Today, Campaign for Vermont Prosperity (CFV) released a report looking at education data in Vermont to help identify opportunities for cost savings and better performance. A decade after Act 46, it’s clear that district consolidation was not the answer. Education spending has skyrocketed while outcomes have declined.

We now see outright anger at an education system that increased spending $606.8M (42%) since 2014 while the student population shrank, and student performance dropped from one of the top in the country to middle of the pack.

In the middle of the Act 46 debate, we issued a report statistically analyzing the spending and outcomes of Vermont students. At that time, it showed that larger school districts were not more effective, on either a cost or performance basis, than small ones. Yet, the legislature chose to continue down the consolidation path. A decade later we have little to show for it except for battle scars on many communities.

We thought it was the right time to revisit this conversation, as school district consolidation is again being peddled by the education establishment as the solution to our woes. The increase in property taxes is clearly unsustainable and the lack of transparency in our education funding system has led to finger pointing and unchecked spending.

What we find in this report is that community wealth is still a predictor of education spending and outcomes, but it is no longer the best one. Other factors measured in this report indicate a stronger impact, such as supervisory union size and teacher ratios. Interestingly, the latter has the inverse impact of what we might expect. As Vermont’s smallest-in-the-country class sizes increase, quality actually improves. Of course, staffing also has the biggest impact on cost so this presents a significant opportunity for policymakers to improve the ROI in the education system.

A second finding, which was similar to our recommendations from 2014, is that the data indicates supervisory union (SU) consolidation would be a much more effective exercise than attempting a second round of district consolidation. There are many reasons for this, ranging from a school board’s ties to their local community to the fact that most of the overhead costs for districts (bulk buying, building maintenance, special education, etc.) are already consolidated at the SU level. Consolidating districts doesn’t change this cost structure.

Another factor worth noting is that, like our 2014 report, we found no relationship between spending levels and outcomes for students. No, spending more does not get you better outcomes. What does? National research indicates that attracting quality teachers and holding them accountable is the most significant thing we can do. Quality is more important than quantity. The Agency of Education does nothing to meaningfully guarantee the quality of our teaching staff in Vermont.

There are several other smaller findings and policy recommendations in this report, but we believe that policymaking needs to be data informed. There is a vacuum of information about Vermont’s education system, and that vacuum will be filled by narratives put forward by special interests looking to increase their grip on Vermont’s education system. Like a tree in a forest, it is easy to get distracted by an individual story and be consumed by its beauty and conflict. But that individual story is just one of many and does not represent the entire picture. This is the origin of the phrase “losing the forest for the trees,” and there is a real argument that it is happening in our education system today.

Within the forest of Vermont’s education system there are many trees, all with their own story to tell. It is easy to be distracted with a handful of them, but we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of extrapolating the experience of one, to the experience of all. This is where data, and reports like this, come into play. They help us understand the broader trends in our education system and adjust our focus so we can see the whole forest instead of just a few individual trees.

Lawmakers need to cut through the noise and dig into what is actually driving the education trends that we are seeing. I sincerely hope they do; the future of the forest depends on it.

The full report can be found at CampaignForVermont.org.

CFV is a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization comprised of over 20,000 Vermonters and dedicated to the vision of a more prosperous Vermont and growing middle class. They seek to accomplish these goals by reconnecting Vermonters to their government and advocating for more transparent and accountable policymaking.