Ekachai Lohacamonchai
The junior-senior high school I attended in New Hampshire in the early 2000s was originally built in the 1920s. It had windows that were covered over to save on heating, rumors of asbestos, and a deep well of community pride. To me, it exemplified the enduring New England trait of self-reliance—that we manage to do the best we can with what we have, which in the case of public school funding, is often not enough. In New Hampshire, where I am now a teacher myself, there is no income tax and school funding is based primarily on local property values, forcing local school districts to rely on a range of disparate measures—including bake sales—to keep the school doors open and the lights on.
But many districts have been unable to keep their doors open. In middle school, my soccer team traveled to the nearby town of Berlin, where we played under the smokestacks of its paper mills. But when the paper and pulp industry offshored jobs and closed the mills, Berlin lost its primary economic driver, resulting in stagnation and urban decline that shrank the town’s tax base alongside its share of state contributions to public school funding. In 2019, Berlin shuttered one of its few elementary schools, opting to consolidate.
Andru Volinsky’s new book, The Last Bake Sale, paints a picture of this reality in its account of the decades-long fight for fair funding in New Hampshire’s public schools. Volinsky describes the school landscape of our state, which is familiar to me. I recognized schools where I played sports growing up and a school where I interviewed for my first teaching job, which included a post-interview essay writing session in a basement. This level of detail helps to tell the familiar story of how our state has consistently lagged behind all others in financing our public schools, despite Herculean efforts at the local level.
Volinsky, an advocacy lawyer who ran for New Hampshire governor in 2020, is a quixotic figure. During his campaign, he carried an eight-foot scrap of wood as a tangible visual for school funding inequalities. “Property-poor towns” like Berlin, a city in northern New Hampshire, marked the bottom of the stick, while “property-rich towns” sat on top, effectively demonstrating the differences in financial capacities of various school districts. He narrowly lost the Democratic primary to an establishment-backed candidate, but his campaign, which received the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders, brought newfound attention to the issue of school funding.
The title of the book comes from the famous poster that reads “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
Long before he entered politics, Volinsky litigated school funding cases on behalf of the poorest school districts in the state, including cities like Berlin and Claremont. After the 1993 Massachusetts McDuffy v. Secretary of the Executive Office of Education case established that state’s duty to provide funding to educate all students, Volinsky’s litigation team argued in front of the New Hampshire Supreme Court that the state’s public school funding system violated students’ constitutional right to an adequate education. Though the court ruled in favor of the underfunded school districts in 1993, New Hampshire lawmakers of both political parties avoided implementing policy solutions to address funding disparities.
From the outset of The Last Bake Sale, Volinsky asserts that the funding of public education is a civil right. But this notion has been contested throughout U.S. history, especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, which required the end to “separate but equal” schooling. Many white communities responded by defunding and closing public schools and setting up private, all-white academies rather than provide adequate funding for all children in public schools. As Volinsky’s continued work demonstrates, the right to a properly funded education is one that has not been fully realized—and one that we must continue to struggle for.
Volinsky paints an accurate picture of the distance between the “haves” and the “have nots” within New Hampshire. The disparity reveals itself in the quality and age of school buildings, as well as the ability of schools to keep teachers over the long term. To develop and sustain a learning environment for students requires high-quality, experienced teachers, but in poorer areas, some school districts are losing staff year after year because of their inability to pay a living wage.
As The Last Bake Sale aptly observes, school funding touches every aspect of life. Volinsky describes how children born in New Hampshire, the land of “Live Free or Die,” are subject to the lottery of birth and the not-so-random state reliance on a regressive tax system that is a holdover of an agrarian age. For those born in wealthier zip codes, modern schools with decently paid staff nurture children and develop their natural talents. For those born into less fortunate circumstances, situations are more taxing, and adults are more stressed by the pressures of getting by in a world where jobs can disappear overnight and entire industries can abandon their employees without a second thought. The Last Bake Sale begs Americans to ask, “Don’t the kids of factory workers and farmers and police officers deserve a decent education, too?”
Volinsky demonstrates in his book how the battle for fair funding depends on multiple theaters of action: the courts, public policy, and public opinion. Outside of the courts, he pursued strategies including offering tours of schools to public officials and creating a non-profit to educate the public and advance fair school funding solutions. Litigation, like the Claremont School District v. Governor of New Hampshire case of the 1990s, has provided what at times seem like improbable wins in the courts—that time and again met supine politicians who, in Volinsky’s account, refused to adequately implement policy solutions that met the needs of students living in poverty.
After the mid 1990s, Volinsky came to believe that litigation was not enough alone. There was a need, he felt, to shape public opinion to move the politicians who forever kicked the proverbial can down the road when it came to school funding. In the same vein as Jonathan Kozol, who depicted the disparate conditions in public school in books like Savage Inequalities, Volinsky incorporates photos of public schools in The Last Bake Sale to illustrate the unvarnished truth of these inequities. One photograph shows a half lit bathroom in a New Hampshire school with a desk crammed in next to a stall for special education instructional services. The viewers are left to consider how this kind of arrangement can be allowed in the richest country on Earth.
One element left wanting in The Last Bake Sale is a sustained narrative relating New Hampshire’s struggle to the national contestation of education as a civil right. The book’s opening section details the historical relationship between the fight for civil and educational rights before getting into the particulars of his litigation efforts in the Granite State. Volinsky, in the final section of the book, approaches the topic of how the rolling back of civil rights is related to the school privatization movement, which attempted to co-opt the language of civil rights. Yet, his final analysis leaves the reader desiring more direction as to how these retrogressive forces interact.
Today, even the scant resources for public schools are contested by privatizers, which in New Hampshire include a coalition of libertarian “Free Staters” and out-of-state dark money. The privatizers argue neighborhood schools should be punished for low test scores with layoffs of school staff and that “underperforming” schools should be stripped of funding and closed, rather than supported through investment. Closures, as an alternative to investment, divert public funds away from communities. Additionally, the expansion of vouchers, also known as “Education Freedom Accounts” (EFAs), have placed public dollars into the hands of students who attend private and religious schools. These developments are a threat to the vision of fair funding championed by Volinsky—a boon to wealthier families as the less fortunate are deprived of what little aid the state provides.
Left unchecked by the courts, inequality in education has grown more extreme. Just as segregationists once drained public pools rather than allow all children to swim together, we are now seeing the draining of resources from our public schools to prevent students of all backgrounds from learning together. And as state funding of religious schools challenges the bedrock principles of separation of church and state, it feels like we are going backward at a faster pace than at any other point in my life. This is done under the cover of the rhetorical cloak of advancing education as a civil right—all while public funds are funneled away from public school students and families.
The aggressive pursuit of profit fueled by judicial and legislative inaction is what makes Volinsky’s book so timely and important. The Last Bake Sale documents an attempt to build broad support for a system that is fair, reasonable, and reliable. Volinsky faced strong political headwinds in his fight for fair funding, with both Democratic and Republican leaders siding with an untenable status quo. In this regard, the book is a call for a political approach that centers working people and departs from the gridlock of the two party system. Government can work, Volinsky reminds us, and we each have a responsibility to bend the arc toward the schools all students need.