By John J. Burns
As a candidate for one of two State Representative seats in the Washington -2 district, I have been looking deeper at things that have created the current inefficient school funding system. Starting with the Brigham decision the State was put on a path to do a better job of equalizing disparities between school districts’ ability to fund their schools. In Brigham, the Vermont Supreme Court decreed that the state needed to ensure “substantial equality of educational opportunity.” Substantial equality. Also the Court noted that ‘absolute equality’ was an impractical requirement.
Following the Brigham decision in 1997 the Legislature hastily launched our education funding system with Act 60 that same year. This system was adjusted numerous times over the ensuing years, and in 2022 they added Act 127, an attempt to make school funding even more equal. Act 127 creates a complex and illogical ‘pupil weighting’ which effectively results in a school funding system isolated from voter understanding and responsible for new inequities between school districts as they compete against each other for funding.
The evolution of the education funding system over the 27 years since Brigham amounts to a quest towards the noble-sounding yet impossible goal of ‘full equality’. We always want to make things more equal where practical, however, there is the inconvenient truth that some kids are better at math or reading, there are different learning styles, and some kids will flourish in a machine shop instead of the classroom.
Still, the school system is on a quest for ‘full equality’ despite all of these factors. This quest will ensure that the massive machinery of the Vermont school system with its highest in-the-country ratio of staff to students stays sufficiently overfunded. The education system has become an entrenched and bloated bureaucracy, concerned primarily with perpetuating itself, which is the nature of a bureaucracy.
It is especially entrenched in this case because it leverages the sentiment of ‘we must do everything for children’ and who is willing to go against that? Along with the nation’s highest staff-per-student ratio, Vermont has declining students, the second highest per-pupil education costs, and declining student proficiency, as related once again by WCAX this past week. School (over)spending is not reaching the children, but certainly is maintaining a bloated bureaucracy.
Act 127, in section 19, proclaims a quest for a ‘fully equitable and progressive’ education finance system. Fully equitable. Remember the Brigham decision required ‘substantial equality’, and now in 2022 it seems that Act 127 has evolved this into ‘fully equitable’. Equality and equity are different, with equity being more difficult to achieve, but our legislature is on that quest to make things fully equitable, reaching far beyond the ‘substantially equal’ mandate set by the Brigham decision. Fully equitable is an impossible goal, however, the enduring pursuit of this and the unlimited supply of funding that it requires will keep the entrenched bureaucracy managing our inefficient education system very satisfied for as long as we allow it.
I hope this short commentary sparked your interest, and that you will visit my website for a more detailed version, including sources and examples. And solutions. Many solutions have been proposed and ignored for years. If you elect me to represent this district I am willing to go against the prevailing sentiments perpetuating the current system and implement some of these solutions.