Tag: school funding

AIER Files Amicus Briefs in NH School Finance Cases (ConVal and Rand)

August 17, 2024

by Steve MacDonald

Almost everyone in New Hampshire knows about The Claremont Decisions. The courts decided they were legislators and could determine what adequate school funding was about. More recently, they’ve been at it again. The ConVal ruling (Contoocook Valley School District v. State of New Hampshire) tells the legislature to amp up school funding despite the absence … Read more

The Fair Share Surcharge

March 12, 2024

by Ian Underwood

I recently saw a receipt from a restaurant in Los Angeles, which included a 4% surcharge labeled ‘Healthy LA’. Presumably, it is supposed to pay for health care and other benefits for restaurant workers.

So Kids, What Did We Learn From Thursday’s House Session (04/21/22)?

April 22, 2022

by Judy Aron

We learned that today was Tartan Day at the NH House. This is a celebration of Scottish heritage in NH and gave our State Representatives a chance to “show our plaid.” Many reps wore some sort of plaid, including the NH plaid.

Equity Requires a Ceiling, Not a Floor

December 11, 2020December 10, 2020

by Ian Underwood

The Democrat-controlled Commission to Study School Funding has issued its final report. There’s no chance that a Republican-controlled government is going to implement the recommendations of this report. (At least, one hopes that’s the case, but as Winnie-the-Pooh would say, you never can tell with Republicans.)

Charter schools: Red herrings

February 23, 2020

by Ian Underwood

In a recent editorial about how school choice and charter schools ‘put public school funding at risk’, Donald Cohen waves three red herrings, hoping to distract you from the real issues at hand. They come up a lot, so they’re worth looking at more closely.

School funding: How much is enough?

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020

by Ian Underwood

There is a question that should be asked of anyone who wants to make a case for increasing the amount that we spend on public schools. Usually, they just say that the amount needed is ‘more than it is now’.

But how much more?

School funding alone won’t help children out of poverty

February 16, 2020

by Don

To The Daily Sun, Haley Thomas’s 1/29/20 letter makes valid points about childhood and generational poverty, and their negative effects on peoples’ lives. But Thomas’s apparent solution, increased school funding, is simply inadequate, and, based on decades of history, unlikely to improve educational results or reduce poverty. Calling for school funding increases may make people … Read more

The Idiocy-Prevention Tax

February 6, 2020

by Ian Underwood

The First Law of Holes is: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Don’t change shovels, or set a new schedule, or try a new digging technique. Just stop.

School funding: Luck is unconstitutional!

January 15, 2020January 14, 2020

by Ian Underwood

Oh, boy! It looks like we’re going to have a new education funding commission, to look at the question of how schools should be funded in New Hampshire. We can safely make two predictions about how this will work out. First, school spending will go up significantly. Second, student achievement will not go up at … Read more

School funding… Look, over there!

January 14, 2020

by Ian Underwood

In their recent column ‘Our Turn: A painful exercise in education funding’, John Tobin and Doug Hall attempt some feats of misdirection worthy of the magicians Penn & Teller.

The $46 Million Free Lunch

December 8, 2019

by Ian Underwood

The first thing to understand about charter schools is that reasonable people disagree about whether the outcomes from charter schools are significantly better than those from regular public schools. (And by ‘outcomes’, I don’t mean just final scores. I mean improvements. Schools that have students who would do well under any circumstances don’t deserve any credit when those kids do well.)

And what do taxpayers deserve?

October 12, 2020December 8, 2019

by Ian Underwood

A recent Grok post begins: All our state’s students deserve the best education possible…

I’m sorry, but that’s just wrong.

Groundhog Day

November 27, 2019

by Ian Underwood

In the film Groundhog Day, Phil keeps waking up to the same day, over and over, already knowing what’s going to happen, and powerless to stop it.

Using ‘adequacy funds’ to buy adequacy

October 17, 2019

by Ian Underwood

Imagine going to a tire shop to get a new set of tires for your car. You pay for the tires and the installation up front, but when you come back to pick up the car, there are only three tires on it. You point out that this isn’t what you paid for, but the manager complains that you didn’t give him enough money to do the job right.

Our Soviet School Funding Model

August 31, 2019

by Ian Underwood

Long ago, I read an account about some factories in the Soviet Union that made cookware for soldiers. Of course, if you’re a soldier, you’d like your cookware to be as light as possible, because you’re going to be carrying it around. And you want it to heat as quickly as possible, because you have to either find or carry your fuel.

However, the managers of these factories were rewarded, not for producing lighter cookware, or better cookware, or more cookware. They were rewarded for using more raw materials. The more raw materials a factory consumed, the more highly its managers were rated.

Can you guess what happened?

Idiocrats

August 19, 2019

by Ian Underwood

In the movie Idiocracy, people in the future experience massive crop failures. Why? Because the government has convinced farmers that ‘electrolytes are what plants crave’, so farmers start watering their fields with the sports drink Brawndo (which is basically Gatorade).

I couldn’t help thinking of this the other day when someone forwarded me the latest email blast from Comrade Volinsky, who is running something called the School Funding Fairness Project.

parent-child-shadow-silhouette School choice for NH

Study: Only 25 Percent Of NH School Funding Follows The Child

February 27, 2019February 27, 2019

by Op-Ed

NH Department of Education – Officials: Foundation for Excellence in Education student-centered study shows need to focus on learners, promote innovation CONCORD, NH – A recent report released by a national education foundation focused on the hallmarks of student-centered funding reveal the importance of transitioning New Hampshire to a model that accounts for the characteristics … Read more

Stop the insanity

February 7, 2019February 4, 2019

by Ian Underwood

If there’s anything that we should have learned over the last half century, it’s that spending more money on schools does nothing to improve student achievement, and that there is no correlation between the amount spent and the results obtained.

And if there’s anything that we should have learned during the two decades since the Claremont decision, it’s that even making every district into a ‘rich district’ does nothing to improve student performance.

These results shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. We’ve been focusing all our attention on money, and very little on what we’re doing with the money. It’s almost as if we think that something will work better if we pay more for it, or if we take the money out of a different pocket.

Money can’t buy love. Or education.

December 20, 2024February 2, 2019

by Ian Underwood

Our representatives in Concord are currently discussing how much money school districts require, where that money should come from, and how it should be collected.

But three simple graphs are sufficient to demonstrate decisively that money is not the issue.

The first graph shows that since 1970, tripling school spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) has had no effect on student achievement:

Milk Cows Not Taxpayers

January 7, 2019January 7, 2019

by Ian Underwood

The Union Leader reports that Governor Chris (‘Bernie’) Sununu has ‘promised to create the New Hampshire Career Academy, a partnership involving community colleges, employers and local high schools that will enable motivated and capable students to get a tuition-free associate degree’.

So, is this part of the state’s court-mandated responsibility to provide an opportunity to get an adequate education? If it is, why stop at an associate’s degree? Why not have tuition-free bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees? But if it’s not, what’s the constitutional justification for it?