For my last column before Thanksgiving break, I thought we would explore the world of school finance – specifically Vermont school finance. Now before you hit delete and start fixing your pumpkin pies, stay with me here. Vermont isn’t the only state struggling with how to best pay for their kids’ public schooling. And school finance is one of those dysfunctional reasons why I think we need a new model of learning for our kids.
Vermont Public’s Lola Duffort put together a seven-minute video explaining the ins and outs of Vermont school funding. You can find it on YouTube. But for our purposes, let me summarize Duffort’s video into four or five paragraphs.
In the Green Mountain State, the first step to a school budget being approved is when a local school board creates a spending plan for their district. Then, on Town Meeting Day (the day when most Vermont townspeople meet to vote on matters of the town) residents either vote to approve or reject this budget. When the town approves the budget, it sends a bill to the state of Vermont for basically the full amount. This year, all those bills add up to $2.3 billion to pay for Vermont public schools. Vermont uses property taxes, sales taxes, state lottery money, and other taxes to pay the $2.3 billion bill.
In Vermont there are two types of property taxes – homestead and non-homestead. Homestead applies to residential homes, whereas non-homestead applies to all other types of property. Although the Vermont legislature sets the same non-homestead tax rate for every town in the state, it’s the states’ tax department that adjusts that rate using the common level of appraisal, or the CLA. The CLA is the tax department’s analysis of how over- or under-valued properties are in every town in Vermont. It’s used to adjust homestead and non-homestead tax rates, so that the final tax rate applied in every town better reflects current market value. Homestead taxes in Vermont are calculated based on the amount of spending approved by each school district. But if a school district serves multiple towns, each town’s taxes are adjusted again using the CLA.
Like most states, Vermont uses different weights when it comes to figuring out how much it costs to educate kids. For example, students in rural settings or those living in poverty cost more to educate. Recently, Vermont passed a law, Act 127, that updated these weights. Furthermore, Vermont income sensitizes their property taxes, meaning that if your household income is below a certain amount, you get a tax credit. Roughly two-thirds of Vermonters receive such a tax credit.
So, the way Vermont figures out how to pay their $2.3 billion education bill is to decide how much burden will be assigned to the homestead pot and how much will be assigned to the non-homestead pot. Then, if the state is lucky and there is extra money in the education fund, they can decide what to do with that extra cash. Sometimes, the legislature will decide to use the surplus cash to provide relief to the taxpayers, which is helpful if there’s extra, but stressful if there’s not. Spikes in property taxes, whether they be homestead or non-homestead, aren’t a good thing for elected officials.
Sound confusing? It is. And Vermont isn’t the only state that offers such a complex and costly system that might overly rely on local control.
Duffort ends her video asking the following questions for Vermont and other states like it:
Can we make the system more affordable?
Can we make the system more fair?
Can we make things more legible to people on the ground?
And, can we do all of this while preserving local control?
Here’s a simpler way to pay for our kids’ learning.
Most states already know how much it costs to educate a special education student, or a rural student, or a just a regular run-of-the-mill student. In Vermont, the cost of educating a regular learner is around $16,000, with some students, such as special education and rural, costing a bit more.
If Vermont (and other states) would change their basic unit of learning from the school to an individual student and begin forming learning cohorts of 40-50 students, then the amount of annual spending needed to run a learning organization that size (and their adult learning leaders) would be 40-50 x $16,000 (possibly a bit more for weighted categories like special education, rural, and the like).
The state would develop a formula whereby homestead and non-homestead property taxes would pay for each learning cohort. After the money was collected by the state, that money would be forwarded to the adult learning coaches (usually two for 40-50 kids) and that money would serve as that cohort’s annual budget for learning.
Chances are, after a few years, what Vermont (and other states) would find out is that they can reach reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development outcomes for far less money than they are paying now with a school-based model.
It seems like the finance plan presented above would be a fairer system, and a system that used money to support the most important relationship in the learning process – the relationship between a young learner and their adult learning leader.
It seems that the proposed system would be more legible to the average parent, and it would support the most local control possible – the relationship between a young learner, their adult learning leaders, and young learner’s family, and the young learner’s learning plan.
Sometimes to make something better, we must rely on the old KISS principle – Keep It Simple (and you know what that last word should be).
I’ll be off until Monday, December 2nd. Here’s wishing all the readers and their families the most thankful of Thanksgiving Days. Til Monday. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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