ohwilleke

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Kinross
NH does very well. Funny that the article gripes that it is "under funded" yet does very well.

Test scores simply show that New Hampshire's demographics are affluent. To show this, consider Denver. It has 80some elementary schools, dozens of middle schools and several high schools. Its school district covers a population equal to about half the population of New Hampshire.

In Denver, every single teacher is paid on the same pay scale, the physical plant is very similar system wide since it has the same in district formula, the administration and curricular standards are exactly the same, every student is free to choose any school in the state that he wants, etc. Yet, test scores are in lock step with school demographics. Schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods within Denver Public Schools are comparable to New Hampshire's results. Schools in the poorest areas have miserable results.

Suburban school districts consistently have high test scores for the same reason.

The same article you quote notes that poor communities have extremely ill funded schools, hence the incentive of poor persons to move to areas where schools in low income areas are better funded. The easiest way to improve a school's test scores are to get rid of all the poor kids, which is precisely what New Hampshire has done. Any system which discourages the poor from locating in the state, as New Hampshire does, improves its statistics.

ohwilleke

With regard to "transparency" in New Hampshire, one need only look to the largest company in the state, Tyco, which is based in Exeter, New Hampshire and has sales that exceed all other publicly held companies in the state combined (one other publically held company has more jobs, at 600 NH jobs as opposed to about 490 at Tyco).

Source: Hoover's Handbook.

Also, New Hampshire ranks 35th in the nation in IPOs as a percentage of state GNP, and is only average for the nation in scientists and engineers per capita.

Perhaps lax regulation isn't such a good thing.

elwoodblues

...the federal gov't monkeying around with the interest rates to try to sustain permanent 'boom' growth rates... Oh, sorry! We're not supposed to talk about that...

meritocrat

Yes, but a fiscal policy relates to taxation and a government's budgetary policy.

Most libertarians want to eliminate the minimum wage because it can cause unemployment.