From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
School innovations, well-intended or designed to cut costs and undermine public schools?
Innovations in education are seemingly introduced every day, often by people who are more committed to cutting costs and dismantling public education. These innovations include expanding after school job shadowing, making regulations optional, diverting public monies to private schools, and having groups of 8-10 kids led on their “education journeys” by uncertified guides, not teachers.
If a high-functioning, well-resourced and welcoming school would not accept a new innovation that just happens to cut costs, struggling schools should not accept it either. Professor Nolliwe Rooks gives this advice in her book, Cutting School. We should not impose innovations on struggling schools that would not be accepted by successful schools. This goes for new content providers like Prager U, too.
In New Hampshire, Moultonborough Academy and Hanover High School are among the best schools in the state. If Moultonborough doesn’t require its students to watch Prager content, struggling schools shouldn’t either. If Hanover High doesn’t strive to only meet Minimum Standards, neither should your school.
Experimental programs or, innovations, are often tested on failing schools. The problem with starting by identifying a school as “failing,” by whatever measure, is people like Commissioner Edelblut and Board Chair Cline appear unwilling to first ask if the school was ever given the resources necessary to succeed.
Manchester, New Hampshire is a school district that in recent history has not had the resources to succeed. The Every Student Succeeds Act (E.S.S.A.), adopted under President Obama, requires states to identify the lowest achieving five percent of Title I schools. These schools are called, “Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) Schools.” Title I is a federal program that distributes additional resources to high poverty schools. A CSI School should be thought of as a school that needs to do a lot because its students face many challenges yet fails to accomplish much of anything. The Beech Street Elementary School in Manchester is a CSI school.
E.S.S.A. also has a category for high schools where a third or more of the students don’t graduate over four years. Two of Manchester’s high schools just moved out of this designation. One, Manchester West High School, remains in a designation just a hair better than CSI. It’s a “Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) School.”
Franklin’s High School is a CSI School, as are its two elementary schools.
Businesses in Manchester recognize the school district’s struggles. In part, they organized “Manchester Proud” to address difficulties finding employees who would live and send their kids to school in Manchester. Proud wrote a comprehensive plan for the improvement of Manchester schools, a business plan for the Manchester schools, that was accepted in 2020 and Manchester Proud continues to serve as a strong cheerleader for the community. Missing from the plan, and from Manchester Proud’s efforts, however, is discussion of Manchester’s poor funding, the implications of the city having a tax cap and the fact that its leading politicians all take the Pledge.
Manchester is also a very tough place to be a leader.
The shadow of the Union Leader still looms large. Manchester has had three superintendents since 2017. The school board, under the city’s charter, does not control the school budget; that is the prerogative of the mayor and board of alderman. Manchester mayors are always running for something else. Mayor Frank Guinta became a member of Congress. Mayor Ted Gatsas lost a race for governor and now serves on the New Hampshire Executive Council. Mayor Joyce Craig is running for governor. All these mayors take the Pledge and avoid talking about the failures of their schools.
The experts who supported the 2020 New Hampshire School Funding Commission concluded that, given the challenging demographics of Manchester schools, Manchester spends $10,000 too little on each of its students. Manchester is the lowest spending k-12 school district in New Hampshire, spending $4,000 less per student than the state average. Based on the Funding Commission’s work, Manchester’s $190 million budget is deficient by $123 million.
The Education Law Center (ELC), in its annual state of education report, characterizes New Hampshire’s funding distribution as “regressive” in that it doesn’t provide needed funds to the districts that struggle most. Manchester is a prime example of this failure.
Communities with the least property wealth, also according to the ELC “impose the highest local education tax rates to be able to fund their children’s education.”
The residents of Manchester are generally less well educated than in other parts of New Hampshire, earn less and have less access to health care. Although Manchester is predominantly white, it is more diverse than other parts of the state. Manchester is clearly a place where additional resources could be deployed to make a difference but even Manchester’s elected leaders do not challenge the Pledge, which is New Hampshire’s greatest impediment to fair funding.
As a result of the Claremont litigation, the state must pay for the entire cost of adequacy but targeting aid above NH’s meagre adequacy allocation is not prohibited. Manchester, and Franklin, could be helped with additional targeted aid aimed at improving specific aspects of their schools. Of course, the additional aid must be sustainable and that requires identifying a reliable revenue source.
The point of my describing Manchester’s shortcomings is not to demean the city, its schools or the people who live and work there. My point is that before we impose “innovations” on Manchester, we should get the city the resources it needs to succeed. We should be honest with Manchester taxpayers about the impact of their tax cap which keeps taxes modest and schools a failure. If Manchester ever wishes to achieve its goal of turning its expansive mills into a regional tech center, it must improve its schools.
The failure to educate generations of Manchester’s residents also has broader implications then just handicapping efforts to attract business. As authors Anne Case and Angus Deaton point out in their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, there is a connection between educational achievement and lifespan. “For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair.” Manchester is the epitome of New Hampshire’s white working class. Lack of access to healthcare, as signified by the lack of insurance, or the prevalence of “under-insurance” as Bernie Sanders would say, contributes to this phenomenon of poorer health and shorter lifespans.
New Hampshire’s Minimum Standards for School Approval were the subject of last week’s Substack post. The state board and Commissioner Edelblut are in the midst of introducing innovations to the Minimum Standards that will dumb down the standards by making important standards optional and by removing language that requires certified teachers. The presence of a teacher trained in scope and sequence of learning with knowledge of child development is critical to successful school systems. One hallmark of a failing state school system traditionally is the number of uncertified teachers in areas without sufficient resources.
ALEC is the inspiration for many of NH’s innovations. ALEC is a secretly funded $10 million a year enterprise designed to fulfill the vision of a miserly Libertarian America as envisioned by Prof. James Buchanan of Democracy in Chains fame. Visiting their website full of saccharin sweet policy titles that evoke “honesty,” “quality,” “transparency,” and “freedom” brings to mind George Orwell, who coined the term, “doublespeak.” ALEC is a major proponent of vouchers that divert public money to private schools. Their goal is universal “freedom accounts” without income limits.
The ALEC website touts that Alabama is the 11th state to reach this goal by implementing a vouchers with an income cap (300% of the poverty level) that disappears in two years. The other states on the list are West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Arkansas, Utah, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and Oklahoma. Some NH legislators would like our state to emulate Alabama, West Virginia and Florida.
The NH state chairs for ALEC are Reps. Debra Hobson (R-E. Kingston), Jeanine Notter (R-Merrimack), Jimmy Spillane (R-Deerfield), Jordan Ulery (R-Hudson) and Ken Weyler (R-Kingston).
The ALEC legislative and regulatory proposals come with explanations and justifications, some of which are just plain dumb (or dishonest). Here’s the argument for why vouchers save money:
“For example, let’s say a hypothetical school district spends $15,000 per student each year and has 100 students, for a total annual spend of $1,500,000. Of the per-student funding, $7,000 comes from state dollars, $7,000 comes from local dollars, and $1,000 comes from federal dollars. If 10 students choose to leave for a non-public learning environment, then $70,000 will leave the public school and travel with those 10 students. This means that total annual spending for the public school goes down from $1,500,000 to $1,430,000. However, there are now only 90 students that the public school is responsible for educating. This means that per-student spending has risen to $15,889!” https://alec.org/article/myths-vs-facts-education-freedom/
The ALEC argument assumes that the school district’s costs decreased by 10 percent to match the 10 percent of students who took their vouchers and transferred to “non-public learning environments.” However, this isn’t true. The school building was not reduced by 10 percent, nor were the costs to heat and maintain it. Unless all of the departing students were in the same grade, the number of teachers and aids likely also didn’t decrease.
What really happened is the school cost structure stayed the same, but the school lost $70,000 in state funding which had to be made-up by increasing local taxes.
Even if NH has the revenue to pay for both vouchers and constitutional adequacy (which it claims it does not) by creating a system based on per pupil voucher stipends, the use of vouchers drives up local property taxes. I made the math clear when I questioned Commissioner Edelblut at his confirmation hearing. I asked Edelblut, “If three percent of NH’s school children took vouchers and left public schools, don’t the public schools lose approximately $20 million dollars that must be made up by local taxpayers each year? I guess I wasn’t too far off as the cost of vouchers in their first two years was $22 million.
ALEC and the NH proponents also are dishonest about the ugly history of this “innovation.” Vouchers first took hold in the 1950s as part of the Massive Resistance to public school desegregation when Southern communities closed their public schools rather than allow Black and White children to attend together. Prince Edward County (VA) was the most prominent proponent of vouchers used to reimburse White families for the tuitions charged by the private academies that formed to maintain segregation. Lewis Powell’s law firm, Hunton and Williams, defended the practice in court while Lewis Powell approved the state’s reimbursement of private academy tuitions as a member of the Virginia state board of education. Of course, Justice Powell wrote the Supreme Court’s key decision upholding inequitable school funding in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973).
We lost the reconsideration request in the Flynn historic marker case. Our clients are now deciding if an appeal distracts from the main purpose of the litigation, getting the marker posted someplace prominent. More as they decide. Reach out if you have suggestions as to who might host the marker—-if we can get the state to release it.