State board adopts costly mandates
Toolbox
By William J. Mathis - Published: August 29, 2010
School budgets, school quality and property taxes are particularly fluorescent issues in election and school seasons. With a stagnant economy and a state deficit, they are even more intense. Thus, to see these issues addressed at the August meeting of the state Board of Education was not surprising. Unfortunately, instead of making things better, they may have made them worse.
Board brows were furrowed examining charts and graphs on the average 2 percent cuts imposed on local schools for next year. Since inflation has to be absorbed and new state mandates (early education, employee background checks, technology, etc.) must be implemented, the real cut to school budgets may be closer to 5 percent.
Instead of helping districts manage this dire problem, some state board members seemed to be looking for ways to seize the $19 million in federal school stimulus money. Of course, everything else being equal, if they took the money away from local schools (or refused to take it, as Brian Dubie suggested), this cost would ooze into your property tax bill. It was opined that this take-away would actually “help” local school districts by keeping them from falling off a bigger funding cliff the following year. A staff member said the state could simply fund schools at 96.5 percent of what the people voted. Either way, it’s a back-door property tax increase.
Continuing this strange philosophy of saving costs by adding burdens, the state board voted to join the “common core” national standards effort. This means the state will have to adopt entirely new math and language arts curriculums (all students, all grades, all schools), which represents major new costs for teaching materials, textbooks, computer programs, teacher re-training, and the like. Furthermore, the previous investments in curriculum and in the NECAP tests would be junked (along with our ability to track progress over time).
In marvelous understatement, the department’s “Cost Implications” says, “The common core will certainly come with cost ... additional resources at the state and strategic investment of local resources will be necessary.” Unfortunately, no greater detail was provided. Department staff said they hoped the costs of the new tests would be neutral (if they got a competitive federal grant). In short, the state board adopted an astronomical unfunded mandate on the hope that a grant they don’t have will offset part of the cost, but the state and the locals will have to pay for it.
Bearing in mind the very high achievement of Vermont students, the scary and unknown part is that this change might actually result in lower scores. Unfortunately, there’s a body of research that shows that’s exactly what happens when such massive system change is implemented. Regardless of what happens in schools, the 2015 headline will be “New tests show Vermont students not mastering the basics!”
One board member astutely asked how well Vermont’s current standards compared with the national standards. The staff vaguely allowed that alignments would have to be made. To get some notion of how massive these “alignments” might be, the conservative and pro-national standards Fordham Institute ranked Vermont standards against the new common core. Our standards got a grade of “D” in English language arts and an “F” in math. This does not mean that Vermont’s current high standards are bad, it just means they don’t line up with the common core.
Completely changing the reading and math curriculum for an entire state is about as important as educational decisions get. Thus, public hearings would be in order. Instead the commissioner and the state board chairwoman simply signed an agreement last June. When asked about the lack of hearings and this stealth agreement, one board member did say she had attended a meeting in Philadelphia — an inconvenient site for a Vermont public hearing. In an example of having the hanging before the trial, one board member said, “We’ll be discussing it after we adopt it.”
Other than being pressured by the commissioner and a desire to go along with the crowd, the apparent reason they agreed to such sweeping changes was to get one-time federal stimulus money. While you can search the Education Department’s website in vain for the amount the feds paid to buy this compliance, it amounts to about 4 percent of education spending for two years. This is amazing fealty to the feds for a group whose politics tend toward the anti-federal.
The state board had simply not done its homework. As a result, they blindly adopted a massive and costly new mandate. When considering what we would have to pay for No Child Left Behind, then-Gov. Howard Dean asked how much we would be getting and how much would we have to pay.
That’s a question our state board, administration and Legislature didn’t ask.
William J. Mathis, a Goshen resident, is managing director of the Education and the Public Interest Center. He is a former school superintendent for the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union.
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