New Hampshire spends roughly $50 million a year sending public dollars to families through its Education Freedom Account program, the school voucher system that now enrolls nearly 10,600 students. This week, lawmakers learned that the private nonprofit running the program does not track whether the special education students in it are actually making academic progress, and does not compare students’ test results from one year to the next.
That admission, delivered during a legislative oversight meeting, has reignited a bipartisan debate over how much accountability should come attached to public money once it flows to a privately administered program. According to reporting by New Hampshire Public Radio, the questions are no longer coming only from the program’s critics.
What Lawmakers Were Told
The Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire, the nonprofit that administers the Education Freedom Account program, told lawmakers it does not require students with disabilities to be evaluated academically each year in order to receive additional voucher money. That stands in contrast to public schools, where annual evaluation of special education students is required and where overall student performance on standardized tests must be reported publicly.
Rep. Rick Ladd, a Republican from Haverhill, pressed Matt Southerton, the director of policy and compliance at the Children’s Scholarship Fund, on the point during the Monday meeting. “That’s giving me heartburn,” Ladd said. He worried aloud about a system that, in his words, would “allow any medical professional that’s licensed somewhere in this country by a separate set of regulations” to determine whether a child qualifies for a given disability category in New Hampshire.
Ladd then asked directly whether there was any documentation showing growth for an individual student. “Is there any identification showing, here’s the growth in that particular student?” he asked. Southerton answered no.
How Accountability Currently Works
The program does require something from families, but it is far lighter than what public schools must produce. Parents receiving vouchers must submit what the program calls a “record of academic attainment.” That record can take one of several forms: a standardized test, or a letter from a licensed teacher who has reviewed the child’s work.
The range of methods families choose helps explain why the nonprofit says it cannot measure progress over time. In a year when the program enrolled just over 5,100 students, Southerton told lawmakers, only 10 families used the same standardized test that public schools administer. About 2,360 parents used a different standardized test, and roughly 2,800 chose to have a teacher review their child’s work. With families spread across so many different tests and portfolio reviews, Southerton said, the Children’s Scholarship Fund is not comparing results year to year.
The result is a program that collects evidence a child did some academic work, but does not assemble that evidence into any picture of whether students are learning more than they did the year before. Public schools, by contrast, report standardized test scores that critics frequently cite as proof that traditional schools are failing to educate children adequately. The voucher program faces no comparable public reporting.
A Bipartisan Accountability Push
What makes this round of scrutiny notable is that it is not falling along the usual party lines. Lawmakers from both parties have called for more public oversight of a program funded entirely by public dollars. Ladd, a Republican, is among those raising concerns, which complicates the familiar narrative in which voucher accountability is purely a fight between school choice supporters and opponents.
The state is already auditing the Education Freedom Account program. Southerton said he was surprised and concerned that lawmakers want to widen that audit to include evidence of academic attainment. He warned that doing so could expose sensitive student information. “If they increase the scope of the audit, that would be private financial information from those students and their testing data,” he said, noting that records of the voucher program are private because it is run by a private organization.
That privacy argument sits at the heart of the tension. The program’s defenders see a private nonprofit handling family choices that should not be subject to the same public reporting as a government school. Its critics see tens of millions of taxpayer dollars moving with less visibility than a single public school district must provide, and ask how the state can know the money is working.
Why This Matters for New Hampshire
The Education Freedom Account program has expanded rapidly. Enrollment has roughly doubled, from just over 5,100 students to nearly 10,600, and the income limits that once restricted eligibility have been loosened. As the program grows, so does the share of the state’s education spending that flows through it, and so does the question of what taxpayers are getting in return.
Special education sharpens the question. Students with disabilities receive additional money through the program precisely because their needs are greater and their education is more expensive. Yet those are the students for whom the nonprofit acknowledges it has no year-over-year measure of academic growth. In the public system, federal and state law wrap special education students in layers of evaluation, individualized planning, and progress monitoring. Families who choose a voucher are trading that structure for flexibility, and lawmakers are now asking whether the state should know how that trade is turning out.
The debate also lands amid a broader reckoning over education results in the state. Recent national data showed that, on average, New Hampshire students’ reading and math performance has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, a finding that adds urgency to questions about whether any sector, public or private, is moving students forward. That backdrop connects this fight to the wider debate over school choice and reform in New Hampshire, where lawmakers have repeatedly clashed over how much oversight the state should impose.
The accountability question is unlikely to be settled soon. It echoes the same themes running through other recent fights in Concord, including the push to lift state oversight of homeschooling and the contested effort to expand open enrollment across district lines. In each case, the underlying argument is the same: how far should the state’s reach extend once families exercise choice, and how much should taxpayers be allowed to see.
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