school funding Archives - Page 2 of 2

Our Soviet School Funding Model

August 31, 2019 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 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 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 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 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 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?

The Amended Amendment Procedure

October 8, 2018October 8, 2018 Ian Underwood

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

September 26, 2018May 6, 2018 Ed Mosca

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

September 26, 2018June 27, 2012 Rick Olson

“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,

Read more

Op-Ed by Carolyn McKinney (Chair, RLCNH) “The Legislature must reestablish its place above the courts”

September 26, 2018May 14, 2012 Carolyn

The Legislature must reestablish its place above the courts
By Carolyn McKinney, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire.

While many in Concord are clamoring over language for an educational-funding constitutional amendment (CACR 12), what’s being lost in the final debate of the 2011-2012 session is a constitutional amendment proposal far more important to the people of New Hampshire as they work to regain control of their government.

CACR 26, a constitutional amendment proposal that would remove the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’s rule-making authority by repealing Part 2, Article 73-a of the constitution, is probably the most important effort still up for consideration this year. By passing CACR 26 and repealing Article 73-a, the Legislature, which is directly elected by the people each biennium, would regain sole authority to write the laws, rules and general policies of the state as our founders intended.

Since 1978, when Article 73-a was adopted under a description of the measure that called it a “housekeeping effort,” the language has given the Supreme Court the power to write court rules that have “the force and effect of law.” This language has severely upset the balance of powers in government to the benefit of the unelected five-member Supreme Court. Since 1978, the court has been using the language of Article 73-a to order the Legislature and the people of this state around, in effect creating the likes of an old-world oligarchy.

Making this analogy far too real is the language in Article 73-a that says the Chief Justice of the N.H. Supreme Court is “the administrative head of all the courts.” Because the Legislature is known in the Constitution as the “General Court,” some have interpreted Article 73-a as a constitutional change that gives the Supreme Court and the other courts it controls unrestrained authority over the Legislature, and by extension, the people. Such an understanding is intolerable in a free Constitutional Republic and it is also inconsistent with the rest of the N.H. Constitution, which makes CACR 26 that much more important to pass.

The court originally advocated for Article 73-a as a way to control the internal procedures of the courtroom, but it has since used the language to go much further than that.