Here we welcome a free and open exchange of opinions and commentary on the public policy issues facing New Hampshire. Our mission is to raise new ideas and improve public policy debates in our state through quality information and analysis.
We've just published our annual edition of "The Year in Graphs," a visual guide to some of the policy issues likely to make news in New Hampshire in 2013. With these 8 charts, we aim to give you a general sense of some of the challenges facing policymakers in the coming year.
You can find "Measuring New Hampshire in 2013" here.
The Center this week released the 2012 edition of "What is New Hampshire?", our annual compilation of data and analysis on the people,
strengths and challenges of the state. Think of it as a New Hampshire guidebook for your mind.
One of the central themes weaving through the report (available here) is the lingering impact of the Great Recession on New Hampshire. The state has emerged in a relatively strong position from recession. Yet New Hampshire also faces significant challenges in
coming years, related not only to the transformations wrought by the
economic downturn, but also shifting trends in our long-term
demographics. While the implications of the
changes now underway are still unclear, they do raise critical policy
questions.
We begin this year's edition of "What is New Hampshire?" with an
analysis of this new economic reality into which New Hampshire is
now emerging, a topic we'll address in greater depth in a publication later this month.
If it's Friday, it's time for another round up of policy reads. Here's a sample of the links, articles, reports and studies that caught our attention this week:
We're starting a new feature here at Policy Blog. Every Friday (or as often as we can remember) we'll share a handful of recent reports, news articles and blog postings that we think raise interesting or provocative public policy questions. Please share your thoughts about any of these pieces.
The issue of tax credits for private schools is now being debated in the Legislature, with several new bills moving through the State House.
One key question in the debate is: what are the costs or educating a single child, and how do those costs change when that child (or several children) leave a public school? As part of this discussion, the Center was asked to help calculate the marginal costs of public education, as a way of estimating the potential financial impact of such legislation. Our conclusion is that the financial impact of the proposed tax credits would vary considerably depending on several factors, including the size of the school, desired student-teacher ratios, and the magnitude of the changes in public school enrollment that followed the implementation of the legislation in question.
New Hampshire's School Building Aid program, which has been subject to dissection and discussion for several years, may finally be getting a makeover. But whether the latest proposal for reform goes far enough to address the program's fundamental problems is uncertain.
The Legislature this week returns to the debate over education funding, when it holds hearings on a constitutional amendment on the matter. Predicting the future of that amendment – or the future of two other similar constitutional amendments still before the Legislature – is tricky. But it’s safe to say that, if passed, all of them would fundamentally reshape the state’s long and tangled debate over education funding and would shift the grounds upon which any future education policy is based.
Teens who drop out of school are more likely than their graduating counterparts to be unemployed, on public assistance, and be involved in criminal activity.For the state to prosper socially and economically, we need an educated and skilled workforce. Drop out rates and NH's drop out policies are changing, but how, and with what impact?
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