Gov. Phil Scott addressed the Vermont Legislature after it passed a historic education reform bill on June 16, 2025. (Vermont Public – Brian Stevenson)
What began as a taxpayer revolt against education spending is well on its way to becoming a full-scale revolution in the way that Vermont governs, funds and provides public education. Only time will tell whether that transformation is for good or ill, but it is clear that the state has entered largely uncharted territory.
Much of the credit, or blame, for this can be assigned to Gov. Phil Scott, who capitalized on voter discontent with soaring education property taxes, as expressed at the ballot box last fall, to upend the status quo and replace it with the landmark legislation lawmakers approved on Monday. It is doubtful that the bill would have been passed without his urgent insistence that a major overhaul of K-12 education was needed, given that many legislators, including most of the Upper Valley delegation, had deep qualms about it.
We are not sure that a wholesale replacement of the current system is what voters signed up for when they expressed their discontent with education taxes last year, but we concede that the governor is a canny politician who generally displays a good grasp of the state’s political mood.
Essential features of the new system, scheduled to be phased in starting in 2028, are large-scale consolidation of existing school districts and a foundation aid funding formula, the projected effect of which will be to shift school spending decisions from the local to the state level through annually adjusted per pupil foundation grants. Among many other things, the law also creates minimum class sizes for public schools, with exceptions, and reduces the number of private schools eligible to receive taxpayer tuition dollars.
The goals of the legislation are to rein in education spending, improve student performance and ensure that every child in Vermont receives substantially equal educational opportunity as mandated by the Vermont Supreme Court in the landmark 1997 Brigham decision. That’s a big ask, and it’s not clear that the new system, when fully rolled out, will be up to answering it.
The consolidation of current districts into ones containing at least 4,000 students — vast by Vermont standards — is said by supporters to be a key to realizing big savings. But it’s very hard to discern exactly how that will come about without shuttering many smaller, rural schools and packing kids off on long bus rides to more distant ones within an expanded district. Previous school consolidation efforts have not yielded the promised savings, and for many families and the communities they live in, small is still beautiful when it comes to schools.
It’s also difficult to tell how the mega-districts and minimum class sizes the law proposes to create will enhance student outcomes. The fundamental relationship in any educational enterprise is that of teacher and student, one that hinges on the skill and dedication of the former and the receptiveness and readiness to learn of the latter. We hold that the setting in which that vital interaction takes place is only of marginal consequence in most cases. More important to good educational outcomes are curricular and instructional guidance and support for teachers, and family buy-in.
As to the funding formula, it has been repeatedly noted that foundation aid is the method adopted by many other states to pay for education. We only note that not all states have the same constitutional mandates that Vermont does — to provide substantially equal educational opportunity to all children, no matter where they live, and to do so with equitable taxation.
In fact, the funding mechanism that the court struck down in Brigham was based on foundation aid. Act 60 and its successors, which replaced it, went a long way toward curing its defects, although advocates for overhauling it say that it has lost equal-opportunity and equitable-taxation efficacy over time. Maybe so, but the burden of the new funding formula is to provide equity while making the system easier to understand. From the projections we have seen, the new formula is no less opaque than the existing one, although in practice it may prove to be.
In fairness, the architects of the new educational order have built in many contingencies that must be met before it becomes fully operational, and there is sufficient opportunity to fine-tune it.
But lawmakers and the Scott administration need to understand that this plunge into the unknown creates great uncertainty for parents, kids, educators and school boards and for communities in which public schools are central to civic life.
It’s not clear yet who will be the winners and who the losers as this revolution unfolds, but there are bound to be both. That’s why we tend to side with Robert Frost on this one: “Yes, revolutions are the only salves/But they’re one thing that should be done by halves.”