Republicans in the New Hampshire Legislature have pushed through several bills this year that are designed, the New Hampshire Bulletin news site informs us, to strengthen fiscal oversight of public schools.

In particular, conservative lawmakers have decreed from their lofty summit at the Statehouse in Concord that local school districts spend too much on administrators and not enough on teachers.

The Students First Act, endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu in August, requires that beginning in 2026 school districts produce four charts at least a week before their annual meetings depicting average teacher salary over the previous 10 years; average administrator salary over the same time frame; annual cost per pupil over the same period; and the current salaries of the district’s four highest-paid administrators. The hope is that voters will rein in spending on the latter.

Maybe they should. But either way this is a breathtaking exercise in hypocrisy, one apparent purpose of which is to drive a wedge between administrators and teachers. (Has it suddenly dawned on Republicans that public school teachers are not the enemy, because — well, because they vote?) We infer that the other point is to deflect attention from the Legislature’s continued failure after 30 years to fund a constitutionally adequate education.

To bridge this credibility gap, conservatives have had to jettison a number of their pet shibboleths. For one, that local residents are best qualified to resolve local issues because they are most familiar with local conditions. Apparently, dictates from Concord are now to take the place of long-standing deferral to the wisdom of the local crowd.

And whatever happened to conservatives’ unbridled faith in the power of free markets? Like it or not, this is a seller’s labor market when it comes to talented school administrators, who currently have great leverage in negotiating compensation with school boards. Conservative lawmakers themselves helped bring this about by declaring war on public education in recent years. In fact, we don’t doubt that a number of promising candidates for school superintendent jobs in New Hampshire have simply concluded, “You couldn’t pay me enough” to fight those battles.

Of course, there’s also the perennial conservative rallying cry that government ought to be conducted more along the lines of business. Well, the average school superintendent in New Hampshire makes about $125,000 a year, roughly twice as much as the average teacher at $67,000. Meanwhile, median pay nationally for CEOs in the private sector reached $16.3 million in 2023, nearly 200 times the typical worker’s wages for the year, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. By that standard, running schools more like businesses should result in much higher compensation for administrators compared with teachers, not less.

And, by the way, on the subject of fiscal oversight, we note that the state Department of Education continues to stonewall a legislatively mandated performance audit of the conservatives’ cherished Education Freedom Account program, which since its inception in 2021 has given away, without any independent accounting, $45 million to families who home-school or send their children to private schools.

A law enacted in 2022 requires the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Budget Assistant to conduct an audit of the program, including initial and continued eligibility of participants; controls for determining qualifying expenditures; identification and recovery of ineligible disbursements; procedures and controls for transferring funds to the organization that runs the program under contract with the Education Department; procedures and controls for phase-out grants; public reporting of participation, student outcomes and expenditures; demographics of qualifying applicants by municipality and state of residence, grade level and type and location of educational program.

In other words, routine stuff, which the Department of Education and its contractor refuse to provide, despite contract language requiring them to do so, under the novel argument that the contractor, the Children’s Scholarship Fund NH, owns the data and is under no obligation to provide it. But as Gregory Sullivan, a First Amendment lawyer based in Manchester, has pointed out, “If you’re a private organization, but you are dealing with taxpayers’ money, then the public has a right to know everything there is to know about those finances.” This is not to mention that the executive branch does not get to decide which laws it will obey and which it will defy.

This refusal to cooperate with the auditors has, to our sensitive nostrils, the distinct odor of potential corruption, all the more so when conservatives are clamoring for tighter oversight of public school finances, which by comparison are eminently transparent. Public money is public money, and needs to be accounted for no matter how unwisely it is dispensed.