Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
School has begun, and whatever mysteries may be in store for teachers, counselors, parents, kids, administrators, coaches and janitors, Vermonters may be certain of one thing about the 2014-2015 school year: It’s going to cost a lot of money.
No doubt more than the $1.528 billion spent on public education Vermont’s 301 public schools in fiscal year 2014. (Fiscal years, which start July 1, are not the same as school years). Nine percent of that, or $137.52 million, came from the federal government or private grants, so Vermont taxpayers had to raise only $1.391 billion.
Only?
The voters don’t seem to think so any more.
It isn’t just that voters rejected 35 school budgets last winter. Or even that concerned (panicked?) legislators immediately began considering a measure that might cut future school spending. Or that Gov. Peter Shumlin called current rate of school spending “unsustainable.”
It isn’t. Vermont’s annual gross state product is roughly $28 billion. If Vermonters choose, they could afford to spend 6 percent or 7 percent of that on public schools.
In fact, that’s exactly what they’ve chosen. Elected officials are reluctant to say this – voters never want to hear that they may be responsible for circumstances they deplore – but one reason schools are expensive is that Vermonters want them to be expensive.
More precisely, either directly or through their legislators, they keep making choices that cost money.
For instance, in recent years the Legislature has passed bills requiring the presence of health care professionals at all interscholastic “collision sports” games, ordering schools to replace cheaper cleansers with toxic chemicals with less toxic but more expensive alternatives, and telling schools to implement new training programs to control student bullying.
Taken one at a time, none of these requirements is “a big deal” financially, said Stephen Dale of the Vermont School Boards Association. But along with other mandates — including preparation for meeting the Common Core testing and curriculum changes the state has embraced – “they add up,” he said.
And Vermonters may be reconsidering their generosity toward their school systems. Simply consider the fact that the education establishment – starting with Agency of Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe – agrees that school costs have to be restrained.
“Something is going to have to change,” Holcombe said. “We’re trying to figure out what’s a better way … what kind of strategies to pursue to bend the cost curve.”
Because of the “broad demographic changes statewide,” Holcombe said (that means fewer kids in school), something has to be done to keep the schools “more affordable in a sustainable way.”
Holcombe is not alone. Thanks to rising property taxes, concern about school costs is no longer limited to the small but vocal minority who for years have complained that the schools waste money by teaching “frills” and that teachers earn too much.
But if that is the new majority or even the new plurality, its adherents ought to know something else elected officials would prefer to ignore: There are only two ways to hold down school spending, and by all indications, most Vermonters don’t want to do either one.
The first – and easiest – approach would be to forget about the quality of public education. Just combine classes in schools all over the state, first- and second-graders together in one room, third- and fourth-graders in another, and so on, with one teacher per classroom. Then get rid of all those no-longer-needed teachers.
Presto! Instead of some 7,860 classroom teachers, there would be maybe 4,000. In one stroke, the school spending problem would be obliterated.
And so – in all likelihood – would be school quality. Some of those combined classes would have 25, 30, perhaps even 35 pupils. That’s too many. The pupil-teacher ratio – now 11.47 to 1, the lowest in the country and arguably too low – would about double, making it the second highest in the country (after California) and clearly too high.
Some of this is already going on. In St. Johnsbury, where the school board had to keep cutting the budget after voters rejected it three times, there are now four kindergarten classes, each with more than 20 pupils.
“It should be closer to 15,” said St. Johnsbury Superintendent Margaret Bledsoe, especially in a district where 70 percent of the pupils come from low-income families. Those large classes can’t be helping the quality of St. Johnsbury schools. Neither will the cutback in the technology needed to adjust to the new Common Core tests and curriculum, she said.
But aren’t there ways to save some money without reducing the number of classroom teachers?
Well, yes. Some money. The problem is, not very much, probably not enough to make a notable difference in the tax burden.
Consider the proposal that concerned (panicked?) lawmakers patched together after all those budget defeats last March. It would have eliminated the 62 supervisory districts and reduce the total number of school districts from 282 to no more than 60.
But “central offices make up only 2.2 percent of educational spending in Vermont,” said William Mathis, the managing director of the National Education Policy Center and a member of the State Board of Education. “Even if you consolidate, you’re not going to save more than a fourth (of that total) if you’re really aggressive, meaning you’d save one half of one percent.”
That would be a saving of about $7.5 million, almost 1 cent off the state school property tax rate. That’s not inconsequential (and there may be other – non-financial – benefits to consolidating school boards) but it still leaves Vermont with a very expensive school system.
Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” and the only way to make significant cuts in the cost of education is to go where the money is: people, mostly teachers.
“Eighty percent (of the cost) is in personnel,” said Mathis. “You’re only going to save if you’re cutting personnel.”
That would include principals and their deputies, counselors, and consultants as well as teachers. And since almost every large and/or sprawling institution (in the private sector as well as in government) is overstaffed at the top, Vermont schools could probably shed a few administrators without doing any harm to the teachers or the kids.
Still, the potential savings there would appear to be limited. Schools need to be governed. Whether Vermont schools have too many administrators is debatable. That they have too many teachers for the number of students – 85,778 at last count, down from 104,559 in the 1999-2000 school year, and still falling – is not.
As to the argument that teachers earn too much, it does not withstand scrutiny. As computed last year by Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for the National Center for Education Statistics at DePaul University, Vermont teachers average $52,526 a year, below the national average and the second lowest (after Maine) in the Northeast.
Plain economics, then, indicates that reducing – or even holding down – teachers’ salaries would create an incentive for the best teachers to move to another state. Anything can be done more cheaply. But no one has repealed the law that you get what you pay for.
So do Vermonters have to choose between ever-increasing school taxes and an inferior educational system?
No, there is another alternative. The problem is that most people seem not to want to make that choice, either.
Perhaps that’s because they sense it might alter some things about their state that they like, perhaps as much as they like their good schools.
If, in fact, the schools are good. Not everyone agrees.
“Vermont’s education system’s performance is, at best, about average for the nation and a case could be made that it’s not as good as the national average,” wrote University of Vermont economics professor Art Woolf last April.
Yes, Vermont students have good test scores, Woolf said, but that could reflect who those students are (almost all white) rather than how well they are taught.
A closer look at who those students really are might tell a different story.
