A Democrat education questionnaire now circulating in New Hampshire is built to manufacture quotes, not to inform voters. Here is how Republican candidates should answer it, and the five questions to hand back.
Post summary:
- The “voter guide.”
- Carry the numbers.
- “Will public schools remain?”
- “Should accountability follow the money?”
- “Which money follows the child?”
- “Supplement or replacement?”
- The loyalty oath.
- Ask them our five.
A five-question education “voter guide” is making the rounds on New Hampshire Democratic social media. It presents itself as neutral civic homework: five “better questions” voters should put to candidates, each with a helpful key explaining what the answers reveal. Read it once, and it sounds reasonable. Read it twice, and the machinery shows.
The whole document runs on a single substitution. “Public education” quietly becomes “publicly governed schools,” meaning schools run by elected boards. Accept that definition, and the argument ends before it begins: every dollar that reaches a child outside a district building becomes, by definition, an attack on public education. Each question then comes with pre-written “listen for” bins that sort any conceivable answer into one of three boxes, and the third box (libertarian, market, Free State, replacement) is attack copy waiting for a name. Question five drops the pretense entirely and asks candidates whether they identify with the Free State Project.
Now notice what the guide never asks. Across five questions, follow-ups, and a closing rubric, student learning appears exactly once: as a paperwork requirement imposed on private providers. Not one question asks whether children can read. That omission tells you whose interests the questionnaire protects, and it is the ground every Republican answer should return to.
Carry the numbers
Candidates who walk into a forum with four figures memorized cannot be pushed around by this document.
- The latest statewide average operating cost per pupil is $21,545, with total spending around $3.8 billion and fall enrollment of 162,660, continuing a two-decade slide.
- Real per-pupil district spending rose 96 percent from 2001 to 2024, reaching $26,347, while enrollment fell by 54,381 students. Over the same period, New Hampshire posted the nation’s largest enrollment decline while its NAEP reading and math scores fell 21 points, against 7 nationally.
- State adequacy aid is at a record average of $7,132 per pupil for 2026-27, with Claremont’s grant estimated at $13,443 per pupil, nearly double the statewide average. So much for the state abandoning public schools.
- SB 295, signed June 10, 2025, made Education Freedom Accounts universal with a 10,000-student cap; the cap filled, and it rises to 12,500 for 2026-27. Each EFA carries only the state adequacy grant, a base of $4,265.64 this year plus differentiated aid. That figure comes from the voucher program’s critics.
“Will public schools remain?”
Answer the fair kernel first: yes. Public schools will remain, funded under the state’s adequacy obligations, for every family that wants them. No candidate on any New Hampshire ballot proposes otherwise. The constitutional duty the guide invokes, established in the Claremont decisions under Part II, Article 83, runs to the child’s adequate education. It says nothing about preserving one particular org chart, and Article 83 itself directs the state to cherish “seminaries,” the private academies of the founding era, in the same breath as public schools.
New Hampshire has never met the guide’s “publicly governed” test anyway. Town tuitioning was formalized in 1901, about 50 towns have no public school at some grade levels, and Pinkerton Academy, a private nonprofit, has served as the high school of record for Derry and five neighboring towns since 1949, educating about 3,100 students primarily on public tuition. By the questionnaire’s definition, Derry has lacked public education for 75 years. Nobody in Derry believes that.
“Should accountability follow the money?”
On the money itself, yes, and say so without flinching: audits, expense review, fraud enforcement, transparent reporting. EFAs already run through a scholarship organization under state monitoring, and where oversight letters have flagged administrative gaps, Republicans should vote to fix them. Take the issue off the table.
What “the same responsibilities” means in practice, though, is cloning the compliance stack that helps push district costs past $21,000 per pupil. Government buys services from private providers everywhere: Medicaid dollars at private hospitals, Pell grants and the GI Bill at religious colleges, childcare scholarships at church-run daycares, public tuition at Pinkerton. Nobody demands those providers seat elected boards. And beware the backdoor: after Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. 767 (2022), “nondiscrimination” cannot be repurposed to exclude religious schools from a generally available program.
Then reverse the symmetry demand. If identical accountability is the standard, districts should accept the accountability every EFA provider lives under: a dissatisfied family free to walk out the door with the funding. Districts carry more compliance obligations than any institution in the state, and scores fell 21 points anyway. Compliance is not performance.
“Which money follows the child?”
This is where a prepared candidate wins outright, because the mechanics defeat the premise. An EFA moves only the state adequacy grant. Local appropriations, the majority of every district budget, never move. A district that loses a student to an EFA keeps every local dollar raised for a child it no longer educates, which means local resources per remaining pupil go up.
The fixed-cost lament is a demographics story wearing a policy costume. New Hampshire lost 54,000 students over two decades, the steepest decline in the country, nearly all of it before EFAs existed. A district that has not right-sized its footprint in twenty years of falling enrollment is not the victim of a 12,500-student statewide program. A serviceable line: if a district loses three percent of its students, keeps one hundred percent of its local revenue, and calls that a crisis, the problem is the budget, not the child who left.
As for the property-tax follow-up, flip it. EFAs draw on state education funding. What threatens property taxpayers is the questioners’ own destination: the Supreme Court’s ConVal ruling set a base adequacy floor of $7,356.01 per pupil, an increase estimated at roughly $500 million per year, and the Rand decision followed by declaring the funding model and SWEPT unconstitutional. Ask which tax pays for all that. They never say.
“Supplement or replacement?”
Decline to file a twenty-year central plan, and explain why: the question measures success by enrollment share, which tells you exactly what its authors value. A better answer: “In twenty years, the share of children in district schools should be whatever share of families freely choose them. I don’t set market-share targets for government institutions, and you should worry about anyone who does. My target is every child reading at grade level. Real spending per pupil nearly doubled since 2001, and scores fell 21 points. Tell me your plan for that, and I’ll tell you mine.” The scale point closes it: a 12,500-student cap against 162,660 enrolled means district schools remain where the overwhelming majority of Granite State children learn, on any trajectory now in law.
The loyalty oath
The Free State question is a purity test dressed as curiosity, and its own disclaimer (“not every Republican is a Free Stater”) gives the game away: the association is the point. A candidate who isn’t a participant should answer in one flat sentence and move on: “No. I signed up for the New Hampshire Constitution, not anyone’s project.” A candidate who is a participant, or simply liberty-minded, should state their own positions and their own votes, which are the four answers above. Nobody should audition for the opposition’s approval by disavowing their neighbors.
Either way, pivot to the asymmetry. Will the same page ask Democratic candidates how much NEA-NH and affiliated PAC money sits behind their campaigns? Or what their movement’s “intended destination” is, now that the courts have handed them a half-billion-dollar annual obligation with no named funding source? Affiliation tests run both ways or not at all.
The guide closes with one “most revealing” question: permanent publicly governed schools, or funded students and competing providers? Reject the either/or. “Both. Strong district schools that families choose, and funded children wherever they learn. New Hampshire has run both since the academies of the 1800s. The only thing I won’t promise anyone is a monopoly.”
Ask them our five
The best defense is a questionnaire of our own. Put these to any candidate who opposes educational choice:
- Real spending per district pupil is up 96 percent since 2001, and test scores are down 21 points. What does the next dollar buy?
- The ConVal floor implies roughly $500 million a year in new state spending. Name the tax.
- Should a working family be locked into a school that is failing their child because they cannot afford the exit?
- Districts keep every local dollar raised for students they no longer educate. Will you return any of it to taxpayers? If not, why is an EFA worth a fifth of district per-pupil spending the fiscal problem?
- How much NEA-NH and affiliated PAC money is behind your campaign, and what do those donors want New Hampshire’s schools to look like in twenty years?
The questionnaire wants Republicans playing defense against hypotheticals. Answer the fair parts, refuse the borrowed vocabulary, and hand back five questions with numbers attached. Quote-hunting only works on candidates who haven’t done the reading.
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