Defunding Public Schools is Really Unpopular

We head to New Hampshire, where the latest effort to undermine public schools just hit a roadblock

It’s field-trip time, reader, and today we’re heading to one of my favorite places: bucolic New Hampshire. A few weeks ago, residents of seven New Hampshire communities came together in an astonishing show of support for their local public schools. Faced with the question of whether to slash spending in the Kearsarge Regional School District, some 1500 people showed up–making this the largest school board meeting in community history (typical attendance hovers in the low double digits)–to make their opinions felt. And by a margin of 1,435 to 113, voters said ‘no way’ to laying off teachers and closing schools.

In many ways, this is a classic New Hampshire story. Here were locals spending a frigid Saturday in that most old-timey of ways: deliberating over budgetary questions. But at a time when many states appear to be blowing up their budgets by design via a combination of deep tax cuts on their richest residents, combined with ginormous new voucher programs that effectively pick up the tab for wealthy families who already send their kids to private schools (looking at you Ohio, Iowa, Arizona, Arkansas and [insert state name here], this story of locals coming together to resist funding cuts is one with important lessons for all of us.

Granite State Blues

Let’s start with the New Hampshire part of the story. First of all, the Granite State is NOT Massachusetts. But while “don’t Mass it up” may have won over voters, sending yet another Republican to the governor’s office, NH’s aversion to taxes isn’t proving to be such a winner for its public schools. While the state may show up on the US map as purple-ish, NH’s Republican leaders have taken a sharp red turn against all things public education in recent years. There’s the state’s top education official, a Betsy Devos clone who homeschooled his seven children, and who views his mission as breaking up the public school monopoly, a favorite phrase of his, by any means necessary. Thanks to Frank Edelblut’s tireless work, New Hampshire now has vouchers, aka Education Freedom Accounts, a program that is proving to be vastly more expensive than promised.

Then there’s the Free State Project, the experiment in libertarian utopia that aimed to attract 10K anti-tax folks to New Hampshire. Well, they’re here now and have found juicy targets in local school budgets. Which is how residents of the seven communities that make up the Kearsarge Community School District found themselves packing the high school auditorium on a Saturday in early January. You see, last year, NH lawmakers passed a measure that allows local residents to ‘cap’ the school budget. It’s the latest in a long list of anti-public school initiatives, but this one is particularly nasty in that it taps in the inherent tension between the needs of students and economic anxiety of retirees and working and middle class voters. And the more that the state shifts the burden of paying for education onto local communities, the more tense this tension gets.

New Hampshire currently spends just $6,000 per student; locals must pony up the rest. Not only is that the least amount of public funds per student in the country but even that is too much according to the coalition of Republicans and Free Staters who run the state. This fall, schools were told that they’d be getting less aid for students with special needs. And in a school funding trial that has now dragged on for roughly 1,000 years, the state’s top lawyer recently argued that neither buildings, nor heat, nor nurses, nor principals, nor superintendents are necessary in order for New Hampshire to meet its constitutional obligation to ‘adequately’ educate its youngest residents. (He really did say this!)

Demanding More

Fortunately, an awful lot of those 1500 residents of Bradford through Wilmot seemed to understand this. “We have a tax system that pits seniors against kids, and people are understandably worried about property taxes,” parent Jenn Alford-Teaster, a parent of a nine year old in the district and one of the organizers of the Save Kearsarge campaign. “But I think people have a much better understanding now that the increases we’re seeing are because the state isn’t doing its job.”

This, of course, was not the outcome that the brains behind the new law were hoping for. After all, the ‘theory of change’ that animates the hostility to all-things-public-education in New Hampshire and beyond is that if you say enough bad stuff about the schools then at a certain point people will refuse to pay for them. That’s why NH’s chief education official has been a relentless culture warrior, going after library books, classroom materials, and individual teachers. Kearsarge put that strategy up for a vote–and it failed overwhelmingly.

Lest you think this is just a New Hampshire story, by the way, I’d point you to similar results across the country. Voters were asked to weigh in on some 2,200 education-related tax referenda in November, and roughly 75 percent were approved. On that list was Florida, where voters in 22 counties, including some that went overwhelmingly for Trump, hiked their own taxes to support local public schools. Or take Ohio (please take it!), where entirely predictable budgetary pressures resulting from tax cuts and school vouchers led a top GOP official to call for cuts to school spending, which fueled voter backlash followed by backsliding from within his own party.

What Happens Next?

Organizers of the Kearsarge campaign, who had just two weeks to rally their local communities and get them out to that regional school board meeting, are celebrating what is likely only a temporary reprieve for the school district. “Yes we did it! But we won the battle not the war,” parent Nancy Glynn, who serves on Sutton’s selectboard, told me. “It was amazing to see the community come together this way. Now we have to drive home that this isn’t one and done.”

The success of this highly local campaign also demonstrates, once again, that it can be far easier to mobilize folks who have a direct stake in the schools than to make the larger case for public education and what we stand to lose without it. As she sought to convince area residents to turn out for the vote, Glynn would often tell them about her own son. Born prematurely, he didn’t start talking until he was seven years old and required intensive special education support. Today he’s thriving, but the services that were so vital to him are now on the chopping block in districts across the state. “It kills me inside to think about what that could look like for kids and communities if kids like him have to do without those supports,” says Glynn.

The challenge now is to take these highly localized efforts, ones centered on the stories of local kids, and translate them for a broader audience. Think of it as the school funding equivalent of the polling data that has shown for decades that people hold their own schools in high regard while rating the nation’s schools as duds. In other words, it’s great that these voters showed up en masse to reject spending cuts, but New Hampshire’s new legislative session is likely to be the most hostile to public education so far, including proposals to make the voucher program universal, further exacerbating the budgetary woes that led to the showdown in Kearsarge.

When I give talks about the threats to public education, I often get asked how we can do a better job of “marketing” our public schools. It’s a question that makes my heart sink as, in many ways, it’s a sign of just how far we’ve slid down the slippery slope of free market-y, education-as-just another-consumer-product-thinking. But what so impressed me about the organizers like Nancy Glynn and Jenn Alford-Teaster is that they understand that it’s no longer enough to talk about their kids or their schools. The future of public education itself now hangs in the balance.

Jenn, a geographer who ran for state senate in 2020 and came within a hair of winning, points to her own story to make the case for why New Hampshire needs public schools. She grew up in poverty on New Hampshire’s sea coast. “Food stamps, welfare, section 8–you name it. I didn’t have the support at home to be academically successful, but I attended a well-funded school system. I had an investment made in me as a child and I am the return on that investment.”

In the months ahead, New Hampshire will be debating once again whether investing in the state’s children is still worth it. Once again, the state’s political leaders will be making the case that that investment hasn’t paid off, that parents will be better served if they’re handed an ‘edu-debit card’ that they can use to purchase ‘education.’ As to what happens to kids like Nancy Glynn’s son or to today’s students growing up in poverty, not much will be said about them. But as we keep being reminded, defunding public education remains a deeply unpopular cause.

It’s on all of us to remind our elected officials of that.