In New Hampshire, the public education fight offers a clear view of the state of the union

Yahoo

19-03-2025

New Hampshire has the fourth highest effective property tax rate in the country. (Getty Images)
One of the best ways to understand what Republican politicians are trying to sell — or inflict upon — the American people is to look at the fight over public education.
In New Hampshire, 61% of public school funding comes from property taxes raised locally, and another 9% comes from the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT).
And, as noted by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute in a January fact sheet, 'New Hampshire spent the least amount of state funds on its public K-12 schools (as a percentage of the total revenue) of any state in the country.' New Hampshire also ranks dead last in state funding for higher public education, which translates to in-state tuition being much less affordable here than it could and should be.
Meanwhile, the Granite State has the fourth highest effective property tax rate in the country, and this year's town meeting season suggests a lot of local property-tax payers have had enough. Their anger is justifiable — but it's often misdirected.
Blaming school districts for high property taxes is like blaming a doctor for the cost of health care. It's the system that's broken, not the people working within it. That is what makes New Hampshire's voucher program — dubbed education freedom accounts – so utterly misguided and so positively destructive.
As originally pitched, the purpose of New Hampshire's EFA program was to give lower-income families an opportunity to use public money to pay for an alternative to their community public school, including for home schooling or private school expenses. It was a bad idea at inception, mind you, but it was at least defensible as a publicly funded voucher created solely for the benefit of lower-income Granite Staters. After all, those lower-income residents are much more likely to be living in a property-poor community with underperforming schools. Now, to nobody's surprise, Republicans in the State House are working to make the voucher program universal, which strips the EFA program of its only marginally credible 'public good' argument: that it is meant to help those with the least.
But 'school choice' has always been a lie propagated by a myth. The truth is that New Hampshire's system of funding public education is a wreck by design — for communities, taxpayers, and most of all children — and the voucher program is a bag of rocks painted to look like a lifeboat. Privatizing our public schools is the ultimate goal of school vouchers, and if you think for a second that corporate greed isn't going to make matters infinitely worse for those with the least then you should read up on Big Pharma, Big Oil, and American tech and health care giants. History and modernity suggest America's 'Big Education' era is probably not going to be awesome for America's middle and lower classes.
But if we're going to debate the merits of vouchers, whether income-capped or not, we should at the very least begin with the understanding that New Hampshire public schools are not monolithic. To say that public schools are failing 'in general' is a complete misreading of the situation.
New Hampshire public schools in wealthier communities are doing just fine, with places such as Hanover, Windham, and Bedford boasting some of the top-ranked high schools in the state (and top 10% in the nation), according to U.S. News and World Report. Each of those three communities has a median household income of more than $160,000. At the bottom of the school rankings are communities such as Claremont, Littleton, and Pittsburg, each with a median household income of less than $55,000.
That data tells us public schools are not failing in New Hampshire but that New Hampshire is failing its public schools. The state's system of education funding creates ZIP code winners and ZIP code losers, and then the residents of those losing towns are directed to blame their own school districts — their own neighbors — for the too-high price of not-good-enough results.
Rather than addressing a system that was designed to ensure poorer communities have poorer schools, Republicans instead offer us vouchers. It's a destructive 'solution' to a problem they themselves created and exacerbated through stubborn, near-religious obedience to bad tax policies. Classic GOP, classic New Hampshire. For whom does our vaunted tax advantage exist if not for struggling New Hampshire families in struggling New Hampshire towns and cities?
The answer is just as clear here in New Hampshire as it is in Washington. The many must pay so the few can prosper, and so it goes.