Editor’s note: This commentary is by Heidi Spear, who is a former tech executive and current Mil Milagros Inc. board director and Fayston Elementary School Board chair. She was a candidate in November for the Washington-7 seat in the Vermont House of Representatives. She is founding member of the citizen-led Accountable Education Funding (AEF ) Working Group. Their proposal to replace Act 60/68 with commitment funding is available on their blog: www.fixvtedfunding.com.
[T]he governor, Secretary of Education and legislative leadership say they have heard us loud and clear — we have a property tax crisis and they must address it head on. They acknowledge the continuous rise in education spending, note our extraordinary 1-4.67 staff to student ratio and say they have a strategy to deliver results. All that is the setting of the bait.
These same leaders then put the blame on small schools and districts for high spending and climbing property taxes, reference highly inaccurate class size analysis, and promise to address our spending and property tax woes in two primary ways: increase tax burdens for small and shrinking districts and force consolidation. That is the switch, that is ignorant at best and dishonest at worst.
Using Agency of Education (AOE) data, the below chart shows the actual distribution of high spending levels across districts by size and relative savings from efficiency gains:
High Spending Distribution and Efficiency Impact
* Impact measured as savings across size cohort if above average spenders reduce to average.
This chart reveals a couple key things:
• Districts with 100 or fewer students educate just 4.7 percent of our total student population and spend just 4.7 percent of our total education expenditures. They are clearly not the source of our spending or tax problems or our means to solve them.
• Current large districts often consume far above the average cost per student, not spending less, despite their potential to leverage economies of scale.
• Without addressing system-wide high spending, redistributing students from small districts to large districts could prove very costly indeed, not even considering the cost of consolidation itself.
I’ve written many times about why the above figures — the ones that most closely reflect actual resources consumed to educate the total number of students educated in each district — are important to consider when evaluating inequity, spending and accountability, but our elected leadership do not agree. They openly oppose inspecting actual spending data in overseeing a $1.6 billion service operation with a spending problem.
That said, when considering the AOE preferred methodology to appraise relative funding,
Equalized Pupils (Act 60/68 weighted student counts far different from Total Students)
Using AOE data, Campaign for Vermont was nice enough to chart this distribution out for the public:
Is it looking more and more dishonest to assign blame, as they have, and insist that consolidation will solve our spending and tax problems? Using actual spending data or very manipulated Act 60/68 data, the financial justification for their policy push is a sham.
Let’s revisit the talking points they hit again and again in our media (with the media’s gracious assistance):
The Problem: small districts -> small classrooms -> gross inefficiencies -> unaffordable burdens -> sky-high property taxes
The Solution: increase tax burden to operate small schools + incentives to consolidate + impose consolidation -> affordable education in Vermont
No data supports this characterization of our problem or the wisdom of this solution.
I understand that there can be benefits to consolidation and, in fact, I am advocating for it across our own supervisory union. However, that doesn’t make baiting and switching the public about what created our property tax crisis and what will solve it any more appropriate. Our leadership is using the public’s anger and fear to advance their longstanding agenda to consolidate authority further from the voting public rather than to actually address the root cause of our problem or high spending itself.
We have a system-wide spending problem. Montpelier fundamentally undermined accountability for resource consumption and property tax increases with the implementation of Act 60/68. By cloaking high spending and insulating a majority of homeowners from the ramifications of approving budgets — no matter how high — it fostered ever-increasing expenditures, undermined affordability and helped stagnate our economy. Act 60/68 has broken the connection between property wealth and spending, but it has not met its ultimate purpose: to fulfill the Brigham mandate to deliver substantial equity of opportunity. Some dismiss reform, arguing that our old Foundation Formula was deeply inequitable. It was! However, our old Foundation Formula and our current unsustainable Act 60/68 Formula are not our only options. That is a false choice.
Our student population has declined 20 percent over the past 15 years. Predictably, state leadership blames external factors, but this phenomenon was neither inevitable nor universal. Student populations have risen slightly nationally and increased dramatically in some regions. Our own extraordinary decline is a performance indicator– one we must face and rectify ASAP. A relatively high cost of living and a persistent shortage of economic opportunities will not draw young families to Vermont. Nor will sweeping, mandated consolidation of indeterminate design.
Appalachia doesn’t have to be our fate, but if our elected leaders continue to take no accountability for state performance, ignore our affordability crisis and drive policies that assume perpetual decline across 95 percent of our state, you can be sure that Appalachia is our future.
