Last April, when the legislature was hearing testimony about its proposed plan to make New Hampshire's taxpayer funded vouchers open to any and all comers, Patty Long, a Peterborough resident who opposed the bill, testified that she had actually called one of the vendors listed on the state report. Were people really getting $750 piano lessons? Nope. They were buying pianos.
This year, the Concord Monitor published a five part series looking at how the money for the state's vouchers were spent (New Hampshire calls them Education Freedom Accounts). Their reporter, Jeremy Margolis, dug through the then-transparent database to find that, for instance, 90% of the taxpayer dollars used for tuition went to private religious schools, and that a quarter of all the taxpayer-funded tuition dollars went to just five schools. In 2022-23, families spent $520,000 – or about one-seventh of all money that did not go to private schools – on extra-curriculars-- $46,000 at area ski mountains, $35,000 at martial arts schools, and $16,000 at equestrian facilities. They took a fascinating look at how the vouchers touched off a firestorm of debate in the homeschooling community, and broke down competing estimates of the full cost of universal taxpayer-funded vouchers (the last two didn't involve the database, but they are still great reportage).
But if Margolis tried to do that same reportage now, he'd be stumped. Because Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, decided to hide a bunch of the information about what money was being spent on which vendors. CSF is the business that manages the voucher money for the state (because for voucher programs you need an extra bureaucratic layer to allow you to pretend that it's legal to spend taxpayer dollars to fund private religious schools).
Baker Demers explained to Margolis:
“We learned that some individuals may have been misusing these reports to contact or harass small providers, or to question them about students and their activities,” Baker Demers said. “If true, this behavior is deeply concerning and could even be viewed as a form of stalking.”
This is baloney on a couple of levels. First, the state already has a full list of eligible vendors where voucher families can spend their pile of taxpayer dollars, so in terms of saving participating providers from being revealed, this does nothing. Anyone with a desire education service providers (because that's certainly a real thing) can still get all the information they need to stalk away. At the same time, voucher users who want to see basic market info about which vendors are popular are now denied that information.
Second, what it does is prevent taxpayers from seeing where the money they paid is being spent. "You are not allowed to see where your tax dollars went," would not be tolerated coming from, say, actual public schools, and it should not be tolerated here.
This turns out to be one of the attendant problems of voucher systems. Most are built with barely any safeguards in place to insure that taxpayer education dollars are well spent, and so when word starts to get out about where those dollars are going, the voucher crowd gets embarrassed and/or cranky (see Arizona for extensive examples).
CSF has no business telling taxpayers and the press that they can't know where the money is going. A voucher program that depends on operating with little or no transparency is waving a big fat red flag about financial shenanigans and legislative irresponsibility, and the people who aren't going to be bothered include the ones who believe the taxpayer-funded voucher system is working exactly as they want it to.
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