Valley News – Editorial: Is Vermont primed to overhaul its schools?

All elections have consequences, but some are more consequential than others. Such might be the case with the tax revolt last fall that upended the political order in Montpelier and brought an influx of Republican legislators to the Statehouse. It potentially created the conditions for a major overhaul of K-12 public education in Vermont.

That is not to say that Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, and the Legislature, which is still controlled by Democrats, necessarily have the will, skill and vision to reinvent the current system. But there are a couple of hopeful signs.

In his inaugural address beginning his fifth term as governor earlier this month, Scott promised that his administration would offer major proposals amounting to a “multi-year plan to transform education.”

This suggests that the governor is willing to spend some of the considerable political capital he has stored up with voters. That has not always been the case in the past, when Scott has largely confined himself to taking issue with Democratic education initiatives and lamenting their failures.

The other sign that the political landscape has been altered came from Senate President Phil Baruth, a Democrat/Progressive, who told VtDigger he thought Scott was “spot on” in seeking to seize the moment for bold change. Perhaps more significantly, Baruth seems to be anticipating robust defense of the status quo, some of it from groups that are traditionally aligned with Democrats.

“I’m sure there are people organizing, even as we speak, to defend against this or that change in the system,” he said. “What I think is different now is that the governor, and, I think, leadership in the House and Senate, are actually truly on the same page when it comes to the need to, if not fully replace the system, then overhaul it.”

We shall see. But if there was anything likely to provide an epiphany for Democrats, it was the near-death experience at the polls last fall driven by public outrage over education property taxes, which increased by 14% on average and as high as 38%.

The task Scott and legislators have set for themselves is nothing less than figuring out how much the state as a whole should spend on education; how that revenue should be raised; and who should pay for how much of it. Related questions are how any new system of finance will impact the quality of education Vermont students have access to and how that quality will be measured, considerations that are just as important as controlling spending.

Scott has promised to propose measures to improve “the quality, equity and sustainability” of public education in the state, beginning with an entirely new “student-centered funding formula,” a simplified governance structure and support for local school districts to reduce cost pressures.

How might those abstractions translate into specifics? It’s a reasonable guess that the administration will propose to have a global education budget set at the state level, as it is in 48 states, rather than the current system in which total school spending is the aggregate of all local school spending decisions approved by voters, which the Legislature is then obliged to pay for.

We can also anticipate a new, simplified funding formula that makes clearer the tax impact of local decisions, although it’s unclear whether a new system would continue to rely as heavily as it now does on residential property taxes.

Scott notes that Vermont’s current system is very expensive and out-of-scale in an era of declining enrollments, producing the lowest ratios of students to teachers and students to staff in the nation and among the smallest class sizes. For all that, he says, student performance is in the middle of the pack nationwide.

Somehow, of course, any new system will have to fulfill the constitutional mandate laid down by the Vermont Supreme Court in the 1997 Brigham decision that all Vermont students are entitled to substantially equal educational opportunity. And we assume that a new system also will have to end the state’s practice of sending public money to private and religious schools, both to keep funding in the public system and to get on the right side of the Compelled Support Clause of the state Constitution.

It’s not hard to foresee that all these measures would require not only big changes in law, but also in culture. Local control of spending decisions is an article of faith among many Vermonters, and the idea of having spending levels dictated from Montpelier is likely to be anathema to them. Likewise, many parents and educators believe strongly that small schools and class sizes produce better outcomes, although Scott cites evidence to the contrary.

In some ways, Vermonters have set themselves a test with their tax revolt: Are they ready to accept the consequences of moving away from traditional norms into an unknown future? It might take another election cycle to get an answer.