By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome
Public Education was a crowning moment for the young United States as its founders knew if the republic was to survive it would need an educated citizenry.
Education was not just for the landowners’ children but for every child, providing they were white at the beginning, but later for all children.
How different state’s handled public education varied around the country with New England establishing religious schools to teach children to read the Bible and religious laws.
In the 1800s, the Common School movement advocated by Horace Mann urged every state to have common schools with standardized grade levels and teacher training.
But little changed in some areas of the country. In the south, the wealthy landowners hired tutors to teach the male children while females and minorities did not benefit.
One of the biggest proponents of educating all children was Abraham Lincoln, who after the Civil War saw it as reaching for the nation’s ideal that every man is born equal.
The wealthy plantation owners did not want to pay to educate minorities and established schools for whites only and a precursory attempt for minorities that became “separate but equal,” although in reality it was separate and unequal.
The separate but equal doctrine was commonplace in the south and other states and initially was blessed by the US Supreme Court.
But by the 1900s Brown versus the Board of Education changed everything when it said minorities could not be treated or educated differently than the white children.
The decision brought about vouchers and grants because the white gentry in the south still did not want to educate black and other minority children.
Segregation schools were born and still exist today in North Carolina where its voucher system has given new life to such schools.
Ohio religious schools, particularly Catholic schools, were disappearing but have been saved by its voucher system.
And in New Hampshire Catholic and other Christian schools have been the biggest beneficiary of the state’s universal voucher program as the vast majority of students in the Education Freedom Account program do not leave public schools to join, but are already in religious or private schools or homeschools when they join.
New Hampshire’s voucher program is universal which means there is no means test for the parents, that anyone eligible to attend public schools in New Hampshire can participate in the program, provided the cap is not exceeded and if it is, students already in the program, and their siblings, as well as those whose parents are under 350 percent of the federal poverty level can still participate.
Which is why there were 10,708 students enrolled in the program last school year although the cap was 10,000 and 13,555 students enrolled for the upcoming school year although the cap is 12,500. The cap will be 15,625 for the 2027-2028 school year as it increases 25 percent every year the cap is reached. or exceeded.
For the upcoming school year the waitlist is 1,055.
According to figures from the Department of Education, the EFA costs the state $53.1 million for the 2025-26 school year, and if per pupil costs are similar for the upcoming school year, it will cost $67.2 million.
That is pretty close to the $73.5 million budget for the two years of this biennium for the EFA program which has always been more expensive than budgeted.
At the end of this biennium, the state will have spent almost $200 million on the EFA program.
That at a time when additional state aid to public schools cannot be found, while the state continues to be dead last in the country for the percentage of money it spends on public education both at elementary and secondary level and post secondary.
At the same time Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s administration asked the state Supreme Court to overturn or at least substantially narrow the court’s three-decade-old Claremont education funding decisions that found the state has a constitutional obligation to define an adequate education, to provide it to its children and to fund it, and find it in a constitutional manner, i.e. proportionally and reasonably and not with widely varying local property taxes which now pay 70 percent of the cost of public education.
The Attorney General in his 125-page brief to the state Supreme Court in the Rand case, which it appealed, says the court 30 years ago made a mistake and cited the wrong section of the constitution in determining the state’s public education obligations.
The administration is asking the court to also throw out all of its other decisions relating to school funding since the original Claremont rulings in the 1990s because they “are wrong as a matter of constitutional text, structure, purpose, history, and tradition; they are poorly reasoned, and have led to the impractical and unworkable state of affairs that exists today in our education funding law.”
The Attorney General argues “This case exists because this Court’s modern school funding jurisprudence has distorted Part II, Article 83 of the State Constitution beyond recognition, finding rights and mandates in it that do not exist, and fundamentally altering how the State and its political subdivisions may legally interact. The result today is a jurisprudence that allows any New Hampshire citizen or entity to challenge the constitutionality of any provision of a public education funding statute, not to better the education of any child, but to demand that the costs of educating New Hampshire’s youth be distributed differently.”
The Attorney General proposes a shared responsibility among school districts and the state without proposing a floor for the state’s share.
That proposal is similar to what lawmakers passed this session and Ayotte signed, House Bill 1815, which proposes a financial partnership among the state and school districts.
The operative sentence in the bill says “Respecting New Hampshire’s long tradition of community involvement, it is the purpose of this chapter to ensure that appropriate means are established to provide an adequate education through an integrated public education system of shared responsibility between state and local government, in recognition of the fact that local governmental entities, including school districts, are created by the state, receive their authority to act and operate from the state, and are therefore indivisible from the state for the purposes of providing an adequate education.”
So the state is king — and knowing that — this other sentence should have property taxpayers reaching for the pitchforks..
“How the state and its local governmental entities choose to raise, allocate, and spend financial resources to implement this integrated public education system is a political policy matter reserved to legislative and executive judgment and control.”
The state is not agreeing to any base or foundational support and will decide what it wants to spend and if you local folks don’t like it, you can’t litigate it in court.
The Attorney General’s brief makes a similar argument saying the legislature and executive branch have sole discretion over education funding and how it is done and involving the court violates the separation of powers principle.
They also argue the issue of constitutional funding is a “non-justiciable political question” that negates the plaintiffs standing to bring the case making their claim non-viable.
So lawmakers and the governor want to decide what education system the state has, how it is funded and to block both the court from interfering and citizens from challenging what they do.
Given all this you can understand why the founding fathers believed a robust public education system was essential to retaining the democratic republic.
Instead those in charge now have been working for decades to end public education and preserve learning for the oligarchs and their brood.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn and their two rescue dogs.