Dear Members of the House Education Committee, 

I have watched your deliberations regarding Act 73 with interest over the first weeks of the legislative session. The conversations you are having today are startlingly similar to the Act 46 conversations from over a decade ago. Local control versus the need for scale and efficiency. Small schools versus equity and achievement. Etc. These conversations are framed as binary choices: one or the other, this or that. The problem is, the data do not support binary framing.  

Regression analysis show us that larger school districts do not perform better on either cost or outcomes basis. Further, an independent analysis of Act 46 shows administrative cost savings were soaked up by increased transportation costs and the buying-out and leveling-up of staffing contracts.

Sadly, today I see that same assumption in the conversations around Act 73. Bigger must be better, right? Our 21^st century American brains are certainly programmed to think so. One of the most telling things for me is that Representative Holcombe, when she was Secretary of Education during the Act 46 debate, said almost the exact same things that Secretary Saunders is saying now. Today, Holcombe is one of the most skeptical voices in the Act 73 debate. What has she learned in the intervening decade?

Fortunately, there is a data-informed path forward. Our policy recommendations from last March reject binary choices and offer policies that achieve administrative scale without disenfranchising communities or introducing the diseconomies of scale seen in Act 46.

Are there small schools that are no longer viable? We can find examples of that. But even if we closed every single one of them, the impact on statewide spending or equity would be negligible. Closing a small school nets a small saving, and meanwhile the students have to be transported to schools elsewhere.

As policymakers, it is prudent to spend less time on fringe cases than on identifying the outcomes we want from our education system and setting up a system of incentives and accountability mechanisms to achieve those goals. We know student performance in Vermont has declined quite substantially over the last ten years. Why has nobody with responsibility remarked on this and taken action to change course?

Look at the data. Don’t repeat the mistakes of ten years ago. Be skeptical of the self-interested public education establishment and their tendency to seek taxpayer money to advance their own stakeholders’ interests.

The path forward we recommend is likely to yield hundreds of millions of dollars in savings. The path of forced consolidation, following in the footsteps of Act 46, is likely to yield little or no savings nor is it likely to improve accountability for student performance. But it will repeat the chaos and lost opportunities that followed Act 46, a process few among us wish to repeat.

Thank you for your work,

Ben Kinsley Executive Director Campaign for Vermont

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. We seek to accomplish these goals by reconnecting Vermonters to their government and advocating for more transparent and accountable policymaking.