Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[J]im Douglas, Peter Shumlin and Phil Scott have all tried to fix Vermont’s education system, and all three have mostly failed. They have been working from the assumption that there is something in need of fixing. But what if they’re wrong? What if their problem is a failure to understand that the system is mostly working?
It’s easy to assume the system needs fixing. Voters perennially complain about property taxes, and politicians perennially promise they will do something to lower them or at least hold them in check. Education spending is a huge expense, approximately the same size as the total state budget, apart from education. And Vermont rates high among the states for per-pupil spending. Thus, it is not surprising that people think something must be done to fix the system.
And yet the complaint about the education property tax has always been puzzling to me. I am a Vermonter with an average income with a house of about average value. And over the years my property taxes have edged up only modestly. It’s annoying to have to cough up the money every year, but the local schools have educated my children and grandchildren, and paying for their education has always been an obligation as fundamental as providing them food and shelter.
But am I paying too much? Is my local school lavish in its spending? It doesn’t seem so to me. Vermont spends a high per-pupil total compared to other states, but those other states include Arizona and West Virginia, where teachers and parents have rebelled against destructively low spending, as well as Mississippi and other Southern states where public schools have a history of impoverishment. One consequence of Vermont’s commitment to education is high scores on standardized tests relative to the other states. As for the size of the total education system in Vermont — of course it is large and expensive. It employs about 17,000 people and has physical facilities throughout a rural region serving a widely dispersed population.
The economic strains plaguing the state — especially low, stagnant wages — are behind much of the restiveness concerning education spending. My case may be that of an average taxpayer who is getting along OK, but thousands of Vermonters are struggling economically, and the problem of paying for taxes — as for electricity, heat, groceries, housing and health care — is a real one.
So policymakers over the years have felt the need to act. But if the system is flawed, why has it been so hard to reform? There are two answers. One is that the debate is clouded by myths. The second is that the system is actually working, mostly, and the problem of low wages is a separate issue, one not properly addressed by starving the schools of funds.
Myth number one is that school spending is out of control. In fact, a graph provided by the Public Assets Institute shows that school spending in Vermont has remained constant over the years as a percentage of the economy. Between 1992 and 2014 health care expenditures almost doubled as a percentage of the gross state product, but school costs stayed just about the same — about 5 percent of the gross state product. School costs also remained at just under 6 percent of personal income.
It is no coincidence that some of the most salient information about education funding in Vermont comes from the Public Assets Institute, a nonprofit policy analysis organization founded by Paul Cillo. Cillo is the former House member who was one of the principal authors of Act 60, the education funding law passed in 1997. He understands that the present system depends on three essential components: local control, state redistribution of revenue and income sensitivity. Attack any of those three components, and the system falls apart or violates beliefs fundamental to the thinking of most Vermonters.
One of the ways the three governors have attacked the system has been to seek to undermine local control in order to give the state more power to control school spending. One of the reasons politicians at the state level would like to assert control over the schools is that the education fund is an enormous pool of money, and they would like to get their hands on some of it for purposes other than K-12 education — essentially robbing the schools of needed revenues and forcing taxpayers to raise taxes if they want to maintain their schools at present levels. Another reason state policymakers seek to curb school spending is in order to placate interests other than the struggling homeowner. Curbing the state property tax rate would help businesses and other nonresidential property owners and wealthy homeowners who do not benefit from the income-sensitivity provisions.
And yet the experience of other states has shown that state control of education spending tends to wreck school systems. California is a prime example. As Cillo points out, the best advocates for schools are the local communities where parents and children live. Vermonters have shown that local voters are also a good check on school spending. Voters defeat budgets when they think school boards have been too generous, and even if they don’t vote down a budget, the threat of a budget defeat is a constant constraint on school boards. During the Great Recession school budgets often showed increases of zero to 2 percent. In fact, school budgets have tended to grow at a slower rate than the budgets passed by the Legislature.
Policymakers have thought it made sense to target high-spending schools, to bring them in line so that the state is not burdened with covering their excessive expenditures. But who are those high-spending schools? Data from the Public Assets Institute show that there is no consistent group of schools in that category — neither small schools nor large ones. Rather, an individual school becomes a high-spending school when it faces a temporary special circumstance, such as the arrival of an unexpected number of special education students. In looking at the top 25 high spenders over a seven-year period, only five towns were on the list all seven years. Most were on the list for one or two years and soon made the adjustments needed to get their budgets under control. Jury-rigging the education finance system to hit that moving target is not likely to be productive.
Act 46, the school consolidation law, is a sideshow growing out of misconceptions about education finance in Vermont. Those who have pushed it have felt compelled to deny that it represents an assertion of state control of local schools. Peter Shumlin explicitly promised not to impose a Montpelier solution on local schools, even as he was planning to do just that.
Why the dishonesty? New promises by the state that it does not plan to manage local school budgets are equally dishonest. Plans offered by the Scott administration, while not directly taking control of school budget decisions, could impose conditions requiring local boards to adopt state-desired budget strictures. Scott’s idea of imposing a student-teacher ratio on local schools would subject the education system to a draconian, California-style form of interference.
Policymakers going back to Jim Douglas have felt compelled to disguise their effort to undermine local control because they know Vermonters would not buy it. Thus, school districts resisting district consolidation where voters believe it makes no sense are holdouts for local democracy.
The real challenge to education comes from the issues facing the state as a whole. Data from Public Assets show that poverty and its effects are the most serious drag on educational performance. Economic austerity has entrenched persistent economic inequities, not just in Vermont schools, but throughout the Western democracies. Other data from Public Assets show that wealthy taxpayers shoulder a lighter education tax burden than other Vermonters. So why do legislators — even those who conceive themselves as proud progressives — remain bound within the ideological straitjacket of budget austerity?
That is a question for all Americans to ask as new forms of progressive thinking take shape and voters demand that the services they depend on, including their schools, receive the support they require.
