New Hampshire has never fully reconciled the values that shape how we design, fund and evaluate our education system. As a result, we debate individual policies without first agreeing on the questions those policies are meant to answer.
Local control is one of those core values. It has long defined New Hampshire’s system of local governance. Through town meetings and local elections, voters decide how to fund schools, municipal services, capital projects and long-term obligations. These decisions require weighing costs and priorities — and voters do so every year.
If voters are capable of approving municipal budgets, authorizing debt or overriding limits when circumstances demand it, it is unclear why their judgment becomes suspect when it comes to school funding. And if voters cannot be trusted to make informed decisions about their local schools, then the question is not about education alone — it is about whether local control is a principle we genuinely believe in. Trust in voters cannot be conditional without becoming incoherent.
Educational quality is another value we rarely define clearly. New Hampshire schools perform well compared to national averages, and that strength is real. On measures such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the state typically ranks near the top in reading and math.
But quality is not a static condition. A strong education system is one that improves over time — helping each cohort of students do better than the last and adapting to changing needs. When outcomes are examined over longer horizons, improvement has been uneven. This does not mean schools are failing. It does suggest we lack a shared definition of what “getting better” looks like.
Without that clarity, debates drift toward inputs rather than outcomes.
Value for money is a related concern. Education spending in New Hampshire has risen steadily, driven by staffing costs, special education obligations, health care and operations. Yet the public conversation rarely asks whether the returns on that investment are commensurate with the cost.
This is not an argument for spending less. It is a question of alignment. Are increases in spending producing proportional improvements in outcomes or long-term readiness? When cost containment is proposed without clear benchmarks for educational value, efficiency risks becoming an end in itself.
Funding risk is perhaps the least openly discussed dimension of the debate. Education funding operates in an environment of uncertainty. Economic cycles, enrollment shifts, special education demand, health care inflation and federal policy changes all affect school budgets.
When funding is capped, that uncertainty does not disappear — it is reassigned. If costs rise faster than allowed funding, schools must absorb the difference. In practical terms, all of the risk is placed on schools, requiring reductions in staffing or services.
This outcome is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate choice to prioritize predictability elsewhere by allowing school budgets to break first when reality diverges from forecasts. The real question is whether concentrating that risk in schools is an acceptable trade-off.
Finally, there is the issue of process. Rather than addressing these foundational questions together, New Hampshire increasingly governs education through competing legislation rather than shared strategy. Individual proposals focus on isolated mechanisms without a common definition of success. Interactions are rarely stress-tested, and trade-offs are seldom weighed holistically.
That dynamic is visible in current debates over mechanisms such as school spending caps and district consolidation — policies that may address individual concerns, but are being considered without a shared framework for how they interact with local control, educational improvement over time, cost effectiveness and risk.
The harder work is not choosing sides in legislative disputes. It is answering the foundational questions first: Do we trust voters to balance cost, quality and risk? How do we define improvement over time? And are we governing education through long-term strategy, or through recurring conflict?
Until New Hampshire confronts these questions directly, education policy will remain reactive — not because communities lack commitment, but because the system itself has never been fully aligned with its own values.
Scott Shepard lives in Barrington and serves on the town’s Planning Board and Advisory Budget Committee.