Editor’s note: This op-ed was originally posted in ConnectedVermont, a blog for discussion of education, with an emphasis on school board-related issues. Rama Schneider lives in Williamstown, VT. He is a member of the Williamstown School Board.
There’re a couple of interesting stories from a legal standpoint posted on Education Week.The first one of mention is titled Ed. Law Challenges Loom After Health-Care Ruling and discusses the provocative concept that parts of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare) can be used to fend off at least some of the U.S. government’s intrusiveness into our state education systems that comes along with federal funding.
The other article (from the AP), and the one I’m most interested in, is self-explanatorially titled ACLU sues over reading on behalf of students. This piece covers a pending lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 950 students and their parents from the Highland Parks, Michigan, school district that claims the students are not receiving an adequate education. What really drew my attention to this article is how a recently mandated Vermont study on education funding and educational access is reflecting a similar concern right here in Vermont.
I’ll get to that new Vermont-based study in a moment but first a quick history tour.
On Feb. 5, 1997, the Vermont Supreme Court released what is most commonly known as “the Brigham Decision.” That decision declared that what was then Vermont’s patchwork school funding system was unconstitutional and violated “the right to equal educational opportunities under Chapter II, § 68, and Chapter I, Article 7 of the Vermont Constitution.” Educational financing schemes to that point had relied on local funding with supplemental funding from the state and this resulted in wide disparities between different towns when it came to accessing funds needed for local school districts.The problem the Supreme Court found was that such large inequality in access to funding led to an unacceptable inequality in access to educational opportunity.
The immediate result of this decision was Act 60 of 1997 (the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1997), and that was followed by revisions in 2004 in the form of Act 68. According to a recently released report, An Evaluation of Vermont’s Education Finance System, that was commissioned by the Vermont legislature and conducted by Lawrence Picus & Associates, both these laws have managed to equalize the access to educational funding across the state. But another recent report claims to throw into doubt whether the educational access side of the Brigham decision has been properly dealt with.
The Local Impacts of Vermont’s Education Finance System is a study commissioned by the towns of Dover and Whitingham and was conducted by Northern Economic Consulting, Inc. This study looked into “a variety of issues concerning the impact of Vermont’s education financing structure on the state’s towns and cities,” and one of the findings was that “while under Act 60/68 the same school tax rate will allow the same dollar spending per pupil across Vermont towns, the same school tax rate does not lead to equal education opportunities.”
The towns of Dover and Wilmington hired a lobbyist to go to Montpelier and see if they couldn’t get their local concerns heard by the legislature — and apparently it worked.The legislature included in Act 156 of 2012 an item, number 31, that created a working group that in concert with the James M. Jeffords Center for Policy Research “shall review and evaluate how Vermont’s current education system allocates financial and other resources in a way that promotes high quality, equitable educational opportunities for students throughout the state.” Included in this panel is Wilmington school board chair Phil Taylor. (At this point I want to make sure nobody misunderstands my prose to indicate any wrongdoing — for that matter I wish my 2012 legislative efforts had been fractionally as effective).
The most interesting point will come with the results of the state-sponsored study: If the state’s current Act 60/68 funding system is found to impede educational-opportunity equality, does this mean there’s a lawsuit in the wings? Are we looking at a possible Highland Parks, Michigan-style lawsuit contending some students are not receiving the same access to programs that provide essentially the same results as opposed to others that are favored by the state’s funding mechanism?
Only time will tell, but it has been about 15 years since the Brigham decision and since the 1960s no Vermont education funding mechanism has survived longer than that length of time.
