Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ann Manwaring of Wilmington, a Democrat who served five terms in the Vermont House of Representatives.
[O]n Tuesday, a reception sponsored by the Public Assets Institute will be held in the Cedar Creek Room of the Statehouse to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Brigham decision by the Vermont Supreme Court. This decision found that the then-education financing system based on town by town property tax decisions to fund education augmented by state payments through the foundation formula was unconstitutional.
Throughout the Brigham decision the term “equal education opportunity” is used, in the claims by both plaintiffs and defendant, the state, and in the court’s decision, saying, “Declaratory judgment entered for the student and school-district plaintiffs on their claim that the current educational funding system denies equal educational opportunities in violation of the Vermont Constitution …” The court left it to the Legislature to find a remedy, which it did in 1997 in Act 60, later modified by Act 68.
While there was a clear emphasis in the court’s opinion on the financing structure, that opinion also recognizes the purpose of education is to focus on individual students, not just districts. “To keep a democracy competitive and thriving, students must be afforded equal access to all that our educational system has to offer.” Thus while financing is a substantial factor in equitable opportunity for all students, it is not the only factor. What about student needs?
Vermont’s education financing law, Act 60/68, in my opinion, does not now, has never, and will never offer substantially equal education opportunity to all students as long as it continues to be driven by the economy of scale paradigm, a way of thinking, extant throughout our culture, that bigger is better and less expensive. This seems like an odd framework in a state that is the second most rural in the country.
Don’t we need to take a good look at 21st century thinking concerning how decisions and financing flow through a system as complex as Vermont’s education system?
Let’s take a look at another factor in our present financing system, that of poverty, expressed in the financing formula as eligibility for the federal free and reduced lunch program. The effect of this factor in the formula is to lower the tax rate in eligible towns. There is a widely held belief in Vermont and indeed throughout the country and the world that poverty is one of the leading causes of the achievement gap in our education system. Does this not suggest the need to focus additional resources, both money and effort, on this significant problem? Yet our education finance system rewards taxpayers, not students who need additional resources. The irony here is how many voters or taxpayers even know they are being rewarded for living in a town with a high percentage of low income people?
Another factor is the reliance on per pupil spending as the driving element in the distribution of money from the education fund to districts. This is not only the driver of the economy of scale paradigm but it also assumes that only spending matters, not what we spend on nor the outcomes we get for that spending. We set the statewide education property tax rate on total spending, thus the resulting per pupil spending is nothing but a mathematical calculation, yet per pupil spending has outsized impact on the work we can do our for children. Two — or more — schools can have the same per pupil spending yet offer substantially more or less “equitable” opportunity for its students.
A third factor is the impact of legislative decisions to enact more and more unfunded mandates, all of which have to be absorbed by local school budgets. Yet we at the legislative level fail to take this into account when we point fingers at the “locals” as the bad actors for spending too much, the very people we expect to get the outcomes for our children – the purpose for which all this money is spent.
At the same time we celebrate the Brigham decision, which did result in equity for all districts in terms of how property tax money gets into the education fund. Indeed, that aspect of Act 60/68 does exactly what the court decision asked it to do. However, in terms of how money gets out of the fund and back to the schools who do the work, don’t we need to relook at this part of the financing system, find a way to account for individual student needs, find a way to value outcomes for all our kids? Don’t we need to take a good look at 21st century thinking concerning how decisions and financing flow through a system as complex as Vermont’s education system?
Offering remarks at the reception will be Robert Gensberg, lead attorney for the plaintiff, Carol Brigham, mother of Amanda Brigham, the third-grader who was the lead plaintiff, and Allen Gilbert, longtime head of Vermont’s ACLU.
