William Marvel: Champions of Complacency

On June 11, the Berlin Sun carried one of Garry Rayno's reliably partisan columns, disparaging Education Freedom Accounts. That, in itself, was no surprise, but this particular column was even more stylistically awkward and incoherent than his usual fare, and it seemed especially brazen in presenting speculation as fact. Such glaring flaws inspired me to take a closer look at the program. 

Pouncing on the recent elimination of income limits for participants, Rayno declared that these grants for alternative educational choices "will cost the state's taxpayers well over $110 million for the next biennium with most of the money going to higher-income parents who currently send their children to religious and private schools or homeschools." Please pardon the unpunctuated prolixity of that quote; it takes him a lot of space to pack so many dog whistles into one sentence. 

As one might expect from Rayno, that's the Democratic Party hype on the topic. It's pretty effectively contradicted in an analysis conducted by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — which, because of the Bartlett Center's current conservative lean, Rayno would probably not have consulted, or credited. 

Democrats, whose support for public education reflects their political loyalty to teachers' unions and public-school employees generally, once contended that expanding EFA eligibility would cost over $100 million in the first year. That scenario relied on wild overestimates of the number of eligible students, extreme-case assumptions of how many would participate, exaggerated expectations of the size of the grants, and a refusal to recognize that those grants might actually save other money. 

The Bartlett Center projected a 2025-2026 budget increase of $6.5 million, and $11 million for the second year. Given the $24 million spent on 5,794 students last year, the biennial cost would come closer to half Rayno's fantasy. 

That seems a cheap way to give New Hampshire residents alternatives to public schools, which are providing a majority of students with a middling to miserable education. I considered it reasonable to restrict the program to lower-income families, until calculating the savings EFAs entail. Rich or poor, every child who leaves public school theoretically relieves the local district of the cost of educating that pupil, estimated by the state Department of Education at $23,545 (not counting debt or transportation). 

Fixed costs notwithstanding, that would eventually produce real local savings. Conway's 21 participants represented more than one classroom and one teacher. 

EFAs also save state money. In 2023-2024, EFA grants to individuals averaged about $5200, while the average per-student state adequacy grant to public schools was around $6200. EFA grants for newly eligible students are estimated at $4400 next year, increasing the likely state savings. 

Reducing costs, of course, isn't the main point of EFAs. It's true that, if every student were eligible and participated, the taxpayer cost of public education would shrink to about 20 percent of its current level, but that will never happen. Not enough parents are financially capable of investing the additional time and money in their children's education that private schools and homeschooling require. Those factors aside, most parents are probably not even interested in doing so. 

Luring enrollment from public schools can initially raise their per-pupil expense because of existing infrastructure. However, even advantageous economies of scale don't stop school boards like Conway's from wasting millions of dollars by hanging onto unnecessary buildings, and by keeping (or adding) staff and programs as the student population dwindles naturally. 

One way or another, EFAs benefit all parents and all students. They offer immediate assistance in finding more satisfactory educational options than our rigid, over-regulated, socially preoccupied, sports-obsessed, academically mediocre, intellectually fragmented public system. They may also encourage the creation of more options, or facilitate improvements in those that already exist. 

Better still, EFAs pose much-needed competition for a government educational monopoly that has grown fat, ineffective, self-serving, and complacent precisely because there have been no alternatives. That competition may finally provoke some improvement in public schools, both in the realm of performance and in the increasingly crucial matter of fiscal responsibility. That will never happen while the champions of complacency shield overpaid administrators and parasitical unions from the deserved embarrassment of more efficient and effective rivals.

William Marvel lives in South Conway.