On ed funding and cutting minimum standards for schools.
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
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for NH’s Josiah Bartlett Center, its president Drew Cline and board member Rep. Dan McGuire (R-Epsom). Cline, who doubles as the chair of NH’s state board of education, released a report on public education spending that uses questionable economics to make the claim NH spends too much. The report landed with a thud. McGuire introduced a bill (HB 283) to dumb down NH’s education standards. The bill may have originated with Commissioner Frank Edelblut. The bill got absolutely hammered. Online opponents to McGuire’s bill outnumbered supporters 30,000 to 70. McGuire also got thumped when his hometown voters overwhelmingly rejected his arbitrary cap on local education spending.
The Josiah Bartlett Center in Concord is “New Hampshire’s Free-Market Think Tank.” Bartlett supports education vouchers and union busting and opposes fair school funding. Bartlett and Cline are funded by right wing sources interested in state level mouthpieces including the State Policy Network and the Donors Capital Fund, both of which are associated with the Koch Brothers’ web of ultra conservative financial donors. Also see this article about Bartlett funding.
In addition to Epsom’s McGuire, the Bartlett Center’s board includes James Sununu and Marc Brown, the geniuses behind the New England Ratepayers Association. Former governor and failed White House chief of staff John H Sununu is a board member emeritus.
Cline published a “report” that claims costs per pupil have skyrocketed. Cline wrote: “Between 2001-2019, public schools in New Hampshire increased their total expenditures per student on an inflation-adjusted basis by 66.8 percent, from $11,336 in 2001 to $18,905 in 2019. This means that New Hampshire public school students had 66.8 percent more in inflation-adjusted taxpayer funding devoted to their education in 2019 than in 2001.”
Scary, huh?
If we started at $11,336 in 2001 and just added a standard inflation adjustment based on the national Consumer Price Index (CPI), we account for $5,031 of the increase. While using a national CPI is a questionable way to analyze school spending, it does give a sense of how the buying power of public school educators faired over this period. As two-thirds of school budgets are personnel costs, it’s appropriate to consider what this scary increase did for school employees. Their compensation exceeded what they needed to just tread water by about $137.50 a year. However, the CPI for the Boston region, which includes NH, is generally higher than the national CPI. Likely there wasn’t even the extra $137.50 increment.
In the last ten years, average teacher salaries failed to keep up with inflation.
The average teacher salary in NH in 2013-14 was $54,712. In 2023-24, adjusting for inflation, this average should have been $71,561.94. In fact, the actual average teacher salary in NH was $69,531.78.
What else could explain the increase in NH’s All-In Cost per Pupil?
First, the All-In Cost per Pupil figure used by Cline is the average of the state’s published district by district operational Costs per Pupil plus the cost of transportation, spending on buildings, interest payments, tuition to other districts, and spending on non-K-12 expenses like adult education. For School Year 2023-24, the All-In Cost was $26,320. The published average operational Cost per Pupil was $21,545.14.
Cline didn’t mention that the state of NH stopped paying 35 percent of the retirement costs of school and municipal employees during the period he examined. This expense shifted from the state’s general budget to the cost per pupil calculation. For the Concord School District where I live, the retirement cost for all district employees is $8.6 million. Thirty-five percent of this cost is north of $3 million, not an insignificant expense.
Also, the cost of energy in New Hampshire is higher than elsewhere in the country and more than doubled between 2001 and 2019.
Let’s go deeper in debunking Cline’s report.
A structural math problem and the cost of special education explain most of NH’s per pupil cost increase.
Here’s an example of the structural math problem. The cost of a teacher doesn’t change whether her class is made up of eighteen students or fifteen students but the cost per pupil changes dramatically because the denominator for our calculation changes. Assuming a salary and benefits cost of $100,000, a teacher with fifteen students has a cost per pupil of $6,666.67 (100,000/15). The same teacher with eighteen students drives the cost per pupil down by 17 percent to $5,555.56 (100,000/18). All that changed was the denominator. The school still needed a teacher whether her class had fifteen or eighteen students.
NH’s public school student population declined over the last ten years from 173,355 in 2013-14 to 150,511 in 2023-24. If all we did is divide current overall spending by a constant denominator of 173,355, the All-in Cost per Pupil would be $22,961, not $26,320.
If the ten year decline in student population was almost 25,000 students, why didn’t school districts adjust and cut costs? Most can’t because the change within a school district is generally too small to allow a district to close a building. The change must come at a state level and that’s why we should circle back to Cline, the state chair and Commissioner Frank Edelblut. Both have been in charge of NH’s system of public education for the last eight years and neither has convened a process to fairly and responsibly restructure NH’s 155 school districts and over 100 School Administrative Units (SAUs). Nor, have they costed out educational adequacy, but I digress.
The state average operational cost per pupil is $21,545. Bartlett, Croydon, Harrisville, and Waterville Valley all spend more than $32,000 per pupil. New Castle spends $44,000 per pupil and there are other high spenders.
New Castle has one elementary school with 20 students. It is a lovely school district in a very wealthy community. New Castle teams with Greenland, Newington and Rye (also lovely districts) to host a K-8 school system organized as SAU 50. SAU 50 students attend Portsmouth High School. One might ask why SAU 50, with its thirteen staff members, exists. Shouldn’t SAU 50 combine with the Portsmouth School District? If the concern is truly about reducing costs per pupil, should the state board encourage the New Castles of New Hampshire to consolidate with other SAUs?
This isn’t a plea to underpay staff. It is a serious question.
Why haven’t Cline and Edelblut printed the report on costs per pupil which is available here and looked to see where we can responsibly restructure NH’s system of providing public education? By “responsibly restructure,” I don’t mean substituting a Prenda-style pod system taught by unqualified volunteers. Consistent with NH’s geography and a preference to keep neighborhood elementary schools open, is there anything NH can do to restructure? It’s a fair question if one is leading a statewide education system rather than trying to dismantle it by shifting state funding to religious and other private schools.
Two Better Measures of NH’s School Spending.
Spending as a percent of income assumes income is representative of ability to pay for quality schools. Higher standards of living, as represented by higher incomes, are also a cost driver that should be taken into account when analyzing personnel costs. If people in NH earn more than people in Oklahoma, it stands to reason that educators will rightly demand more to take jobs in public education in NH.
Only thirteen states spend less as a percentage of taxpayer income than NH. NH spends 3.3 percent of its income on K-12 public education. Florida is the lowest at 2.3 percent. Alaska is the highest at 5.5 percent. Maine (3.7%), Vermont (5.2%), Massachusetts (3.5%), Rhode Island (3.9%), and Connecticut (3.9%) all commit higher portions of their income to fund public K-12 education than NH.
Spending as a percentage of a state’s GDP has NH ranked 16th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in 2018. GDP is the value of goods and services produced in a state. NH ranks second lowest in New England with only Massachusetts committing a smaller percent of its GDP to public education. Massachusetts was at the national average of 3.1 percent of GDP. NH was at 3.52 percent.
Special Education Costs.
Cline’s report also complains of spending for special education services without providing any analysis of why costs are high or examining what the state can do to reduce costly district by district special education bureaucracies.
NH spends $900 million for special ed and related services for the 30,000 children who qualify for special ed. That’s $30,000 per child who qualifies for special ed over and above the average costs per pupil cited above. ($5,979.63, or 23 percent, of Cline’s All-In Cost per Pupil of $26,320 are special ed costs.)
Special ed is expensive. The cash strapped, property poor school districts don’t over-identify kids with special needs. If anything, there is pressure to keep children from qualifying for special ed because of its high cost. NH’s rate of identifying students with special needs also is in line with the rest of northern New England and Massachusetts. All identify about 20 percent of their students according to the Edunomics Lab cited in Cline’s report.
Smart state leaders could cooperate with their counterparts to find more cost effective ways to provide special education across our region. We can also do more within our state. Cline and Edelblut are AWOL on these topics. Cutting special education funding, as Frank Edelblut recently proposed, is not the answer.