Jason Bedrick, Ed Tarnowski
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and scaremongering that school choice will destroy public education.
Whenever a state legislature is considering a measure to create a new education choice policy, or expand an existing one, the proverbial Chicken Littles inevitably start squawking that the sky is falling.
Take New Hampshire’s popular Education Freedom Accounts (EFA). State legislators are considering a bill to expand eligibility for the EFA, which empowers families to use their child’s portion of state funding to choose the learning environments that work best for their children. Predictably, opponents of education freedom are predicting utter ruin.
Left-wing columnist Gary Rayno screeched that making EFAs open to all children would “do away with public education as we know it.” Likewise, Liz Tentarelli of Manchester, president of the League of Women Voters New Hampshire, called the EFA expansion, “One more step in defunding public schools.”
Media Recycles Teachers Union Rhetoric To Attack School Choice. Here’s the Truth.
These Chicken Little claims are nothing new. When the EFA program was first enacted in 2021, state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro wailed that it was “carving public education apart.” For that matter, when Granite State lawmakers were considering enacting a tax-credit scholarship program in 2012, state Sen. Sylvia Larsen warned offering families more school choice options was “ruining the very basis of our society.” Left-wing activist Bill Duncan, who later served on the New Hampshire State Board of Education, called the scholarship program “an IED, an explosive device planted in our school system.”
Yet more than a decade later, the sky hasn’t fallen. New Hampshire public schools are still going strong. In fact, they’re better funded than ever. According to the New Hampshire Department of Education’s latest figures, the state’s public schools spent, on average, $26,320 per pupil last year. By contrast, last year’s average EFA award was only $5,204 and the average tax-credit scholarship was a measly $2,825. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/be-not-afraid-nh-school-choice-benefits-everyone
