[Updated 11/25/2025, to reflect new information that has been brought to my attention. Although Sen. Ruth Ward sponsored the bill, the requirement that schools actually teach all kids to read and do math was deleted in an amendment offered by Rep. Rick Ladd. I can find no indication that Sen. Ward voted against, or objected to, the amendment, or to any of the misleading testimony offered in support of it. So they both bear responsibility for the travesty.]
The other morning, I was reading a Grok post about bribing schools to get better reading scores. My first thought was: The law requires them to have every kid reading at proficiency, so we’d just be paying them to obey the law.
Then I thought: Maybe we could extend that. I haven’t robbed any convenience stores this year, or murdered anyone. That should be worth some kind of bonus, right? A couple hundred bucks, at least. Maybe a thousand.
I started writing a comment. I wanted to accurately quote RSA 193-H:2, which is the law requiring schools to have every kid reading at proficiency, but to my amazement… that requirement is gone. It’s no longer there. It’s been replaced with some mealy-mouthed language about meeting performance based indicators as established in rules adopted by the state board of education.
It took me a while to track down how that happened, but it was the handiwork of Ruth Ward, who sponsored SB266, and Rick Ladd, who offered the House amendment that made the switch, buried in a bunch of other changes that were made simultaneously.
That requirement was the only useful one in the entire public education edifice! It was the only one that focused on results, instead of on recipes.
If we threw out every other statute, regulation, and rule about education, but kept that one requirement, and took it seriously, we would have schools that give both students and taxpayers what they need. But if we throw it out, or just ignore it, and keep everything else, we will have the same sorts of schools we’ve had for decades — you know, the ones where more than 90% of kids graduate, even though less than half of them are proficient in reading and math.
It is the equivalent, in the Declaration of Independence, of the requirement that governments are formed by men to protect their rights, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If you throw away the rest of the DoI, but just keep that idea, and take it seriously, you get good government. But if you throw it out, or ignore it, and keep everything else, you get… well, what we have now.
If Sen. Ward, or Rep. Ladd, or anyone else wanted to change 193-H:2, it should have been to add penalties for non-compliance.
So now, thanks to Sen. Ward and Rep. Ladd, schools can rest easy, knowing that they’re no longer required by law to do the only thing we really need them to do, which is teach kids to read and do math. That means they can focus on all those other important things, like sports, and therapy, and extra-curricular activities, and most significantly, political indoctrination.
The level of betrayal here is astonishing, and someone capable of it should never again be trusted to hold public office, of any kind, at any level.
I have heard that Cato ended every one of his speeches, no matter what it was about, with the declaration Carthago delenda est, which translates to ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. Until Ruth Ward and Rick Ladd have been removed from office, I’m going to do something similar:
Ruth Ward et Rick Ladd removenda est.
