Education as the Engine & Child Well-Being as Economic Policy

The Ultimate Return on Investment

I was taught from a young age that a democracy cannot survive without educated citizens. If people cannot separate fact from fiction, think critically, or recognize manipulation, the system collapses. I believe we are testing that theory to its breaking point today.

But the stakes are even higher than preserving democracy. Education is how a society equips each new generation to pursue happiness collectively. It is the process through which we pass down the tools for understanding the world, the wisdom to navigate it with purpose, and the empathy to do so alongside others. An educated person is more than just a productive worker: they are a capable neighbor, an engaged citizen, a lifelong learner, and a steward of the future.

Our public education system has been systematically underfunded and undermined for decades. The result is a failing of our intergenerational covenant. We are neglecting the very machinery through which we renew our society’s capacity for innovation, compassion, and growth. Community First Economics sees this with stark clarity: Education is the single most important infrastructure investment we can make in our community. It’s the engine of opportunity, the guardrail of democracy, and the foundational investment in our community’s future vitality.

Let’s talk about it like a small business owner would: return on investment.

Study after study shows that money spent on education, especially high-quality early childhood education, pays exponential returns. The famous Perry Preschool Project and ongoing research by economist James Heckman demonstrate that every dollar invested in early education yields $7 to $12 in long-term benefits through higher graduation rates, increased lifetime earnings, lower crime, and reduced spending on social services and healthcare.

This is the smartest economic and social development strategy there is. States with strong, well-funded schools have stronger, happier, more resilient communities. They attract businesses that need a skilled and adaptable workforce. They foster innovation because they nurture curious, capable, and collaborative minds. The child in a kindergarten classroom in Claremont is doing more than just learning her ABCs; she’s a future nurse, entrepreneur, artist, or engineer who will contribute to our shared prosperity and civic life.

Neglecting this investment is the economics of self-sabotage. It’s like eating your seed corn. It’s a guaranteed recipe for future scarcity of talent, trust, and social cohesion.

Breaking the Housing Logjam: How School Funding Reform Unlocks Homes

Here is one of the most powerful interconnections in the Community First model, a direct link between the crisis described earlier in the book and the solution: We cannot solve the housing crisis without fixing how we fund our schools.

Right now, towns have a perverse incentive to block affordable housing. Why? Because under our broken property tax system, new families moving into smaller, more affordable homes are seen as a net cost. Their property taxes won’t fully cover the expense of educating their children in the local school. So towns use exclusionary zoning to keep them out, protecting their municipal budgets but strangling their communities and fueling the statewide housing shortage.

Community First Economics flips this script. By reforming school funding, shifting the primary responsibility to the state through fair, progressive revenue, we remove the financial fear. A town that welcomes new workforce housing, duplexes, or tiny homes is no longer punished with a fiscal crisis. It can grow organically, confident that the state will ensure its schools are fairly funded through a collective pool of resources.

Fix the school funding formula, and you remove the biggest political barrier to building the homes we desperately need. It’s a two-for-one solution for community health: we secure excellent education for every child and open the door to the housing that families and our economy require to thrive. 

Learning from the World: And From Mississippi

New Hampshire’s hyper-local funding system is an outlier, not just nationally, but globally. Most developed nations treat education as a national or regional responsibility, not a geographical lottery. In countries like Finland, Germany, and Canada, higher levels of government provide the majority of school funding, ensuring a baseline of quality and equity for every child. 

In this post World War II era, Finland’s rise to the top of global education rankings is widely described as the result of a major pivot away from competition and toward equity and trust. Unlike the American model of high stakes testing and administrative oversight, the Finnish system is built on the professionalization of teaching. 

Teachers are trained through research-based university programs and the profession is highly selective and prestigious. Once in the classroom, teachers are granted broad autonomy. There are no national examinations in comprehensive school, there are no teacher ranking systems tied to national tests. The main standardized national exam is the matriculation examination at the end of high school. The system operates on a foundation of high trust, assuming that rigorous preparation reduces the need for bureaucratic policing.

This pedagogical freedom is paired with “a less is more” philosophy that prioritizes the biological and psychological needs of the child. Compulsory schooling begins at age seven, and the school day is commonly structured around shorter lessons with frequent breaks. A typical pattern is forty-five minutes of instruction followed by a fifteen-minute break, which supports movement, reset, and attention. 

Homework loads are generally lighter than in many peer countries, especially in earlier grades, and Finland’s strongest years in international comparisons have been associated with calm classrooms, focused instruction, and consistently trained teachers rather than test prep culture.

A controversial pillar of the model is how Finland limits private flight. Schooling is tuition-free, and even private providers operate inside a publicly funded, publicly regulated framework. That structure keeps affluent families tied to the same system and helps sustain broad political support for high quality schools everywhere, not only in wealthy neighborhoods. By centering public policy on students rather than the property tax base, Finland aims for the principle that every school should be a good school.

These nations have decided that a child’s potential should not be limited by their parents’ property value or hometown. They fund schools the same way they fund roads and public safety: as a universal public good essential to the nation’s survival, prosperity, and happiness. Their results, in educational attainment, economic mobility, social cohesion, and reported well-being, speak for themselves.

While global models show us the importance of equitable funding, we must also look for practical, evidence-based strategies that work within our classrooms. A powerful example comes from an unexpected place: the state of Mississippi.

For decades, it languished at the bottom of national education rankings. Then, it embarked on a concerted, statewide campaign to improve literacy, with stunning results. By 2022, Mississippi’s 4th graders, once ranked 49th, had risen to tie for 21st in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—matching the national average and outperforming many wealthier states.

How did they do it? With a Community First-style focus on the foundational skill of reading. The state implemented a multipronged strategy: The Third-Grade Gate: A law requiring third-graders to demonstrate minimum reading proficiency to advance, creating a systemic imperative to identify and help struggling readers before they fell behind.

Investment in the Science of Reading: Retraining thousands of teachers in phonics-based literacy instruction, grounded in cognitive science.

Early Screening and Intensive Intervention: Screening for deficiencies starting in kindergarten, with targeted tutoring and summer literacy camps for those who needed help.

The results speak to a core Community First principle: prevention is cheaper and more humane than rescue. Holding a student back for a critical year of literacy intervention is a difficult, short-term cost. But the lifelong cost of functional illiteracy to that individual’s pursuit of happiness and to society in lost potential, poverty, and poor health, is incalculably higher. Mississippi chose to make the upfront, foundational investment.

This model offers New Hampshire a crucial lesson. We must have the courage to prioritize mastery over movement. Our goal cannot be just to process children through grades. It must be to ensure every child possesses the foundational tools, upon which all future learning and self-determination is built.

Recess and the Woods: Nature as Essential Educational Infrastructure

Our focus on foundational academic skills must be matched by an equally serious commitment to a child’s foundational human needs: movement, play, and connection to the natural world. There is a growing body of research that points to a simple, profound, and largely ignored fact: children learn better, behave better, and feel better when they have regular, unstructured time outdoors.

Yet, we have systematically stripped this from their school days. Recess has been shortened or used as a bargaining chip. The school day is a marathon of indoor, sedentary concentration. We then medicate and diagnose children for their inability to conform to this unnatural container.

Community First Economics sees this not as a disciplinary issue, but as a design failure. We are trying to build healthy, happy, creative future citizens while denying them the conditions essential for healthy neurological, physical, and social development.

The science is clear: Cognitive Benefits: Time in nature improves attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Studies show that children who spend more time outdoors score higher on standardized tests in reading and math.

Mental Health Benefits: It reduces symptoms of stress, anxiety, and ADHD. It builds resilience.

Physical & Social Benefits: It promotes fitness and fosters negotiation, cooperation, and imagination.

This is an investment in the biological and psychological foundation upon which learning occurs. We would not expect a plant to thrive in a room with no sunlight or fresh air. We must stop expecting it of our children. By reintegrating nature and free movement into the school day, we are not sacrificing academic rigor. We are creating the calm, focused, healthy, and joyful minds that are capable of achieving it. We are building a foundation for lifelong well-being, not just test-taking.

Child Well-Being Is Economic Policy: Cultivating the Seedlings of Our Future

I often see cruel comments aimed at struggling parents, especially single mothers. If you can’t afford kids, you shouldn’t have them. This attitude is not only heartless, it’s economically and morally illiterate. It ignores the most fundamental truth there is: Our children are not a private hobby. They are the future.

Human civilization is a relay race. One generation passes the baton to the next. For millennia, societies understood this and invested in their young. That intergenerational contract of care has been in tatters since we decided to treat children as consumer choices rather than as a shared responsibility and our most precious common asset.

Supporting children from birth through adulthood is a strategic investment in our community’s most vital infrastructure. When children thrive, towns thrive in perpetuity. When children struggle, we all pay the price for generations, in diminished potential, in reactive spending, and in a frayed social fabric.

This is the essence of Community First Economics: the recognition that the pursuit of happiness is a multigenerational project. We cannot secure our own well-being on the broken backs of our children. Their foundation is our collective foundation.

Childcare: Essential Infrastructure

Let’s start with the most obvious market failure: childcare. For too long, we’ve framed it as a “personal responsibility.” But try running a restaurant, a hospital, a factory, or a town when half your workforce can’t find or afford safe, nurturing care for their kids. It’s impossible.

When my son, Ollie, was born, my restaurant was only one year old. We couldn’t afford childcare. His mother and I took turns working in the restaurant and watching the baby. Eventually, his mother got a job as the administrator of our local community church. She brought our son to work with her, where elderly women would dote on him all day as he ran around the sanctuary. We were lucky, saving tens of thousands of dollars we did not have. Most new parents are not so lucky.

Childcare is economic and social infrastructure, as essential as roads or broadband.

Without it, the workforce of today collapses and the workforce of tomorrow is underdeveloped. In New Hampshire, the annual cost of child-care for two children is roughly $32,000.

Meanwhile, the providers, overwhelmingly women, are paid poverty wages, trapped in a broken system that fails everyone.

The Community First solution is straightforward: treat childcare like the public good it is.

• Subsidize access for working families on a sliding scale.

• Invest in the workforce to raise wages and improve quality.

• Integrate services by co-locating childcare centers with senior centers or libraries, fostering cross-generational bonds and creating community hubs of care.

When childcare is stable, affordable, and high-quality, parents can work, businesses can staff, and, most importantly, children get the critical early stimulation, socialization, and security they need for healthy brain development. High-quality early childcare can increase future earnings by up to 26% and reduce crime rates by 25%.

Health and Nutrition: The Building Blocks of a Future Citizen

A child who is hungry, lead-poisoned, or battling untreated asthma is a future student who will struggle to concentrate, a future adult with chronic health problems and a future community member with a reduced capacity to contribute and connect. Their pursuit of happiness is compromised before it even begins.

The solutions are simple, proven, and profoundly cost-effective: School Meals for All: No means-testing, no stigma. Just breakfast and lunch for every student. Children who eat school breakfast have been shown to score 17.5% higher on math tests and attend 1.5 more days of school per year. A child can’t learn on an empty stomach.

Protect and Expand Health Coverage: Ensure every child has access to preventative care, dental checkups, and mental health services.

Remove Environmental Toxins: Aggressively test for and remediate lead pipes, PFAS, and mold in homes, schools, and playgrounds.

Every dollar spent on a child’s health and nutrition saves seven to ten dollars in future healthcare, special education, criminal justice, and social service costs. This is fiscal responsibility and moral necessity.

The Two-Generation Approach: Supporting Parents is Supporting Kids

Child well-being cannot be separated from family well-being. Stressed, insecure, isolated parents cannot provide stable, nurturing environments. This is why policies like paid family leave, a living wage, and flexible work schedules are child well-being policies.

When parents have time to bond with a newborn without financial panic, income to cover basics without working three jobs, and the flexibility to attend a school conference or care for a sick child, children’s outcomes improve dramatically. Children whose parents have access to paid leave are 25% less likely to be hospitalized in their first year of life. We should stop trying to fix children in isolation and invest in the family, caregiving, and community conditions that shape outcomes.

The High Cost of Instability: Foster Care, Homelessness, and Lost Potential

When children are removed from unstable homes or face homelessness, the immediate crisis is only the beginning. The long-term costs of educational disruption, trauma, and systemic dependency are paid by the whole community.

In New Hampshire:

• Over 1,100 children are in foster care, with median stays nearing a year.

• Homelessness among children rose 41% in one year.

• 1 in 4 children live in housing-insecure households.

Nationally, the downstream effects of foster care and childhood instability are staggering:

• 1 in 4 former foster youth will be incarcerated within two years of aging out of the system.

• Up to 50% of youth experiencing homelessness were previously in foster care.

• Only about half of foster youth graduate high school by age 19, compared to 87% of their peers.

• Former foster children are three times more likely to rely on public assistance as adults.

Why does this matter for education? Because unstable housing and family separation sabotage learning. Children in foster care change schools frequently, fall behind academically, and are far more likely to drop out. Those experiencing homelessness face hunger, stress, and invisibility in the classroom.

But this is more than just a tragedy, it’s an economic failure. Foster care costs New Hampshire over $50 million annually. Homeless youth often cycle through shelters, emergency healthcare, and later, the criminal justice system. The downstream costs of instability are astronomical.

A Community First Response: Stability as Educational Infrastructure

We cannot educate children who are hungry, homeless, or traumatized by family separation. Therefore, family stability and housing security are prerequisites for learning.

A Community First approach recognizes: Housing support is educational support. Eviction prevention and affordable housing keep families together and kids in school.

Wraparound services keep kids out of foster care. Mental health care, substance treatment, and parenting resources are cheaper and more humane than removal.

Kinship and foster care stability improve outcomes. When kids stay in their communities and schools, they thrive.

Investing in stable housing and family preservation is a fiscally smart move. It reduces future spending on special education, counseling, juvenile justice, and adult incarceration. It transforms vulnerable children into capable students, future workers, and engaged citizens.

In the end, the well-being of children and the strength of our schools depend on the same foundation: a stable home. If we want to build a brighter future for New Hampshire, we must start by securing that foundation for every child.

A Covenant with the Future

Skeptics ask, “But how do we pay for it?” We must ask in return: “How can we afford not to?”

The cost of neglect is astronomical and paid in the worst currency: In Lost Human Potential: Children who start behind rarely catch up. We waste talent and spirit.

In Reactive, Punitive Spending: We skimp on prenatal care, then pay for neonatal intensive care. We defund preschool, then pay for special education. We ignore mental health, then pay for incarceration.

In Community Erosion: Families in constant crisis can’t volunteer or invest in their neighborhoods. The social fabric tears, trust evaporates.

Investing in children is the opposite of a handout. It is a hand-up to the entire community across time. It creates a virtuous cycle: healthy, educated, socially-skilled children become a resilient, innovative, and compassionate workforce and citizenry. This attracts business, broadens the tax base, and creates a society where people want to live and raise their own families.

Schools are where children from different backgrounds learn and play together, forging the bonds of a common identity. They are where parents meet, where town voting happens, where disaster shelters are set up. They are the heartbeat of the town.

This is more than policy. It is a covenant. A promise that we will not punish children for the circumstances of their birth. A promise that we value them not merely for their future economic output, but for their inherent humanity and their role as the next stewards of our world.

Investing in education and child well-being is the ultimate act of faith in our children and in each other. It is how we ensure that the pursuit of happiness is not a privilege for the lucky few, but a cultivated capacity for all. Let’s build a foundation worthy of that faith, and in doing so, rebuild the most powerful engine of our common prosperity and shared happiness.