New Hampshire residents may well wonder how it came to be that in the years after the COVID 19 pandemic, their highly regarded public school system has been defamed, degraded and defunded while a shadow system of private, publicly funded education for a vocal minority has been erected alongside it.

The two latest depredations in the Legislature’s campaign against public schools occurred this month. First, the Republican majority killed a bill that would have required public reporting of aggregate test scores of participants in the Education Freedom Account program. The EFA siphons off millions of dollars annually from the public schools and bestows taxpayers’ money on individual families to use at their discretion for their children’s private schools or home-schooling expenses.

This shadow system of education operates largely without accountability. EFA participants are required to take annual assessments of their progress, but the test results are shared only with their families. The state Education Department does not collect or analyze the data, as it does for public schools. The bill that was rejected earlier this month would have put the EFA system on equal footing with the public schools when it comes to assessing academic proficiency rates.

The Legislature is also considering a bill that would do away with virtually all regulation of home-schooling. 

These kinds of exceptions and carve-outs in the name of “school choice” or “parental rights” may strike the overwhelming majority of parents who are content with the public schools as bizarre. But there is context that helps explain the seemingly inexplicable.

First, there is the Free State Project, which was established in the early 2000s to recruit thousands of libertarians and their ideological soul mates to move to New Hampshire, with the goal of putting their free-market stamp on state and local government. This they have unquestionably done; with an estimated 80 to 100 members, they constitute a decisive force in the Legislature, where their inveterate hostility to publicly funded education plays out.

But the conflict over schools in the United States stretches back at least to the Progressive Era (not to be confused with the progressive movement of our own era). It ran roughly from the late 1890s to the early 1920s. Walter Nugent, a scholar of that era, writes in his introduction to the subject that Progressivism “emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty, while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive.” Sound familiar?

The Progressive response, which enjoyed broad political support at the time, comprised  a series of wide-ranging reforms, which included the introduction of mandatory school attendance. Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, notes that “by 1916, nearly every state had mandated school attendance, usually between the ages of six and 16. … Some families objected, citing ‘parental rights,’ a legal novelty, but courts broadly upheld compulsory-education laws, deeming free public schooling to be essential to democratic citizenship.” Universal public education was conceived as a way to bridge the gap between wealth and poverty, to provide a common experience for all children as a way to foster civic unity.

Mandatory schooling was also tied to other Progressive-era reforms such as child welfare laws, abolition of child labor and vaccine mandates.

In short, the state asserted a compelling interest in educating children and in their health and welfare, which to that point had been the almost exclusive province of parents. Soon enough this idea was contested not only in who should be taught but also what should be taught in public schools. This manifested itself in the battle over the teaching of evolution as opposed to biblical Creationism, as in the Scopes trial of 1925.

While the basic elements of the Progressive Era program prevailed for a long time in American life, the issue was never settled in the minds of many conservatives, especially Christian conservatives. New Hampshire’s recent experience is testimony to the unresolved tension between what government may require and what authority parents may exercise. Substitute a ban on teaching “divisive concepts” for a ban on teaching “evolution,” and you get the idea. Vaccine mandates are similarly targeted by those who believe parents must have the last word, even if it puts their child’s health at risk, along with other people’s.

Taken as a whole, these frictions fray the social cohesion fostered by common educational experience, and as such contribute to the sense that American society is coming apart at the seams. But every action has a reaction, and we anxiously await a new progressive response.