Thoughts on Education and Property Tax Reform, Part 1

by Rob Roper

When Governor Scott teased the administration’s plans for how to reform our public education delivery and financing systems, he warned that there would be something in it for everyone to hate. Credit where due, the man spoke truth!

School administrators are going to hate that the plan calls for consolidating over 52 supervisory unions and 119 school districts along with their bureaucracies into five regional districts. Local school boards – and perhaps more importantly the parents and community members who see those school boards as their personal friends and levers for local control – are going to hate that all the local boards are going to be eliminated and replaced by some unclear things called Advisory Councils. Parents in Vermont’s ninety or so school choice towns are going to hate that they will lose their right to choose where they send their kids and instead have to enter into an uncertain lottery system. On the other hand, the anti-choice teachers’ unions and their allies will hate that every student in the state will have access to that new lottery system which could allow students to opt out of public schools. Some communities are going to be told their small school has to close and, well, they’re going to hate that.

And then there’s the question of the money. Taxpayers (aka voters) aren’t going to like the fact this is plan is woefully unspecific in what net savings it will create – the talk is of cutting administration but increasing teachers’ salaries and adding programs, soooo…. And, more importantly, that it lacks a specific promise for lower property taxes and by how much. At the same time, the public-school special interests (aka The Blob) have already registered their disapproval of any changes to a cash cow system they have been able to game to their considerable financial advantage for going on three decades baring a non-starter switch from the property tax to an income tax.

Okay. Yeah. But, if everybody hates the policy, that must mean it’s on target, or so goes the (IMHO rather bizarre) conventional thinking.

Here’s the problem with that strategy from a political perspective: if everybody hates something about the plan, the plan will never gain the popular majority of support it needs to pass. And we desperately need to pass something significant because this educational system we have is, to borrow an old WWII acronym, FUBAR, short for [fouled] up beyond all recognition. It is not working. For anybody.

It’s certainly not working for taxpayers as we have seen the costs for k-12 education rise by $606.8M (42%) since 2014, and we are now spending around $2.5 billion a year to educate 80,000 kids. This nets out to the second highest amount of per-pupil spending in the nation. Everybody’s jaw dropped at the 14 percent on average property tax increases last year with some communities receiving nearly 40 percent year over year increases. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Pre-K-12 education now consumes not just that mammoth property tax bill, but all of the 6 percent sales and use tax, a quarter of the 9 percent rooms and meals tax, a third of the purchase and use tax, funds from the state lottery, the new “cloud” tax on internet software services, the new 3 percent surcharge on short term rentals, and some Medicaid money thrown into the mix. And, how could I forget, the new $100 million per year payroll tax to pay for pre-k programs, which doesn’t even count as Education Fund money. This is not sustainable.

And still, all that revenue doesn’t cover the nut! To meet the anticipated increase in spending for next year, it will also require a $77 million general fund transfer, and more if $18 million in cuts to existing programs don’t take place. Did I mention the $6 billion in deferred school building maintenance that’s been accumulating over the years due to systematic neglect? This level of voracious special interest greed is unsustainable.

The more we spend on this system….

… the worse results we get for our children.

Despite this firehose of tax dollars, the system is certainly not working well for students. Test scores have been dropping at a steady pace since 2015. And, while test scores aren’t everything, as Secretary Saunders noted in an interview with WCAX, “When we look at other measures including mental health or wellbeing or chronic absenteeism and graduation rates, none of these metrics are trending in the right direction.” This level of systemic incompetence cannot be tolerated.

The system is not working for classroom teachers either. More and more, teachers are being forced into roles, such as behavioral therapist, social worker, health advocate, etcetera, for which they are not trained and, in many if not most cases, didn’t sign up for and don’t want to do. The stress of this has contributed to experienced teachers leaving the profession and their being replaced with less qualified staff. According to the Agency of Education, the number of provisional and emergency teaching licenses issued each year has doubled since 2017.

So, yeah, our public education system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. The new design needs to be both more effective in educating and nurturing our children, and less costly for the taxpayers footing the bill. It’s doable. Other states are doing more with less, and there are schools within Vermont that provide examples of less costly, more effective programs. This is where we should be looking.

But, to succeed in bringing this change in the face of entrenched special interests that are determined to maintain the status quo (or an equally if not more expensive version of the status quo that involves even less accountability) the general public needs to not hate the proposed solution. We can’t even be tepid about it. We need to be actively enthusiastic. Even excited! And by that measure, reform plan 1.0 falls short. I’ll have some suggestions on how to fix that in the next article in this series. Stay tuned!

Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com