Letter to Commission on the Future of Education

Good evening, I wanted to be sure that the Commission took the recent Education Outcomes & Spending report from Campaign for Vermont into consideration. As well as the original report from 2014 that Tom Pelham and I co-authored.

It is important for this Commission and Legislators to correctly identify what the cost-drivers are in Vermont’s education system and what levers are likely to have a meaningful impact. Our statistical analysis shows that school consolidation will have little impact on the total cost of the system. However, bringing our student/staffing ratios back in line with high-performing states will have a significant impact on cost without adversely impacting the quality of education.

The latest Picus Report from this past fall indicated that we are overspending by at least $400 million and we know much of this cost is tied up in staffing. We also know from our report that class size is statistically unrelated to the size of the school, which means that cost controls should be agnostic to school size. Further, any consolidation effort should be focused on Supervisory Unions as this is where most of the scalability in cost overhead resides.

 

Thank you for your consideration,

Ben Kinsley
Interim Executive Director, Campaign for Vermont

 

Ben Kinsley has over a decade of public policy experience in Vermont. Working for non-profit organizations, he has shaped public policy in areas such as education, elections, and ethics. He currently serves as the Interim Executive Director for Campaign for Vermont, a non-partisan advocacy group seeking to grow the state’s middle class.

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