Squeezing the taxpayer dry is what it’s designed to do, and it’s working.
Photo by katiew via Flickr
by Rob Roper
Vermonters head into town meeting week with a massive property tax increase looming over our heads, as much as 40 percent in some communities. There is a collective wail on Front Porch Forum and on social media, at least in my town of Stowe, that “the system is broken!” No, it’s not. I understand why folks would think it is if you’re looking at an education finance system as a way to fairly and efficiently raise the money to effectively educate children. But that’s not what Act 60 and its subsequent parade of patch laws (Act 60 PLUS) is meant to do.
No, Act 60 PLUS is designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the population for the benefit of politically powerful special interest groups (the VTNEA, the Superintendents Association, etc., aka The Blob), which, in turn, kicks back benefits to one particular political party with donations, endorsements, and campaign volunteers. And it does this with the least amount of fiscal transparency, political accountability, or taxpayer protections possible – which is to say nearly none. Once you recognize that this is its actual purpose, you’ll see that Act 60 PLUS is working with the precision of a Swiss watch.
This is why when you’re presented with a 38 percent property tax increase to pay for a level funded or moderately raised local school budget, you get the response of, “It’s not the legislature’s fault for setting tax rate; it’s the school boards’ fault for setting the budgets! No, it’s the local voters’ fault for approving the budgets. But don’t vote “no” because it doesn’t matter how you vote; the tax is going to rise just the same because of how they voted next door. Just pull the lever, open your wallet, and pretend you’re exercising ‘local control’. It’s for the children!” Your confusion and sense of helplessness are a feature, not a bug.
But all this is not for the children. It’s for the adults who run the system and the politicians who enjoy the kickback benefits from those adults. Former American Federation of Teachers union president Albert Shanker famously said, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” That still stands, and the same sentiment can be applied to taxpayers. None of them give a hoot about any of us. They just want more and more money and the political power to ensure its continued flow.
Which is why every time we are offered a “fix” to the ostensibly broken system, be it Act 68, or Act 46, and now Act 127 the promise is “a fairer tax system and better schools,” – like Charlie Brown with the football we buy the rhetoric — but what we get every time is even higher tax bills for even poorer performance. The record speaks for itself.
In 1997, the year Act 60 became law, Vermont had over 106,000 K-12 students and a total education budget of about $840 million. We were consistently among the top five performing public school systems in the country.
Since then, Act 60 PLUS has catapulted Vermont into second spot nationally for per pupil spending at around $25,000 per kid with a total education budget of $2 billion to serve a shrinking population of now less than 85,000 kids. For all this “investment”, student scores have been steadily dropping for the last decade and a half and compared to other states we’ve fallen from the top five performers into the middle of the pack.
How is this possible? These trends go back to Act 60 PLUS, as a 2006 analysis done by the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce warned, “… between 1996 and 2006, despite a decline in enrollments of 8.5% (totaling nearly 9,000 students), total staffing increased by more than 22%. This phenomenon is one of the fundamental factors driving education costs.”
Act 60 didn’t save money or improve student outcomes, but it did enrich the VTNEA et al and consolidate its political power to the detriment of both students and taxpayers.
The same can be said of Act 46, the mandatory school district consolidation law passed in 2015. The promises were for cost containment via efficiency and greater opportunities for students. Nope. We’ve seen nothing but higher costs and poorer performance – but greater consolidation of VTNEA power.
Same for Act 62 of 2006, which expanded the public schools’ role in providing taxpayer funded pre-k. The promise was that for every dollar we spent we’d save seven in the future due to better student outcomes. Nope. We just got a giant and ever-growing bill for a childcare affordability and availability crisis while watching test scores and classroom safety for our youngest grades deteriorate along with our kids’ mental health. But again, the VTNEA gets to wrap its tentacles around kids aged birth to five, expand its ranks with more pre-k teachers, and suck up hundreds of millions of dollars to run these programs – into the ground!
For a quarter of a century Vermonters have been buying the line that if we just give the same public school special interests more money they’ll deliver a higher quality product. This has proved false. Money isn’t the problem. The problem is the people running the system. It’s time to fire them – and the politicians who have done everything in their power to perpetuate this failure. Because as long as they are there, genuine reform is impossible.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.
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Categories: Commentary, Education
Logically, if the State legislatures and administrations, over the past three decades, have failed to fix education funding, or any other issue plaguing the State, there is obviously an incentive not to fix it. Incompetent? Nay. Compensated? Yea. Between the Federal pork, the DNC controlled NEA and other labor unions, the lobbyists twisting arms with money, the non-profits installed with friends and collegues, and NGOs with no authority, but lots of money, friends and collegues, it is plain to see why the People are not represented, heard, or even considered in the very least. The good news is people are waking up, much to the horror of the despots, and the system is imploding on itself. They can’t stop what is coming, they initiated it, and they are not insolated from any consequences of their actions. The boomerang cometh with vengence and justice. Be prepared and brace for impact.
Indeed. And that the education system and its funding mechanism is designed to be as obscure as it can be, I forgive Rob Roper for missing some of the detail.
There are only 72,093 K thru 12 students in Vermont’s public school system. And about 4000 or so of them are being educated in independent schools that are less expensive to operate than Vermont’s traditional public schools.
There are 7843 Pre-K students in Vermont. These are 3, 4, and 5 year-old kids who spend less than 25% of their time in the Pre-K program than do their K-12 counterparts. And most of them are also in independent less expensive programs.
Vermont’s education expenditures aren’t a mere $2 Billion. The projected “total education system spending” is $2.7 Billion. So, we aren’t spending $25,000 per student. For K-12, the cost per student is more than $37,000.
And when I calculate the cost per student for my local district at about $28,000 per student, that leaves a financial black hole of $9000 per student between what my local school board presents for approval and the so-called “total education system spending” listed by the Agency of Education (AOE). We know where the money comes from. But we have no idea where it goes.
https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/WorkGroups/House%20Appropriations/FY%202025%20Budget/6.%20Education/W~Heather%20Bouchey~AOE%20FY25%20Budget%20Book~2-20-2024.pdf
Our school boards are riddled with conflicts of interest. Teachers, retired teachers, and actual school district employees serve on these boards. They apply for and get a ‘waiver’ from the AOE to serve as long as they agree to recuse themselves from voting on issues that affect them directly. Please! In the Cabot school district, for example, the school board chair works for the AOE. The same AOE that provides the ‘waiver’. You can’t make this stuff up.
Never mind that fewer than half of the students who graduate from this indoctrination mill can read, write, do math, or understand science to minimal grade level. Never mind that drug overdoses have increased four-fold over the last ten years. Or that the suicide rate for 15 to 24 year olds in Vermont doubled last year over the previous three year average.
Not only is Vermont’s education system much more expensive than Rob is warning us about. Its dystopian nature is destroying the traditional family unit, faith-based culture is being substituted by the business marketing of gender dysphoria. Parental consent to the curricula and the medical treatments their children receive in school is non-existent.
We, all of us on the outside looking in, are being categorized and bankrupted as ‘domestic terrorists’ – literally. The public education monopoly, and the NGOs providing subcontracted services to it, are punishing us in their struggle to think well of themselves at our expense, in the same way ‘the teachers’ in Milgram’s infamous 1961 experiments unwittingly punished their ‘learners’. The public education monopoly has become the most dangerous threat to our western culture in our history.
Jay, My eyes are wide open. By the numbers, your numbers are vastly different from those that are commonly published in VT, published via www and numbers that are deployed in Vermont by Vermonters. Numbers don’t lie people do. I’m neither accusing your nor disputing you. Please ASAP verify/ cite your sources of numbers upon which your calculations are based that is suitable to publish as a Commentary for Mr. Pages consideration @VDC. One it is published, the link of your work can be shared far and wide throughout Vermont. And it will be eye opening. Thank you for your work.
Libby: Open the link published with my comment. These are not *my* numbers. They come from the Agency of Education.
The State enrollment numbers are clearly shown at the beginning of the report.
The “projected total education system spending” of $2.7 Billion is shown on page 2 and 19 of the AOE report.
My Westminster school district numbers come from our annual report with clarifications by our supervisory union administrators.
“My concern rests with the projected total education system spending of $2.7 Billion, indicated on page 2 and 19 of the AOE report. If we take this number and subtract Pre-K costs based on my district’s per student experience (assuming $3884 per student for 7843 students = $30.462 Million), we are left with $2.666 Billion for K-12 costs. That equals $37,029 per K-12 student spending.”
I asked VDC to publish an article I submitted to it showing this information. For whatever the reason, VDC chose not to publish it. Go figure.
If you have more questions, let me know.
Jay – Got your updated post March 5 w/ reference cite and forwarded it to VDC requesting publication – asking it also be forwarded to Rob so all numbers are updated. Looks like the 73K vs 83K = 10,000 difference in pupil count x 37000k per= 37, 000, 000 MILLION dollars not in tax payers best interest as the difference between the posted numbers and your verified numbers.- 37M stands for just one year of these skewed numbers year over year budgets. Thank you Jay.
vote down all town, city, and school budgets/// make your vote count///
They did all of this because one small school didn’t have computers.
They told us our taxes would go down.
They told us our small schools wouldn’t close.
They told us our education results would be better.
They don’t seem to be meeting their goals and objectives.
When Senators Rivers and Hooker (At the time Act 60 became the law) were the ram rods for getting this passed. what would the expectations be? As with other Progressives coming to the surface back then, they would not take no for an answer. What we have today came from these phonys. They are both retired
now, but their Legacy is the school mess/education mess they created.
Vermont schools. Beat hard on the dead horse in 2016-2018. In the name of “equity”. Beat it some more. In the name of “diversity”. Beat it further. In the name of “increased opportunity” And more. In the name of “a cost taxpayers and citizens will accept.” Forward now to 2024. The horse is dead. It’s fetid carcass is rotted. Time for another round of beatings.
And the beatings will continue until moral improves…
“Cold penetrates my neck, creeps down my backbone, seeps into my limbs … cold … I am cold … my arms … fingers … toes.
“Fire and ice … the cold that freeze-sucks my body is matched by the heat it creates in the belly of my psyche — the heat of anxiety. After all this, how am I going to pay my bills?
“This anxiety attack hit hard when I, and many homeowners throughout Vermont, received our property tax bills last summer and we saw the increase in the homestead education tax. That bill might as well have stamped on it: “You cannot afford Vermont!” (34 towns
turned down their school budget this past Town Meeting Day. I was lucky I am so poor for I received for last year a hefty payback. Still, I’m behind.)”
Written by Vermont iconic photographer Peter Miller in 2014:https://vtdigger.org/2014/03/26/peter-miller-cold-weather-hard-state/
Two years later , Peter Miller wrote another article describing the plight of Vermonters who could no longer afford their property taxes.https://vtdigger.org/2016/08/21/peter-miller-vermont-brokea/.
The Legislature did not listen to his pleas nor to the many other struggling Vermonters he portrays in his books . And now the legislature found a way to hit even harder with Act 127 .
Pure tyrrany .