Rep. Tracy Anne Bricchi, a Concord Democrat, argues in favor of a bill to require the test scores of EFA recipients be reported to the state Department of Education, Feb. 12, 2026. (Photo by Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin)
House Republicans killed a Democratic bill intended to strengthen the reporting of test scores for students in the education freedom account program Thursday, arguing it would place an unfair burden on those students.
House Bill 1716 would have required parents applying for an education freedom account to allow their child’s standardized test results to be sent to the state Department of Education for compilation and analysis. The House killed the bill, 194-166, with five Republicans joining all Democrats to vote against its defeat.
Currently, students in the education freedom account program must take annual assessments, which are collected and stored by the private organization managing the EFAs, the Children’s Scholarship Fund.
But the law does not require the CSF to share those results with the state, and the department does not collect or analyze that data. Instead, the CSF is required only to share the test results with the family receiving the EFA.
HB 1716 would require the Division of Learner Support within the department to analyze and compile the data it received from the EFA program to “determine academic proficiency rates.” The bill would direct the department to aggregate that data based on “graduation rate, grade level, gender, race” and for other categories such as free and reduced-price lunch or special education recipients. In a fiscal analysis attached to the bill, the department stated it would need to hire three new positions to compile that data, at a cost of between $342,000 and $427,000 per year.
The bill revealed long-running disagreements over the EFA program. Democrats, who have long been opposed to the voucher-like program, have argued that the assessment data is needed to determine whether public education funds are being spent on private educational programs that are not producing acceptable educational outcomes.
Created in 2021, the EFA program allows New Hampshire families to receive the state’s per-pupil school funding share that would go to their child’s public school district, and use it toward private or home-schooling expenses instead.
Speaking in favor of HB 1716 Thursday, Democrats noted that the department releases annual aggregated data about standardized test results for public school districts. They argued private EFA recipients should be treated the same.