Bedrick

Nearly 1 million American students participated in a school-choice program last year, according to data compiled by EdChoice. Across the country 72 choice programs operate in 32 states. And who has the most popular program in the nation? New Hampshire.

With an Education Freedom Account (EFA), parents can customize their child’s education. Families can use EFA funds for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, special-needs therapies and more.

According to EdChoice, New Hampshire’s EFA policy is the most popular education choice policy in the nation. It has had the most growth per capita nationwide over the past academic year—a whopping 58%. The number of ESA students has grown from 3,025 in 2022–23 to 4,770 scholarships awarded in 2023–24.

Those numbers show that a lot of New Hampshire families want an education that better fits their children’s individual needs. No New Hampshire student who needs a better educational fit should be denied access to this popular and effective program, especially because of politics.

Unfortunately, politics is keeping most students out of the program right now.

Expanding Education Freedom and Choice to All

Though EFAs were intended to be accessible to all students, legislators agreed initially to enroll only children from lower-income families. That was necessary to address concerns that the program would struggle to succeed in its early years or, conversely, would prove too popular to manage effectively.

Now that New Hampshire’s EFAs are an undeniable success, it’s time to take off the training wheels.

Currently, fewer than half of students in the state are eligible for an EFA, which is limited only to students from families that earn no more than 350% of the federal poverty level. That comes to $109,200 for a family of four—less than the average annual household income of a firefighter married to a registered nurse in New Hampshire. Three House bills this year would expand access to the program. One, House Bill 1634, would remove that income cap so that any student eligible to enroll in a K-12 public school in the state could qualify for an EFA.

That income cap suppresses participation. Though New Hampshire’s EFA program ranks first in the country in administration and popularity, it ranks just 42nd in eligibility nationwide.

Other states have been expanding educational opportunities. Over the last three years, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia all either enacted new universal education choice policies or expanded existing choice policies to all K-12 students.

Some people fear that universal education choice will cause a mass exodus from public schools. But that’s not what’s happened in other states. Though roughly 20 million students nationwide are eligible to participate in a school-choice program, fewer than 1 million students do.

The two largest school-choice programs in the country are Florida’s and Arizona’s. In both states, 100% of students are eligible for school choice. But only 10% of Florida students and 9% of Arizona students participate.

Here in New Hampshire, where 48% of students are eligible for EFAs, only 3% of students participate.

Education Freedom Accounts Save Taxpayers Money

Critics claim that making EFAs available to every student is unaffordable. That’s not true. U.S. Census estimates from 2022 (the most recent available) put the state’s school-age population at 189,600. How many of those students can be expected to use an EFA if all students become eligible?

Florida has the highest school choice take-up rate in the country, at 10%. Every other state with an education savings account or scholarship program has a lower take-up rate. New Hampshire’s rate of EFA use is about 3%. If we use New Hampshire’s current rate as the baseline and Florida’s as the high end, we could see a range of somewhere between 5,688 and 18,960 students enrolling in the program, though the higher number would take years to achieve and certainly would not happen overnight.

Currently, about 28% of EFA users were previous public-school students. As they received their per-pupil allotment from the Education Trust Fund before taking an EFA, they are not a new cost. Assuming the same switch rate if EFAs are expanded, a reasonable cost estimate would run somewhere between $21.5 million (at a 3% take-up rate) and $71.7 million (at a 10% take-up rate).

That might sound like a lot, but New Hampshire taxpayers spend $3.4 billion a year on K-12 public schools, and the state’s current Education Trust Fund ended the 2023 fiscal year with a surplus of $161 million. State budget officials project the Education Trust Fund to end the current fiscal year with a surplus of $232 million. Even at the high-end estimate, New Hampshire can easily afford universal EFA expansion.

And those figures don’t include local taxpayer savings. New Hampshire spends an average of $20,322 per pupil, with more than 60% of that coming from local taxation. That local portion will not be spent to educate students who use an EFA to purchase an education elsewhere.

Based on take-up rates between 3-10%, taxpayers can roughly estimate local government savings of between $86 million-$286 million were all students to become eligible for EFAs. Subtract the state costs of $21.5 million-$71.7 million and taxpayers would be looking at a net annual savings of somewhere between $64.5 million and $214 million.

Those are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but they give a general idea of the size of taxpayer savings possible if New Hampshire educates students for $5,255 per pupil instead of $20,322 per pupil. Far from a net loss for New Hampshire, Education Freedom Accounts are clearly a net gain.

School Choice Improves Public School Performance

Critics also falsely claim that school choice harms students who remain in traditional public schools. In fact, of 29 studies on the academic outcomes of public school students whose schools were faced with competition from policies, 26 found a net positive outcome for those students, one found no visible effect, and only two found a negative effect.

Moreover, the families of lower-performing students tend to be more attracted to school choice programs than those of higher-performing students. Florida State University research on Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program found that students who chose to enter the scholarship program had lower test scores in the year before they took a scholarship than did their classmates who opted not to participate. But after just a few years of using the scholarship, those students were out-performing their demographic peers.

Claims that school choice programs “cream” the best students and leave low-performing students behind in under-funded schools are false. Indeed, the reality is the very opposite: school choice benefits disadvantaged students most.

Fulfilling the Promise of Public Education

When they aren’t fear mongering about empty public schools, EFA opponents demagogue the issue by shouting that EFA expansion would have taxpayers foot the bill for educating the children of “millionaires and billionaires.”

But, of course, that’s exactly what public schools do. Every child, regardless of income, is eligible to attend his or her district public school. No one argues that the public education provided by district schools should be means tested.

Neither traditional public district schools nor public charter schools have income caps. Education Freedom Accounts shouldn’t either.

The promise of public education is that every child should have access to an education that meets his or her individual learning needs. Education Freedom Accounts help fulfill that promise by empowering families with the freedom and flexibility to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.

Expanding this opportunity to every child would improve outcomes for students, including those who prefer traditional public schools, while saving taxpayers money. For families, students and taxpayers, it’s the best option.

Andrew Cline is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.

Jason Bedrick is a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

School choice in New Hampshire has become increasingly popular, with more and more Granite State families accessing Education Tax Credit (ETC) scholarships and Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs) to shop the best learning environments for their children in the state’s growing educational marketplace. 

But as the program becomes more popular, the governmental instinct to impose controls is growing. This year, legislators will consider more than half a dozen bills to layer new regulations on the state’s young EFA program. 

Of the 13 EFA-related bills filed for this year’s legislative season, seven would impose new state controls on the program or its participants:

  • HB 1418: “This bill prohibits the use of education freedom account funds to purchase school uniforms.”
  • HB 1512: “This bill limits the amounts of funds appropriated from the education trust fund to the education freedom account program to budgeted sums.”
  • HB 1592: “This bill prohibits the use of education freedom account funds at religious schools or for religious education or training, and repeals provisions relating to independence of and legal proceedings concerning education freedom account providers.”
  • HB 1594: “This bill requires annual determination of eligibility for awarding of education freedom account funds.”
  • HB 1610: “This bill requires all students to participate in standardized statewide assessments.”
  • HB 1654: “This bill requires the state board of education to annually review education freedom account service providers for continued compliance with all state and federal anti-discrimination laws.”
  • SB 525: “This bill changes income eligibility and reporting requirements for the education freedom account program and modifies the program’s administration and oversight.”

How the bills would impose new controls on the EFA program

House Bills 1418 and 1592 seek to restrict the type of schools EFA participants can use. HB 1418 would prohibit participants from purchasing school uniforms with their EFA funds. HB 1592 would forbid EFA families from using their funds to pay for religious education or training of any sort, including paying tuition at a religious school. HB 1592 is clearly unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a similar Maine law in 2022’s Carson v. Makin

In addition to its unconstitutional exclusion of religious education from the EFA program, HB 1592 repeals entirely the independence of the EFA program’s education service providers. The bill would strike provisions under RSA 194-F:7 that prohibit EFA providers from becoming extensions of the state education bureaucracy. Specifically, it removes the following from the law:

II. Education service providers shall be given maximum freedom to provide for the educational needs of EFA students without governmental control.

III. Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to expand the regulatory authority of the state, its officers, or any school district to impose any additional regulation of education service providers beyond those necessary to enforce the requirements of the EFA program.

IV. Any education service provider that accepts payment from an EFA under this chapter is not an agent of the state or federal government.

V. An education service provider shall not be required to alter its creed, practices, admissions policy, or curriculum in order to accept payments from an EFA.

These protections exist to clarify that EFA money belongs to parents, not the state, and that EFA providers are independent organizations rather than agents or extensions of the state. Providers include vendors ranging from local tutors to Amazon.com. These protections make clear that vendors are providing products and services to parents, who are purchasing those products and services with their own money. Erasing these provisions allows the state to treat providers as extensions of the state bureaucracy.

In a similar vein, HB 1512, 1610, and 1654 would limit EFA growth, add rules to the program, and increase governmental oversight of the program and its service providers. 

HB 1512 would limit appropriations to the EFA program from the Education Trust Fund to a maximum of $19.8 million for fiscal year 2024 and allotted amounts in the state budget for subsequent fiscal years, regardless of actual enrollment figures. 

For context, appropriations for the program are upwards of $22 million to meet the needs of the more than 4,000 enrolled students this academic year based on average per-pupil adequate education grants of $5,255. 

Enrollment has increased by 158% since the program first began. Limiting the program to set dollar amounts, regardless of future demand and enrollment, would hamstring the program’s ability to meet the needs of the many current and future Granite State families seeking educational opportunities outside of their government-assigned district public schools.

HB 1610 would require all New Hampshire students, including those enrolled in the EFA program, to take standardized statewide tests. Parents may choose alternative educational environments specifically because those environments assess student progress with measures other than standardized tests. Those tests wouldn’t be aligned with the curricula or program of every provider, so they wouldn’t necessarily provide an accurate measurement of every student’s learning. 

Education service providers in the EFA program are required by state law to comply with state and federal anti-discrimination laws. HB 1654 would subject providers to annual reviews for compliance with those laws. This would further discourage provider participation by adding an additional layer of compliance costs.

HB 1594 and Senate Bill 525 would apply to participants, not providers. Both proposals would require participants’ household incomes to remain at or below 350% of the federal poverty level each year during their participation in the program. Existing law requires that this income threshold be met at the time of application. Under these bills, an EFA student would be removed from the program if their single parent making $68,000 a year received a Christmas bonus.

SB 525 would also impose reporting requirements and annual income verification audits. Reporting mandates include annual reporting on the number of EFA students to the Legislature. Income verification would be pursued by subjecting ⅓ of EFA families to “randomized annual EFA income verification auditing” by the legislative budget assistant audit division. 

The EFA program is succeeding to a significant degree because it was structured to give families a large degree of autonomy while maintaining state oversight of expenditures through basic financial tracking and reporting requirements. 

The regulatory expansion in these seven bills would have the cumulative effect of discouraging participation of both families and providers, shrinking the variety of options available through the EFA program, and burdening all players (the state, families, and providers) with costly and unnecessary compliance costs. 

This legislative season offers a reminder that the existence of lightly regulated public education alternatives is no guarantee that such alternatives will continue to exist. Pressure will always come from lawmakers who distrust markets and parents to expand bureaucratic control and limit or even eliminate access to alternatives. 

Editor’s note: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, educational entrepreneurship has boomed nationwide. New Hampshire has experienced significant growth in the number of entrepreneurs and innovators willing to take on the daunting challenge of building a new educational ecosystem. This year, we’re highlighting some of the people and organizations that have begun expanding the education marketplace in the Granite State, as well as the obstacles they face in creating nontraditional learning environments. 

Our fourth installment explores Wildcat Microschool, a tuition-free Prenda pod in North Haverhill, New Hampshire, that emphasizes the importance of learning outdoors.

As a school counselor in the Newbury, Vt., public school system, Heather Long felt she was just a temporary solution to the many behavioral problems she noticed daily. 

“I started to feel like I was a Band-Aid for the problem,” she said. “So, I was being called in to help fix the situation or help kids with these behaviors, and I started to question, ‘Well, maybe the system’s created some of these behaviors?’”

“And I felt like I couldn’t do very much with those kids, and there were too many of these needs for me to get to as a counselor, where I really wanted to be able to change something in that foundation of the system so that these kids could be successful and not have the need for the counselor,” she continued.

Long said she had previously resisted private schools because she wanted to improve the public school system. But she kept hitting too many walls.

With her frustration building, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

“I just didn’t want [my kids] to be in the public school system with all the changes and the restrictions, especially my kindergartener,” she recalled. “I just couldn’t stand the thought of him being there with everything being so different, and that’s his introduction to school. So, we formed a homeschool co-op with a few other families.”

Long said she quickly noticed that her two kids were flourishing in the new environment. 

She could give her oldest a checklist of his tasks that he would finish by the end of the week. But this introduction into self-guided learning was temporary. The co-op disbanded after the initial pandemic response, and the kids returned to their assigned public schools.

“We all kind of went back to our own ways and very quickly realized we weren’t happy,” she said. “I think it was kind of a combination of two things. My kids had the experience—this homeschool, self-paced learning—and really missed it. And for me, it allowed me to start to question school and what school could look like. And I had never allowed myself to question that before.”

Long’s desire to find a system that could adapt more quickly to meet her children’s changing needs led her to Prenda, an Arizona-based company that helps aspiring entrepreneurs start their own microschools.

“Prenda’s mission is to empower learners to take control and ownership over that part of their life,” Kaity Broadbent, Prenda’s chief empowerment advocate, said. 

With their affiliate microschools across the country, known as Prenda pods, “Prenda acts as a microschool management platform for the guide to be able to easily offer all of their kids a wide degree of choice,” Broadbent explained.

What Long heard at a Prenda informational session inspired her to do what she hadn’t considered before: Start her own microschool.

“So, I got my wheels turning, like, ‘Well, maybe I could open a Prenda pod.’ When I was at that info session, there was a parent that looked at me, and…she was like, ‘If you do, I will sign up my kid.’”

This was the push she needed. 

Before she knew it, Long was interviewing with Prenda, going through its training and background checks, and being approved to start her own Prenda pod.

“There was like a ‘no turning back’ situation for me, and it seemed like what my family needed,” Long said. Out of her own house in North Haverhill, N.H., Long started Wildcat Microschool in December 2021 with four kids. By the end of the school year, she had six learners.

It was hard at first to get families to commit to making this kind of change in their children’s education, Long recalled. Some in her previous workplace even questioned her entrepreneurial endeavor. 

“When I first started, especially where I left the public school system, I think there was some animosity towards me and to my co-worker,” she said. “There was some talk around town that wasn’t very positive, but that has quickly shifted because the talk about our school from our families is so positive that it’s shifted the tone really quickly.”

With no government obstacles to slow her transition, Wildcat Microschool grew quickly as a result.

With 16 kids at the start of the following academic year, Long added another full-time guide and a part-time helper. This school year, Wildcat Microschool has 22 learners, all registered as homeschoolers. After starting with four learners and some skepticism about her endeavor, Long now has a wait list.

“I still hear from time to time from people within the system that there are things that are said, but it’s understandable,” Long added. “It’s something different and new, and I think maybe to some of the teachers it feels threatening because they’ve lost kids to us. But we don’t want to be in competition. That’s not our goal.”

What drew so many families to Wildcat Microschool? 

“I have some families that come to us because they love the homeschooling idea, they like the microschool idea, they just love what we do,” Long explained. “And other families it’s more of a like, ‘Well, we don’t like what [traditional schools are] doing, so we want an alternative.’” 

The 22 learners, including Long’s two sons, are split into two groups, Bobcats (grades K–4) and Pumas (grades 5–8), that alternate between the two guides’ houses during the week. Wildcat Microschool operates Tuesday–Friday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

While Long hopes to make her homeschool learning center a vendor of Education Freedom Accounts next year, her 22 learners are tuition-free this academic year thanks to Prenda’s Bright Futures Grant, which funds Wildcat Microschool. 

Not all Prenda pods are the same, so learner experiences across New Hampshire and the country vary. Prenda supports its affiliates but grants them the flexibility to provide a variety of educational environments.

“To speak to flexibility, that’s their microschool, and they’re choosing to partner with Prenda to provide services to parents and kids who are their customers, so we try to really stay out of the middle of that relationship and allow each guide to present themselves as they wish,” Prenda’s Broadbent explained. “The worst thing we could do at this point in the history of education is create another one-size-fits-all solution. Prenda is an education solution that is inherently built for flexibility and personalization from the guide side and from the student side, especially.”

Wildcat Microschool shares several of the characteristics common among unconventional learning models—an emphasis on hands-on, project-based learning, allowing free play, and maximizing learner agency—while also having other more distinct focuses in their everyday practice.

“We found that kids really thrive off of purpose…. So, we do a lot of projects with a purpose at the end,” Long explained. “Our ‘readers cafe’ is an example where they’re going to read their stories out loud to everybody and have this cafe, that’s the purpose. Last year, we did biography projects, where they did a ‘living wax museum.’ So, we find that we always have something we’re striving for for a purpose for the kids, and that helps with engagement.”

By ensuring that everything they do has a purpose, Long’s learners are invested in their own educational journeys, more easily retaining the core lessons of each hands-on project because there’s a goal at the end that they’re working towards.

A focus on financial literacy

Wildcat Microschool sets itself apart from other options in two ways. One is the attention paid to financial literacy. 

“We were doing economics [last year], and the kids were doing their own business projects,” Long said. “So, we did like a ‘Shark Tank’ project. They had to come up with their own business idea, and they did the marketing, they did a business pitch…. And when we ended that, I just felt like, ‘I don’t think we quite got to the financial piece as much as I wanted.’ Like, I wanted them to get more out of it, which is one of the beauties of what we do. Instead of being like, ‘Nope, I’ve got to move on to this next unit next year,’ [we] decided to start off with it again.”

This includes going through lessons about finances, keeping a budget, banking and loans, investing, the stock market, and taxes, with the help of the popular The Game of Life. “So, we learned about taxes,” Long said. “They got to choose their career, which, of course, they all chose the top-paying careers they could find, and then very quickly realized if you pick a top-paying career you’re going to get more taxes pulled out of it. So, we had a conversation about taxes, which will bring up conversations about government and how our government works.”

Emphasizing financial literacy as part of the curriculum gives these children in kindergarten through eighth grade an education that they might not get at their assigned public schools at that age, as well as the life skills that come with it.

The forest for a classroom

The other distinguishing feature of Wildcat Microschool, made possible by its location in the White Mountain National Forest, is the forest classroom. 

“We’re really big on outdoors and getting the kids outdoors,” Long emphasized. 

Every Friday afternoon, alternating each week between the two age groups, Long takes the learners on a five-minute walk into the woods behind her house to the learning pod’s forest classroom, a roughly 1,000-square-foot space in the woods complete with supplies, hammocks, a fire pit, and forts. 

Here, the kids have a lot of freedom (by design), and they learn how to interact with each other and collaborate. They learn fire-starting skills (with supervision), eat lunch, practice writing in their journals, and play games as part of their overall nature-based education.

“Number one, we’re using our local resources, right?” Long responded when asked about the benefits of outdoor learning. “Like, we live in a place where there’s tons of nature. So, teaching the kids about that and respecting that, helping them love it, because I think to be healthy and to kind of thrive around here, especially in the winter time, we have to be able to get ourselves outside all the time. So, there’s that mental health component. I think being good stewards of the environment—like, if we want kids to really respect our environment and protect it in the future, we have to get them to be out there and explore it and love it.”

Moreover, the forest classroom allows Wildcat Microschool to incorporate some risk-taking and survival skills, building confidence and agency in the learners, she said.

“One of our youngest…has wanted to start a fire…. So, we were working with him on it a few weeks ago, and he finally got it. And it was so cool, he just jumped up with his hands. We have a picture of the moment. So, for him, just thinking about that, the confidence, like, ‘Hey, I did this by myself’—when we talk about autonomy, there are a lot of opportunities we can give them out in nature that allow them to have that autonomy.”

Outside in the forest classroom, Long told us, “It’ll be very interesting to see where all these kids are in 10 to 15 years. I have no doubt that they’ll be very successful people.”

Measuring success

How microschools measure success and provide accountability to parents are questions often brought up by skeptics. Long has ready answers. 

“Number one is our retention,” she said. “We’re accountable to our parents and our families, and the fact that all of our kids want to come back and our families want their kids here says a lot about what we’re doing.” 

Long points out that all but one learner returned to Wildcat Microschool for this school year. The child who didn’t return had moved.

Wildcat Microschool also administers tests, so it has those scores to measure student progress. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle for Long. 

“I, more than anything, want to see kids that are independent learners, that love learning, that are able to critically think and problem solve, and those are really hard things to measure.”

Long added that one of her frustrations with the public school system was the limited amount of parent involvement. Facilitating that involvement has been a guiding principle behind the philosophy of Wildcat Microschool. 

“I feel very strongly that it’s a parent’s job to educate their child,” Long said. “And whether or not they choose to entrust someone else to do that, that’s fine, but they have to work closely with that other person. And I think it’s the parent’s job to decide what those goals are and what that education outcome should look like.”

Long is proud to have created an educational institution directly accountable to parents. In her view, working closely with parents and their children to create a responsive, family-driven educational experience is the key to Wildcat Microschool’s success.

Wildcat Microschool in North Haverhill can be found online at https://wildcatmicroschool.weebly.com/.

There is one and only one way to determine the “true cost” of an adequate education. That is to create a competitive education marketplace. Alas, that is not the approach New Hampshire has taken.

Instead, legislators have tried to set the cost by decree. Public school districts, asserting with some justification that the amount is too low, have asked courts to… set the cost by decree.

Now a court has done so, and the results are as absurd as one would expect.

On November 20th, Rockingham County Superior Court Justice David Ruoff ruled that the Legislature’s decreed amount ($4,100 per pupil; he excluded differentiated aid) was unconstitutionally low. But, he said, the plaintiff school districts’ asserted amount ($9,929) was too high. The actual minimum constitutionally permissive state per-pupil expenditure was, he figured, $7,356.01. 

Note the penny. Such precision carries the weight of both mathematical and legal certainty. 

Except, the entire number, including the penny, is merely a guess offered as a suggestion for legislators to consider because the court lacked enough information to find the true figure. So says… Justice David Ruoff.

“Although the evidence demonstrates that a base adequacy aid level of $7,356.01 would be constitutionally insufficient, the Court cannot set a higher threshold at this time,” Ruoff wrote. “Such a step is precluded by the limitations of the evidence presented at trial, as well as the involvement of certain policy considerations. The Court is confident, however, that the guidance offered here will empower the legislature to meaningfully consider and appropriately respond to the relevant issues.”

Well, glad that’s cleared up. 

How did Justice Ruoff conclude both that $7,356.01 was the minimum threshold of constitutionality and that he had too little information to make such a conclusion?

After reviewing the statutory and regulatory requirements for adequacy, and examining actual school district spending, he undertook the following policy analysis: 

He used “common sense” to guess that some district spending wasn’t essential for adequacy, lopped off an arbitrary percentage from some figures (without examining others that would be relevant, such as public charter school spending), and wound up with a back-of-the-envelope guess that can’t quite be called educated, but probably could pass as educated at a cocktail party if it didn’t talk too much. 

Justice Ruoff tasked himself with deciding three questions:

“[T]here are three inquires before the Court: (I) what are the necessary components or cost-drivers of a constitutionally adequate education, as defined by the legislature, exclusive of additional services provided to students eligible for differentiated aid?; (II) what funding is necessary for school districts to provide those components and cost- drivers?; and (III) how does that amount compare to the funding currently provided via base adequacy aid? As the third inquiry is a matter of simple mathematics, the evidence presented at trial largely focused on the first two inquiries.”

To answer these questions, Ruoff considered state requirements and district expenditures. At no point did the court consider whether there might be other, more effective, more efficient and less costly ways to satisfy the state requirements.

Damning for the decision is that the word “market” appears just nine times in the 69-page ruling. Plaintiffs use it to argue for higher teacher compensation, as competition for good teachers drives up wages, and the court uses it to argue that professional development funds are part of adequacy. 

The word is used to justify higher spending, never lower. That’s odd, given that competitive market forces have been shown to improve productivity and drive down costs in K-12 education. 

  • A 2010 Harvard University Graduate School of Education study found that “competition from private schools boosts achievement and lowers costs.” According to the study, “a 10 percent increase in enrollment in private schools improves a country’s mathematics test scores on PISA by almost half a year’s worth of learning. A 10 percent increase in private school enrollment also reduces the total educational spending per student by over 5 percent of the OECD average.”
  • A 2012 study of open enrollment policies in Wisconsin found that “schools respond to competitive forces by improving quality.”
  • A 2003 study found that “regular public schools boosted their productivity when exposed to competition.” That productivity increase typically took the form of higher performance rather than lowered spending. Nonetheless, the study shows that schools can produce better results without higher spending when competition is introduced.
  • A 2019 study of private schools participating in Wisconsin’s voucher program found that “private and independent charter schools tend to be more cost-effective than district-run public schools in the state overall and for the vast majority of individual cities.” Particularly, private schools received 27% less funding than district public schools overall but generated “2.27 more points on the Accountability Report Card for every $1,000 invested than district-run public schools, demonstrating a 36 percent cost- effectiveness advantage for private schools.”

Any examination of school spending that ignores chartered public schools and non-public schools is incomplete at best. And any that doesn’t even consider the effects that competition could have on the system is negligent. 

The understatement of the ruling came in Justice Ruoff’s caveat that he was hindered by the “limitations of the evidence presented at trial.” Those limitations, he acknowledged, prevented him from determining with certainty how much an adequate education should cost. But the limitations were greater than he realized. 

Not only did the court lack sufficient school district data to make an accurate cost determination, but it lacked equally important data on the efficiency gains created by competition. Going forward with an analysis despite such huge gaps in available data was a critical error. 

The ruling was plagued with numerous problems, the first being its roots in the wrongly decided Claremont decision. But even accepting the Claremont fallacy, the ruling was doomed by fatal methodological flaws and a devastating shortage of information. 

The information problem should have been obvious from the start. Prices are information. Prices absent competition are woefully inadequate information. Since no competitive education market exists in New Hampshire, the court is left applying legal analysis and back-of-the-envelope math to discover something that only the market can discover: the best available cost of a service. 

It’s clear that legislators set a low figure in the hope that this will press district spending downward. Districts, however, encourage local voters to approve ever higher budgets, which counters the Legislature’s intent. Districts then use those higher levels of spending to claim that the state appropriation is too low. Given these dynamics, it’s impossible to determine with any accuracy just how low district spending could go while meeting the state mandates for adequacy.

Until New Hampshire introduces some form of robust market competition, Granite Staters will never know what an adequate education really should cost. 

The Merrimack County Superior Court this week dismissed a lawsuit brought by Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers-New Hampshire (AFT-NH), challenging the constitutionality of New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) program, the state’s largest school choice program. 

Howes challenged the EFA program on three grounds: (1) The EFA program violates Part II, Article 6-b of the N.H. Constitution by allocating lottery money to EFAs, (2) the use of Education Trust Fund dollars for EFAs violates RSA 198:39 regarding distribution of funds from the Education Trust Fund, and (3) the EFA program represents an unlawful delegation of governmental duty to a private entity (Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire). 

Presiding Justice Amy L. Ignatius granted the New Hampshire Department of Education’s motion to dismiss on all three grounds. 

On the claim that lottery money is spent on EFAs, Justice Ignatius concluded that Howes had not and could not demonstrate a violation.

Part II, Article 6-b of the New Hampshire Constitution reserves lottery revenue “exclusively for the school districts of the state.” Lottery revenues are deposited into the Education Trust Fund. But so are revenues from eight other sources. In the 2022 fiscal year, lottery revenues comprised only $125 million of the $1.145 billion in the Education Trust Fund. Howes was unable to show that any lottery revenues were included in the $9 million transferred to the EFA program. Lottery money comprised only 0.01% of the Education Trust Fund, and EFA spending could easily have come from the other 99.99% of the fund.

On the claim that the Legislature violated RSA 198:39, governing distributions from the Education Trust Fund, Ignatius ruled the claim moot since legislators had added a provision expressly allowing distributions to scholarship organizations that manage the EFA program. 

On the claim that the EFA program constitutes an unlawful delegation of legislative authority to provide an adequate education, the court was unpersuaded. Howes had claimed that the EFA program was created to remove children from the public school system for the purpose of eliminating the state’s obligation to provide children an adequate education, and that it prohibited students from obtaining an adequate education. Ignatius dismissed the claims, countering that neither was logical. Parents who choose an EFA lose nothing, Ignatius pointed out. If parents choose an EFA, the state is not obligated to provide their children with a public school education while they participate in the EFA program, she noted. But that is the family’s choice. If they choose later to enroll their children in a public school, their participation in the EFA program does not block this option. Therefore, participation in the EFA program in no way prohibits families from accessing a public school education.  

In response to the court’s dismissal of her claims, Howes said, in part:

The Legislature should be focusing far more time and resources on the needs of the 160,000 Granite State public school students who deserve a robust curriculum and fully staffed schools, not on the 4,000 students whose families choose to take state-funded vouchers. Vouchers have exacerbated an already disparate burden placed on local property taxpayers to fund the basic right to a quality public education. Every Granite State public school should be a safe and welcoming place where students have the academic challenge and support they need to thrive.

This statement flies in the face of reality on several fronts. 

First, the Legislature does focus “far more time and resources” on the 160,000 students enrolled in district public schools versus the roughly 4,000 students with EFAs. In the 2021–22 academic year, total spending (state, local, and federal) on New Hampshire public schools exceeded $3.5 billion. Total expenditures per pupil exceeded $23,000. 

The EFA program is tiny in comparison. The court pointed out that, from the $1.145 billion Education Trust Fund, a mere $9 million was transferred to the EFA program in the 2022 fiscal year. The state’s estimated cost in the 2024 fiscal year is just $22 million, a tiny fraction of the more than $3.5 billion spent on public schools. EFA expenditures per pupil average just $5,255 versus more than $23,000 for public schools.

Average district public school spending in New Hampshire is 14.4% above the national average, while teacher pay is 5.3% below the national average. Moreover, district public school enrollment fell by 14% from 2001–2019 (a loss of 29,946 students), while inflation-adjusted spending at district public schools ballooned by 40% ($937 million). 

Far from being strapped for cash and staff, New Hampshire’s district public schools have never experienced higher funding despite continued drops in enrollment. Between the 2019–20 and 2023–24 school years, New Hampshire’s public schools experienced a 6.3% decline in enrollment (a loss of more than 11,000 students). New Hampshire experienced the nation’s largest percentage increase in district public school staffing relative to student enrollment from 1994–2022. 

Additionally, as more families choose to access educational alternatives outside of their assigned district public schools, per-pupil funding for those who remain in the public schools only increases since local funding (which accounts for 60% of public education funding in New Hampshire) remains untouched by the EFA program. 

From 2001–2019, inflation-adjusted public education spending per student increased by 66.8% in New Hampshire. By 2019, per-pupil public education spending in the state was 25.7% above the national average. 

The state’s Education Trust Fund ended the 2023 fiscal year with a $148 million surplus. The long-term decline in the state’s school-age population has left the fund with such a big surplus that legislators have considered changing the funding formula so that such a large pool of money does not sit unused. 

So, it’s untrue that the EFA program is draining money from district public schools. The state has a huge surplus of funds available for spending on public education even after increasing public school spending by nearly $1 billion, adjusted for inflation, in the first two decades of this century. And legislators in the most recent state budget further increased public education spending by $169 million during the two-year budget cycle and by a projected $1 billion over the next decade. 

Again, it’s untrue that state spending on district public schools is declining at all, much less that it is declining because of EFAs. So, in addition to the legal arguments in this case being unfounded, the financial claims were as well.