Louis Porter does an extensive analysis of the education cost containment bill passed by the legislature in the Rutland Herald. I have some comments.
One is just on the numbers. Porter notes that
In all, school spending tops about $1.4 billion a year in Vermont.
Later he explains how the state funding formula works and notes that
The average rate of per-pupil spending statewide is roughly $10,000.
The problem is that if you divide $1.4 billion by $10,000 spending per student you get about 140,000 students. But Vermont only has about 90,000 students. We're not missing 50,000 students. But we are missing about $500 million. There is a huge difference between what the state counts as spending for Act 68 purposes and the amount we really spend to education 90,000 kids. It's the difference between the number that legislators use when they talk about education spending ($10,000 per student) and the amount that taxpayers are actually paying for (about $15,000 per student). That's not chump change.
He also talks about the "penalty box"
That is an existing law which requires that local voters pay more into the system if they approve school budgets which are more than 125 percent of the statewide per-pupil spending average. Districts appear to watch that number closely, and a significant block of budgets are clustered a few percentage points below that threshold. The penalty box remains in place if the new bill becomes law.
I am uncomfortable with the state telling towns that they are going to be penalized if they want to spend "too much" for education. Why? If taxpayer-voters want to spend their own money on education (or anything else) then why should they be penalized? People in that town should not complain about their property taxes if they've voted to increase them, but I don't think they should be penalized.
That they are is one of the cruel ironies of the legislature's response to the Vermont Supreme Court's Brigham decision. In the guise Brigham's commitment to equity, we are not content just to raise the spending in low-spending towns. We are trying to lower the spending level in high-spending towns. Kurt Vonnegut explained this nicely in his short story Harrison Bergeron.
Of course, one of the problems of Act 60 and Act 68 is that they've severed the links between voting on school budgets and the taxes that those same voters have to pay, with the result that the incentives to keep an eye on spending are sharply reduced (see my discussion here). Voters vote to increase school budgets, then the same voters complain about their high property taxes and pressure the legislature to "do something" to control school spending and their property taxes.
Finally, in one of the throwaway lines (a paragraph, actually) in the article, Porter says
Vermont's public schools and students routinely score in the top tier on national tests.
Like Lake Woebegone, we're all above average. But after you adjust for Vermont's racial makeup, Vermont student performance is only average. Nationally, almost one-third of all students are either black or Hispanic, and minorities perform significantly worse on standardized tests than non-minorities. In Vermont, our student population is nearly 100% white. And our test scores are just about identical to the U.S. white student population' scores. It would be good if journalists and policymakers would start to ask hard questions about educational quality in the state instead of blindly accepting the idea that Vermont student performance is stellar.
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