After a House Republican leader argued in leaked messages with colleagues last week that “segregated schools” would improve test scores for members of her community, the Bedford lawmaker publicly pointed to the value of education freedom accounts.
“If Democrats had their own schools, and we had our own, families wouldn’t need to avail themselves of the wildly successful education freedom account program,” Rep. Kristin Noble said in a statement, claiming her private remarks referred to political, rather than racial, segregation.
Currently, no data exists to evaluate Noble’s claim that the program — which allows families to spend government funds on private school tuition and homeschooling expenses — bolsters students’ academic performance. Unlike public school students, whose standardized test results are released publicly by the state, no requirement exists to provide analogous data for program participants.
A bill introduced by Democratic lawmakers would change that.
“If we are going to compare outcomes, if we are going to make claims about success, then we owe it to taxpayers, families, and students to have real data — not anecdotes, not assumptions, and not rhetoric,” Rep. Tracy Bricchi of Penacook, the prime sponsor of the proposed legislation, said at a hearing on the bill this week.
Under the current law, parents of students enrolled in the program must demonstrate their child’s academic performance annually through either a standardized test or through a teacher’s review of a portfolio of student work maintained by the family. No report on those results is released publicly.
Last year, 2,435 students took a standardized test and 3,059 maintained a portfolio, according to Matt Southerton, the director of policy and compliance for the Children’s Scholarship Fund, the non-profit company that administers the program.
The law requires the company to make any nationally-standardized test results available to the state’s Department of Education upon request. Results from the state-administered SAS test are exempt from that requirement.
In response to a public records request, a Department of Education employee said it had never received any testing results from the organization during the program’s five years of existence.
A spokesperson for the department did not answer whether any requests for the data had been made but not fulfilled. She also did not respond to a question about why the department would opt against requesting the information, despite being allowed to do so.
The law change would clarify the reporting requirement, explicitly mandating that the program administrator share all aggregate testing data with the department, whether or not it is asked to do so. The information shared would presumably become a public record that could be released.
The new law would also require the department to create a rubric used to assess student portfolios and would mandate that portfolio evaluators share their evaluations with the department.
Under the law, the state would be required to analyze all data received.
Noble did not respond to a request for comment on whether she supported the bill.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Republican Rep. Mike Belcher of Wakefield expressed concern that the portion of the proposed law governing student portfolios could grant the state the power to interfere with the educational materials families elect to use.
“Is this opening the door, or is it supposed to be opening the door, to the possibility that the Department of Education could adjudicate certain things — sources, certain books — outside of bounds for parents to be teaching their children at home?” Belcher asked.
Bricchi said that was “not the intent” of the proposed legislation.
Whether to release academic performance metrics for school voucher and savings account programs has become a hot topic throughout the country. In states where data has been released, some research and state-level reports have found that students enrolled in voucher-like programs are underperforming compared to their public school counterparts.
David Trumble, a public education advocate from Weare, said that the academic performance of EFA recipients should be subjected to the same scrutiny as public school students.
“If you’re getting public money, why aren’t you playing by the same rules as the public schools?” Trumble asked. “The public schools — you can go to your local school board meeting and find out everything that’s going [on] there.
“But it’s really hard to get any information about this program,” he added. “It’s a black hole.”
Southerton said that the Children’s Scholarship Fund took no position on the law change. However, he said the proposed law contained ambiguity about whether families would send their portfolio evaluations directly to the state or whether the company would serve as the intermediary.
Kate Baker Demers, the executive director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, did not respond to a question about whether it would voluntarily release aggregate testing data from previous years.