The True Cause of Failed Education in New Hampshire

First, let me say that I am writing this for all the right reasons and, likely, at considerable expense to myself. What I am about to tell you will not be received well by those with more power than me. I am not taking the typical political move of cowardly leaks and anonymity – I am putting my name on this.

I will not receive awards or promotions, and I suspect in the coming days and weeks, I am going to have a bad time.

I write this as I have taken every action available to me, and yet, I have not been allowed success in accomplishing a single reform to New Hampshire schools. It is my hope that you, dear readers, when armed with the truth, might make a difference here.

There are many procedural, ideological, and curricular causes to the current state of affairs in New Hampshire schools – so many, in fact, that it has been the subject of much debate in what order they should take priority. I tell you now that the foremost cause of the awful state of NH schools is none of these. It is not Critical Race Theory. It is not Gender (“Queer”) Theory. It is not Common Core. The foremost cause is not a theory, it is a man – a man with a name, a face, and a high-ranking position in government.

We want to thank Michael Belcher for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
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First, you must understand that the Democrats cannot beat us – they simply don’t have the numbers. Yet, they achieve victory after victory regardless. You see, not every person who stands for election with an (R) next to their name does so in order to carry out the will of the Republican voters. It is perfectly clear that the will of Republican voters is to rid our schools of the social “theories” listed above, to gut the administrative bloat, to eradicate far-left indoctrination, to do battle with the corrupt teachers’ unions, to kick the federal government out, and to win this for them at any cost to us.

Some “Republicans” elected by these voters would prefer we not win. Some of those with an (R) next to their name run specifically to thwart the will of the voters and to betray the base. I was elected to the New Hampshire House for the first time in November of 2022 and appointed to the House Education Committee (“HEC” hereafter) by Speaker Packard in January 2023, where I have served since, and I came to win at any cost. This session (Speaker Packard) and the HEC (Chairman Ladd, Vice Chair Cordelli, Clerk Ford), have been under Republican control – Republican control, yet we keep losing.

Upon being appointed to the HEC, I attended an “orientation” session. Merriam-Webster dictionary offers the following definition for “orient”: “to direct… toward the interests of a particular group.” So, to what group’s interests was the HEC directed during orientation? Well, there were no representatives of private schools, nor charter schools, nor of homeschoolers, nor of parents. So, who did Chairman Ladd invite to orient us? He invited lobbyists from the teacher’s unions and the Department of Education. From day one, Chairman Ladd referred us to the unions and the Department of Education for policy and procedure, and he has been a staunch defender of the unions in the HEC every time they’ve come under scrutiny from true conservatives.

Rick Ladd of Haverhill, NH, has chaired the HEC for the majority of the last decade. He came to the committee after a career in teaching and as an administrator in public schools. He was trained as a “social science” teacher. For those uninitiated, “social sciences” came about in the mid 1900’s when socialists successfully attached the word “science” to their beliefs to get around anti-Communism laws, which they then started using to indoctrinate students in schools. During the time that Ladd has chaired the HEC, proficiency in math and reading has gone down by roughly 7%, incidents of violence are up 7%, cost per pupil has gone up by over 30%, and suicidal ideation and depression have increased by 9.4% and 17% respectively – notably, these are trends attributable to policies supported by Ladd.

This year’s record demonstrates that Chairman Ladd has no business in a Republican leadership position on, arguably, the most important committee in the House.

1. He voted to allow men to use girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms.
2. Ladd sponsored, voted for, and passed legislation to bring social media and digital badging into public school classes, with all attendant risks and harms of social media, and placing students under the 3^rd party speech codes (terms of service) of social media companies that will silence dissent and create a quasi-social credit system in public schools. We received testimony from Concord Schools that teachers will instruct students on the speech codes and what ideas are not allowed in public.
3. He demanded that Education Freedom Accounts, which allow students to leave failing government schools to attend a school of their parent’s choosing, not be expanded, and limited the increase in eligibility to a mere 16% (even less than what the governor had been publicly willing to sign).
4. Ladd refused to consider adding Communist atrocities, such as the Holodomor and Mao’s Great Leap, to Genocide curriculum, stating that they are obviously too obscure to be taught because he doesn’t know what they are – he further demanded we kill a bill naming the “Armenian Genocide” after receiving a letter from the Turkish consulate based on his apparent fear of angering “those people.”
5. He went back on his word after negotiating with committee Republicans a much-weakened Communism education bill only to kill the original bill with the amendment and then kill the newly amended bill as well.
6. He negotiated directly with Democrats to kill many good Republican bills, and he did so without even notifying the Republicans whose bills were to be killed (by tabling) on the House floor, choosing to surprise them at the last moment and making it impossible to effectively resist his betrayal. One such bill would have eliminated “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)” indoctrination in schools – a major source of our problems. I have it on good authority that he has already begun negotiating with Democrats to kill another round of Republican bills next session.
7. Ladd runs the committee with a total intolerance of any dissent from the right, often not even allowing pointed questions to be asked by Republicans, while allowing Democrats nearly unlimited leash to attack Republicans, tirades sometimes extending tens of minutes, and even attacks on members of the public testifying.
8. Ladd sponsored and passed legislation to circumvent privacy rights and provide NH data on children and their families to the federal government in exchange for a promise of marginally more federal money for schools.
9. He pushed through an expanded “civics” education mandate despite knowing that the curriculum for this program will be provided by far-left organizations that teach the Constitution is to be reinterpreted however is useful, that the Supreme Court is the highest government authority, that America was inhabited by the ‘Noble Savage’ before western colonialism genocided them, and other such ahistorical myths and fictions.
10. Ladd is pushing for the addition of “mental health” in schools by law, which is yet another method of indoctrinating students via Social-Emotional “wellness” practices and “empathy” training towards creating social activists, and further erodes parental rights by bringing the practice of healthcare into the classroom with no parental consent or knowledge.
11. He is supporting a major overhaul at the Department of Education, bringing in “competency-based” education, where teachers become mere managers of the checklist while students learn from technology like artificial intelligence, and they’re not allowed to move on until they’ve mastered a “competency,” including “social and emotional competencies,” that include ideological viewpoints, i.e., students must adopt socialist ideology to pass.
12. Ladd has been a major force behind expanding expensive “green” energy and pushed to further subsidize the industry by providing taxpayer-funded training of their workforce in NH schools for jobs that don’t even exist yet and probably never will.

Beyond all this, Ladd regularly betrays the Republicans on his own committee by outlining a Republican strategy in caucus only to abandon the strategy and join with the Democrats immediately. When he does this, he leaves the Republicans on the committee without any plan or leadership going into debates and votes, and it becomes impossible to mount an effective resistance to Democrats. There’s every reason to believe this is done on purpose to undermine us in favor of the Democrats – after all, Ladd argued more against other Republicans on the House floor this year than he did against Democrats last session.

The cost increases and money being shifted around in NH that is directly attributable to Chairman Ladd is staggering, and it would be well worth taking a very good look at where all of that money is being distributed – there’s an awful lot of lobbying done on his part to send more and more funds to specific places, including Manchester. He also has very close ties to the University System, served as a trustee, acts as their defender-in-chief on the committee, and was instrumental in killing a very popular bill requiring colleges to respect the First Amendment rights of students – a bill strongly opposed by UNH.

It is said that America is undergoing a Cultural Revolution. Many decades ago, China underwent its Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao. Mao, before being Chairman, had pretended to be a member of China’s conservative party in order to destroy it from the inside and then radicalized the schools to produce a generation of revolutionaries who went on to murder millions. We in New Hampshire have our Chairman Ladd, likewise, pretending to be a member of the conservative party to destroy it from within while radicalizing a generation of students, and we have recently seen the fruits of such radicalization across the country in antisemitic, anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-American violence.

Things don’t have to be this way. We don’t have to lose. We can win. The facts are on our side, and we are the good guys. We just need to start acting like we can win. I would ask that you consider contacting the office of Speaker Packard (603-271-3661, sherman.packard@leg.state.nh.us) to request a new Education Chairman be named. The committee has, unfortunately, and significantly due to the influence of Ladd, been so thoroughly steeped in Progressive education ideology that it would be best if a new Chair were brought in from outside the committee. No reform of NH schools is possible until this happens. Thank you for taking the time to read this and for your help.