Scott: New Hampshire Expanded Education Freedom. Now It's Time To Build What Comes Next.

By Sarah Scott, NH Journal

This year, for families and students in the Granite State, the start of a new school year marks more than just the next grade or a new classroom.

It marks a school year when they have a greater say in the direction of their own education. Families can decide if the school down the street is a good choice for their child, and if it’s not, they can do something about it. Five years ago, that was not an option.

For decades, educational options were confined to the ZIP code a family lived in and limited to the choices available in that school district. This one-size-fits-all approach to education ignored students’ unique needs, interests, and strengths, and treated the government as the party best positioned to judge what a child needed, while parents were just spectators.

New Hampshire rejected that premise. Five years ago, New Hampshire established the state’s first Education Freedom Accounts. That allowed parents to choose the best approach to their child’s education, whether that means a traditional classroom, tutoring, homeschool or a mix of options.

In July, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 1268, the Home Education Freedom Act. Notifying the state or the district is now the parent’s choice. Annual evaluations are gone, along with other overly burdensome paperwork requirements. I was homeschooled myself, and those filings never measured whether a child was learning. They measured whether a parent would turn in paperwork on time. Credit for the bill belongs to the parents who kept showing up in Concord to testify, the legislators who sponsored and carried it, and the governor who signed it.

A separate law signed this June opened public school courses and activities to Education Freedom Account students, so a family building its own program can still send a kid to chemistry class or history class.

Set alongside the Parents’ Bill of Rights, these laws add up to a coherent answer about who is in charge of a child’s education. The parent decides. The state serves. These aren’t just disconnected legislative victories. Paired together, they show a significant shift in New Hampshire’s approach to education, away from a system that limited opportunities by geography or income and toward one that recognizes the needs of individual students.

This progress didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t come from Concord alone. It started from the ground up — with parents pushing for more options, teachers pioneering innovative approaches to education, advocates spending years championing policy changes, and policymakers acting to make them possible.

But there is still more work to do to transform our state’s education system. New Hampshire has given families the power to choose.

The waitlist is the exception.

EFA enrollment hit its statutory ceiling of 12,500 students in August, the second year in a row that family demand outran the cap. When the program filled its previous limit of 10,000, an automatic growth provision added 2,500 seats. Those were filled, too. As of mid-August, 13,443 qualified New Hampshire students had applied, and 943 of them were waiting for an opening.

Every family on that list has already been told by the state that it qualifies. What stands between them and an account is a number written into statute. Universal eligibility that runs out in August is not universal, and a program built on the premise that parents know best for their own children should not make 943 of them wait for someone else to drop out. The legislature should repeal the cap outright and clear the list.

More freedom doesn’t automatically mean better education, and having a choice isn’t meaningful unless families have good options. Parents need clear information to determine the best options for their children; innovators need environments that encourage new ideas; and educators need the resources to deliver them.

There won’t be one path forward, and that’s the point. Flexibility and opportunity are the very things that make innovation in education possible. When educators, families, and entrepreneurs have the chance to develop new options, they can produce a far more diverse range of opportunities than any single education model could.

As technology continues to transform our world, a flexible approach to education can give students access to specialized courses and personalized learning tools that would not otherwise be available to them.

Getting this next step right can do more than improve education. It can also make the Granite State a place where young people want to work and build their lives long after they graduate. Policy wins have set the foundation for a new approach to education, but the next generation of education reform won’t come from policy alone. It will come from families, educators, and communities building new opportunities from the ground up.

Sarah Scott is Deputy State Director of Americans for Prosperity-New Hampshire. She wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.