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.)
Articles tagged as
school funding
Charter schools: Red herrings
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?
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
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
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!
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!
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
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?
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
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
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
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
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.
Study: Only 25 Percent Of NH School Funding Follows The Child
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
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.
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
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?
The Amended Amendment Procedure
I do solemnly swear, that I will bear faith and true allegiance to the United States of America and the state of New Hampshire, and will do whatever their Supreme Courts tell me to do, even when that conflicts with their written constitutions.
Article 100 of the New Hampshire Constitution outlines a few different methods by which that document can be amended. But with election season upon us, and with school funding being such a hot topic, it’s worth taking a look at a method that isn’t included in the document itself, using Article 83 as an example.
Neal Kurk’s Assault on the Truth
To understand why Representative Kurk is #FullofSchiff, we need to understand how SB 193 works. From a prior post:
The bill provides that an “eligible student” can receive a grant from the State equal to 95 percent of the per-pupil funding the State provides to municipalities to pay for the cost of an “adequate education” (currently $3,636.00) in order to fund an “education freedom savings account.” The account must be opened through an approved scholarship organization and the funding can be used to pay only for “qualifying educational expenses.”
Nothing Like A “Veto Day” To Bring Out Liberal Concern For Overtaxation
“The same undisciplined government spending and social engineering that has undermined our economy over the past 30 years has also been tearing at the social fabric of this land.” —Stockwell Day
The New Hampshire House and Senate will vote today to override Governor John Lynch’s veto of two bills that sought to allow Granite State businesses to receive tax credits for donations to scholarship funds to help low and middle income students attend private and religious schools.
Of course, opponents of SB 372 and HB 1607 had lots to say about these bills, chief among them, Maggie, “The Red” Hassan. Hassan, as reported in the Union Leader said,