This is a tale of two charts. Each addresses a factor that has a profound impact on the quality and cost of education in the state of Vermont: student-teacher ratios.
Though the number-crunchers who created these visual shortcuts (one could compare them with a statistician’s sound bite) use some of the same data, their fundamental assumptions differ. That said, the charts point to the same conclusion: There is only one way to increase student-teacher ratios with the goal of saving money, and that’s by significantly cutting staff.
The state would have to eliminate 1,549 teaching positions to increase the student-teacher ratio from its current level of 10.7 to 1 to its goal of 13.1 to 1, according to the Douglas administration and the Vermont Department of Education. Officials say the staff reductions can be made through attrition over the course of the next few years as the baby-boomer workforce approaches retirement age.
Douglas has said the ratio increase would save taxpayers $100 million.
Opponents argue that voters in local communities control school spending, and if they were unhappy with the cost and the quality of education, they would reject school budgets and demand lower school spending.
Chart No. 1: “Education: Out of Balance”
One of the charts, titled “Education: Out of Balance,” has been used by Gov. Jim Douglas to score political points on one of his favorite topics – taxes. Douglas has said on numerous occasions that Vermont has the second highest property tax rates in the country (New Hampshire surpasses us), and the surest way to reduce the state’s high education tax burden is by mandating a higher student-teacher ratio, though he has tried other tacks. For a while, he pushed for the consolidation of school districts, now arranged in 60 supervisory unions, into 20 unified districts; his administration has also proposed a straight 2 percent reduction in funding for schools. These proposals were rebuffed by the Democratic Legislature.
DownloadEducation Out of Balance chart from the Douglas administration
The “Out of Balance” chart is frequently displayed in poster form at press conferences, and handed out to reporters at Republican events.
The numerical illustration shows a correlation between Vermont’s student-teacher ratio, the lowest in the nation at 10.7 to 1, and the country’s second highest personal property tax burden. The “teeter totter” chart states that if the average ratio were increased from 10.7 to 1 to 13.1 to 1, property taxes could be reduced by $96 million. The national average is 15.2 to 1.
Douglas, at press conferences and on the stump for his chosen successor, Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, has repeatedly berated the Legislature for refusing to mandate changes to education that he believes will result in significant reductions in the state’s school tax burden. Douglas chose not to sign H.66, a voluntary school district merger plan, because it “did not take meaningful steps against property tax growth”; he allowed it to become law without his signature. (See video footage at the end of this post.)
On June 3, Douglas described his failure to reduce the cost of education as one of the “biggest disappointments” of his eight-year career as governor. The statewide property tax rate, he warned, could go up as much as 10 cents, or 12 percent next year.
“We have the lowest student-teacher ratio in America, and a lot of schools have decided it’s just not sustainable,” Douglas said as he listed off a a few schools in towns that have closed in recent years, including Belvidere and Bennington.
Tom Evslin, the administration’s point man on the Challenges for Change, the restructuring plan that is supposed to save the state money in education and other areas of state government, said some kind of school spending mandate is necessary since schools haven’t done enough to curb costs at a time when student enrollments are declining.
In the 1990s, the state had well over 100,000 students; there are now 92,000 pupils in schools statewide now, and the number is expected to reach a low of 85,000 before bottoming out.
“There has to be some way to tell school districts that there is a limit on the amount of funding that’s available, and (that) the only lever anyone has to significantly reduce the amount of money we’re spending is to reduce staff,” Evslin said. “It would be acceptable to the governor if there were mandatory caps put on school districts, and school districts then decided for themselves how much of the reduction they were going to achieve through staff reduction, with the understanding that there is no other way because that’s where most of the expense is.”
Chart No. 2: “Effect of Closing Schools on Student/Teacher Ratio”
The other chart, developed by Brad James, finance director for the Department of Education, looks at student-teacher ratios from the flip side. Instead of examining how much money the state would save if the student-teacher ratio shifted upward, his calculations are a hypothetical representation of how many schools would close and how many teaching positions would be eliminated if the ratio became a state mandate.
DownloadEffect of Closing Schools on Student/Teacher Ratios, from Brad James
Last year, a study committee asked James to determine whether closing the state’s 17 smallest schools, with fewer than 50 students, would have an impact on the average student-teacher ratio statewide. He ran the numbers, and the results were negligible. If all 17 schools were shuttered tomorrow, the ratio would go up one-tenth of 1 percent, according to James’ research, which is based on fiscal year 2009 data.
Once the database query was created, James decided to run more numbers. He approached the student-teacher ratio question as a math problem and asked the following hypothetical question: If the state required each of its 308 school districts to maintain the Douglas administration’s ideal goal of a 13.1 to 1 student-teacher ratio, how would closing schools affect that ratio? In theory, how many could be shuttered to obtain the magic number 13? The answer: 143. In order to reach the national average, 15.2, his calculations show that one way to reach that number would be to close 190 schools – two-thirds of the total.
James is the first to say his chart is not a recommendation from the Department of Education. (In fact, it’s buried on the department’s Web site.) He created it, he said, to illustrate the impact of such a mandate on a very rural educational system.
“Is it realistic to close all these schools? Absolutely not,” James said. “Can you close some of them? Probably, but it’s not the state’s mandate to close schools. It’s really an illustration more than anything else to (show) that Vermont isn’t like a lot of the rest of the country. And neither is North Dakota or South Dakota.”
The administration’s student-teacher ratio objective can only be achieved if a number of schools close, according to Evslin. Just how many would have to fold, he said, is anyone’s guess, since those decisions would be made by local communities.
“A number of schools have to close in order to accomplish that, that’s absolutely true,” Evslin said. “Which schools is much more complex because it is a question of how far they are from another school. It’s a complicated equation I’m not sure anyone knows the answer to.
“What would be a misreading of (the chart) is to say that the only way that you could get to the national average is to close all schools under 275 students,” Evslin said. “Other ways to get there would be to keep open some of the schools with students under 275 but have less teachers in some of the schools.”
James’ chart points up a fundamental disconnect between the administration and the Department of Education. While Douglas has hammered on mandates, Armando Vilaseca, commissioner of education, has insisted on protecting the state’s tradition of local control.
The chart, Vilaseca said, shows how difficult it is to achieve large-scale educational savings in Vermont. He said a mandate would have to be applied to supervisory unions, so that the average could be applied more judiciously across a pool of individual school districts.
“We have more rural, spread-out schools — it’s a factor of geography,” Vilaseca said. “This is a local control state with a lot of history and more liberal interpretations of things around schools. We have what we want; if we didn’t want this, we would change it.”
Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, who lobbied for H.66, the voluntary school district merger plan, said the chart is a poignant way to present the information, “but I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination that closing schools is the only way to change the ratios.”
Francis said the higher ratio could be achieved through personnel cuts: “You could achieve a change in staffing levels without closing the school,” he said.
However, a shift to a 13.1 to 1 ratio would have a major impact on teachers if only teacher cuts were attempted. It would require the elimination of 1,549 teacher positions. To achieve the national average of 15.2 would mean cutting 2,584 instructional staff, nearly a third of the workforce.
Darren Allen, spokesman for Vermont-NEA, says the latter would amount to one of the most massive layoffs in the state.
“The governor is going about this in a way that suggests that Vermonters don’t have a school system that isn’t working for the vast amount of Vermont students, and he suggests it comes at a cost that is too high for Vermonters, yet they, in vast numbers, continue to invest in their schools,” Allen said.
He pointed to Vermont students’ high graduation rates and successes on national and international tests.
“We don’t know why the governor would want us to be like the rest of country when we are already better than the rest country in what we provide our students,” Allen said.
Evslin said the reductions can be achieved through attrition. He would also like to see a number of non-instructional and administrative positions eliminated. The current student-to-adult ratio in Vermont schools is 4.35 to 1.
“We’re not saying you have to get there in a year,” Evslin said. “The fact is we have a lot of attrition coming up demographically in our teacher workforce, and we think we ought to be taking advantage of that attrition so that we do reduce teachers.”
Allen counters: “I would remind the governor that if he’s calling for attrition, those are decisions made by local voters and local school boards. It’s curious to us that someone who is a lifelong Republican is talking about mandatory control from the central government.
A third chart
George Cross, a retired superintendent of schools, and former chair of the House Education Committee, has developed a series of averages for schools of varying sizes based on Vermont Department of Education data. His Excel spreadsheet shows that the average ratio for schools with student populations of under 300, is 10.79; for schools with enrollments of 300 to 499 students, the average is 11.55 to 1; schools with 500 to 1000 students have an average of 12.42 to 1; and finally, schools with more than 1000 students have an average of 13.58 to 1.
Vermont’s student-teacher ratio averages are comparable to national figures for schools of similar size, according to Cross’ analysis.
The state’s public academies, according to Cross, have a student-teacher ratio of 11.27 to 1.
Perhaps most telling though, is this factoid: Of the state’s 308 schools, 207 have enrollments of less than 300 students.
School size, student-teacher ratio chart by George Cross
Editor’s note: Many thanks to Andrea Stander who volunteered to shoot the following videos.
