By Rob Roper
The Vermont Joint Fiscal office released a 43 page report this month on the state of education financing, but its findings go much deeper than just the money. The system as a whole is broken — costs are rising, scores are falling. Beyond the numbers, members of Vermont’s public school bureaucracy recently described a situation inside the schools where, violence is on the rise, and “teachers are literally scared and administrators are at a loss.”
For a long time, Vermont had a reputation as a top education performer compared to other states, but that is changing. As the JFO report states:
“[W]hile Vermont has traditionally been better than the national average, over time it is moving down [on national test scores] and closer to the national average. These figures are particularly striking when considering the continued increase in education expenditures per pupil in Vermont without a commensurate change in student performance when compared to national trends.” – P.15
Public school apologists in Vermont, both in government and in the media, are quick to blame Covid and the school lockdowns as the culprit (which, lest we forget, the teacher’s unions wholeheartedly supported), but as you can see from this chart that ends in 2019, the decline in outcomes began long before Covid was a gleam in Anthony Fauci’s eye. Covid certainly didn’t help matters as the most recent scores not featured here showed even further drops in performance.
The costs Vermonters have had to bear in order to achieve these declining student outcomes are staggering, as anyone who pays property taxes can attest to. For the 2021-22 school year, the average per pupil spending rate was $23,299 compared to the national average of $14,360 and the New England average of $21,535. Since 2001, Vermont has climbed from the eighth highest per pupil expenditure in the country to the second highest.
The JFO report suggests potential cost drivers include “pupil teacher ratios, costs associated with special education and English Learner (EL) students, efficiency of supervisory union and district organization, system design of PreK programs, prevalence of instructional aides, and number of administrators.” P.17. Vermont has more staff per pupil than any other state.
Additionally, “According to the Digest of Education Statistic, in 2019, Vermont school districts employed approximately 18,700 staff members [to serve about 80,000 students]. If Vermont had the same pupils per staff as the national average, schools would employ approximately 7,700 fewer staff members.” P.21
Clearly all the “reforms” lawmakers have passed to ‘bend the curve’ of education spending and improve student outcomes over the past two decades have been a colossal failure. This list includes Act 60 and its many band aid fixes, Act 62 introducing public school governed “high quality” preschool, Act 46 school district consolidation, and the many policy experiments with things like proficiency based learning.
I would also add the cultural decisions to politicize education and students by injecting divisive political issues surrounding climate, race, gender, guns and electoral politics into curricula in place of a focus on the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s got to be hard to learn and certainly taxing on one’s mental health when your teachers are telling every day that you’ll be inheriting a world that’s going to spontaneously combust in a decade, if you survive the next school shooting, which you shouldn’t because you’re systemically racist, and, oh by the way you’re probably a boy trapped in a girl’s body or vice versa.
But, whatever the reasons, the results are undeniable that the system of educating our children in Vermont is not working — neither for the kids nor the teachers and staff. This is why S.56 — An act relating to child care and early childhood education, which would expand this broken system by a year to include full day preschool for 4-year-olds should be absolutely unthinkable.
Libby Bonesteel, Superintendent of the Washington Roxbury school district, described in testimony to the House Education Committee what the public school experience is like today. “Every school system has students who are explosive in ways that we have never seen before…. Teachers are quite literally scared, and administrators are at a loss. People are getting hurt, and rooms are getting trashed…. We currently have one classroom that is covered in plywood because of the amount of damage students have done to the walls. I spend my mornings reshelving books in my elementary school’s library after a child ripped nearly 500 of them off the shelves.”
Sounds like a great environment to drop a four-year-old toddler into, no?
But this is what our lawmakers are about to do.
The way we deliver a safe, effective, quality education to our children needs to be re-thought and restructured. We do not need to pour more money into expanding the current dumpster fire that that is systematically failing too many of students already.
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
Give the school system back to the towns and eliminate state control. Kids were smarter when the towns dictated what they were taught.
This is all policy driven. VT has a welfare system that incentivizes people with no parenting skills to have as many kids as possible. The fathers are MIA, freeloading is generational and we have a massive substance abuse problem to boot.
Just wait a few more years when these problem kids will be old enough to procreate.
You expose the naked truth, Mr. Roper…the destruction of VT education via Union control and a WOKE agenda. I’ve a project for you. Call the VT NEA office and ask them this. In the last decade how many teachers union members have been FIRED for “poor performance”….not anythiing otherwise (like sexual or violence)….just their PERFORMANCE in teaching. In the private sector if you are a poor & underperforming employee, you get fired..(if you can document such). But with the UNION teacher monopoly….you never, ever get fired for poor, horrible performance at your “job”. I went thru it in elementary and middle school…terrible teachers. The schools (UNION) just either shifted horrible teachers to different grades or if needed, different schools…. they just “rinse, repeat, recycle” poor teachers. ASK THE NEA! I bet the answer is no teachers have been fired for that in a decade or so. Which highlights the teachers union is out for themselves and NOT the BEST interests of all VT children. Declining test scores over a decade are the proof….horrible teachers never get fired…just recycled. Unions come first, children second.
Jeffrey there is another big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
Because of voter fraud, perhaps half the population of Vermont has no representation at all in the One Party state of Vermont.
Half of the population of Vermont is living in failed Socialist mess that they are robbed to fund and all of this is against their will- because their votes really don’t count.
So you’ve got perhaps half the population raising their kids in a way that is completely contrary to what is being crammed down their throats in public education.
I’ve got teenagers- they know exactly what is going on today in this mess of a world that they are stuck trying to survive in.
These kids are smart, they know that there is non-stop endless attempts to brainwash and indoctrinate them. They know they are punished is some way for refusing to allow this to happen to them. It’s creating tremendous conflict in their undeveloped brains.. this is abusive.
There is study after study that is saying kids and teenagers are a mess! they are on drugs, they are suicidal, they are depressed, unhappy and have anxiety..
The CDC just released information that said this last week.
THIS is all being created today in schools largely.
A whole lot of these students are a lot smarter than they are given credit for.. afterall, culture wars are started by the youth! by young people that are not that much older than they are.
So what is quite often being viewed as ‘behavior issues’ is really normal teenage rebellion by very frustrated mad young people. At the ages that they are, many are simply not wired yet to express all this in constructive manners– perhaps they’ve not even been taught how too in these failing schools..
These kids are being completely screwed out of a good and well balanced education and a whole lot of them know this and are madder than hell..
I am watching this play out DAILY with my own kids in school..
Yet who is talking about this aspect of things?
These teachers are suspending these kids to the degree that the state is now stepping in and saying they can no longer use this as a punishment.
That is how much this is going on..
How do you think that 16 year old kid feels about being suspended over and over again for reacting to what is happening to them? for displaying the symptoms of their problems?
For acting out in perhaps the only way they know how too.
What is going on in these schools today is *by definition* ABUSE.
Many of these students are reacting to being in what is today nothing but government funded institutionalized warehousing designed to replace parents and break their spirits.
Don’t the falling test scores say all this?
Don’t the suicides, the drug use– doesn’t it all say this?
It does, but the people doing this, the people that have created this hot mess are not listening at all.