Vermont’s Education Property Tax System Is Not Broken
Squeezing the taxpayer dry is what it’s designed to do, and it’s working.
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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In an earlier time there might have been people who would call out this type of critique as being cynical. Unfortunately with the benefit of witnessing the last five years the worst that can be said is that this is a realistic assessment. There can be no other conclusion.