Scott’s Plan

The Plan • The Bill • The Effects • The Sources • A Critique

The Plan
Governor Scott’s Education Plan website

The Bill
House bill 454, An act relating to transforming Vermont’s education governance, quality, and finance systems

The Effects
The Governor’s plan would move us toward fewer, larger schools with bigger classes and fewer teachers. It would reduce the number of school boards to 5 from the current 126. It would cut the amount spent per student from an average of $20,000 to about $14,000.

Fewer and larger schools
Vermont’s 215 elementary schools today average 200 students, its 59 high schools 500, and its 21 middle schools 300 students. Vermont’s overall average school size is 267. The Governor’s plan calls for doubling the size of these schools. Our school districts today average about 800 students; the Governor proposes districts of 16,000. Today Vermont elects locally 500 citizens to serve on 126 school boards. The Governor proposes to reduce this local governance down to 25 citizens, elected statewide, sitting on just five boards. 

Lower spending
The Governor proposes to cut education funding by 30%, from the current $20,000 per student to about $14,000 per student. This would put us on a par with the lowest-spending and lowest-performing states of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Per-student spending and school quality in the United States are highly correlated: the more you spend, the better your schools perform.

The Sources

Governor Scott bases his plan on a report from a school finance consulting company called Augenblick, Piccus and Odden. Their Evidence -Based Budgeting approach, called EBB, is a mathematical model, what its authors call an “Excel simulation.” The Governor refers to this report as the “EB model.” It is based on school sizes twice what we have in Vermont. It is not based on a study of Vermont schools. The report that AP&O wrote for Vermont in the blink of an eye is word-for-word similar to cost-cutting reports they have done for other states. See for example Study of Adequacy of Funding for Education in Maryland, or An Evidence-Based Approach to School Finance Adequacy In Michigan

A Critique
The Governor’s plan rests on two false premises; it was developed by out-of-state consultants with no expertise in school improvement, and with no consideration of Vermont voices; it proposes an organization and governance scheme that flies in the face of the realities of eduction in Vermont; and it fails to provide a sustainable source of funding for our schools.

False Premise #1: Poor Student Performance

The Governor claims that our students are not performing well. He writes that “because of the way our system is designed, we’re not leading the pack in terms of outcomes.” This is simply not true. In fact, Vermont’s system of small schools with small classes under community control has allowed our students to outpace the nation for the last 40 years. Forbes magazine ranks Vermont in the top ten for student test scores in 2024. The World Population Review for 2025 ranks Vermont’s schools in the top five of states. Since 1996, Vermont 4th and 8th graders have outperformed their peers nationwide by ten points on the National Assessment of Student Performance. At the high school level, Vermont’s SAT scores have exceed the national average for the last 20 years. See the graphs and tables in the Resources tab for evidence to support this analysis.

False Premise #2: Overspending 

The Governor claims that Vermont spends more than any other state per student, because teachers and school boards have not been “frugal.” This is simply not true. Four other states spend more than we do: New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia. Four others are very close behind. Interestingly, the top ten spenders also achieve the highest test scores. 

Why do we spend more per student?

• We relish our small schools with small classes under community control, and are willing to pay for this privilege.
• Our student population has declined by 20% over the last 25 years, while the number of schools and teachers has remained the same.
• Health insurance for school employees is rising by 15% per year. School boards have no choice but to pay a quarter of each employee’s salary for health insurance. 
• Our special education costs have risen as more students are being identified as such, and more is spent on each one. Spending per special ed student is now double the per-student average.

Only the first of these is under the control of local school boards. It’s not a lack of frugality, but outside pressures that drive spending. See the graphs and tables under the Resources tab for evidence to support this analysis.

The Process
Rather than supporting the work of the broad-based Vermont Commission on the Future of Education, the Administration left it in the cold and ignored its suggestions. Instead, it hired an out-of-state consulting firm specializing in education cost-cutting to develop a plan. That’s the Augenblick, Piccus and Odden paper cited above. Very quickly they performed a find-and-replace on the boilerplate study that they have provided to other states and school districts, to make it seem like it was developed specifically for Vermont.

The authors claim their plan is “Evidence Based (EB)”, but its authors provide no evidence that followers of their model see better student learning. The chief hard evidence they cite is that large classes in large schools cost less than small classes in small schools. None of the states following their model are in the top ten of student performance.

Curiously, the EB study reports that “ students in the small classes of 15 achieved at a significantly higher level … than those in regular class sizes of 24, and the impacts were even larger … for low income and minority students.” And yet the Governor’s plan calls for class sizes of 25.

The decisions dictated in this EB report are best made by local boards and education professionals in Vermont. In their report, among other things, the authors tell us, among other things, exactly how many custodians we should have in each school and how they should be deployed (pages 67-68). Same for groundskeepers. Vermonters do not need or want  this level of micromanagement.

Their cost-saving projections are based on an elementary school of 400 and a high school of 1000 and a district size of 4000.

Vermont’s elementary schools today average 200 students, its high schools 500, and its middle schools 300 students. Our districts average 700. Vermont’s overall average school size is 267.

And Vermont’s small schools turn out to be no more costly than its large schools. In fact there is no significant correlation between our district size and per-student expenditure in Vermont.

To follow P&O’s model would force us to close 173 of our 216 elementary schools and 45 of our 58 high schools. And then build dozens of larger schools to replace them.

Today Vermont provides a $20,000 education, on average, to each student, in line with the ten top-performing states. P&O recommends we cut that back to $11,446 per student, lower even than the worst-performing states, and cut our teacher/student ratio in half. This will certainly save money, but will also destroy our educational quality. I am not sure that’s what Vermonter’s want.

Funding

The Governor in his introduction to the plan complains that the current formula is so complex that few Vermonters fully understand it. But the formula he proposes is far more complex than what we have now. Here’s the Governor’s formula:

BF * WLTADM (LATDM (0.75 * EDSC) + (ELC *1.5) + (CTEFTE * 1.3) – (EEE* 0.54) + (LATDM * DSW) + SA) = FF + SE + TR + SP + Other

Res ipsa loquitur.

Adding more variables to an already complicated funding formula, as we have learned over the past ten years, seldom solves the problem and often engenders unintended consequences.

Taxation
The Governor’s plan does not explain exactly where the money will come from to support his formula. We must assume it will come from the current property tax, perhaps with small contributions from various sales taxes. But we all know that the current property tax is regressive and burdensome on wage-earning families. And that much wealth and income in Vermont is making little or no support to our schools. A truly comprehensive proposal would reform this broken tax system so that all Vermonters contribute a fair share of support for our schools. 

School quality

The Governor says that his “education transformation plan is a comprehensive approach that involves changes to funding, governance and education quality.” But all he proposes are changes to funding (cut it) and governance (remove local control). No specific plan for improving educational quality can be found in his proposal.

Governance

Today Vermont elects locally 500 citizens to serve on 100 school boards. That provides plenty opportunities for community control and involvement in our schools, something Vermonters have relished for 250 years. But it may be too many boards for our small state. The Governor however proposes to reduce this local governance down to just 25 citizens, elected statewide, sitting on just five boards. That’s far too few for parents or taxpayers to have much influence on their schools.

(While the Governor mentions in passing School Advisory Committees, his plan grants them no power, only the ability to provide feedback on the giant district budget, and to file a school improvement plan with the state.)

What’s the problem?

The secret to Vermont’s school success over the last 40 years has been its small schools with small classes under community control. Lose that, and we lose our advantage and our happiness. The Governor’s plan proposes to replace this with large schools and large classes under state control. This might get us lower costs, but moves us backwards in terms of educational quality and community involvement. This is not what Vermonters want.

The last eight years have not been kind to Vermont’s students. They have suffered repeated floods and an epidemic that closed many schools and disrupted many communities. They and their teachers and board members have borne the brunt of a divisive political culture in Washington and in Montpelier that has blamed them for high taxes, emasculated their educational leadership, and confused citizens with misinformation. If this continues, Vermont will lose its hard-won educational advantages. It’s no wonder our stellar test scores are beginning to lose their luster. 

What’s the solution?

The way to move forward is not to hire unqualified, inexperienced planners from poor-performing states to dictate a solution. Nor to double our class sizes, fire a third of our teachers and abolish local control. The Governor’s plan was designed by people who have never taught in a Vermont school, never served on a school board, never led a school, cast aside Vermont’s history and traditions, and ignored the advice of the Vermont Commission on the Future of Education.

Rather we need to involve Vermonters in a forward-looking examination of how we might:

• Re-organize our schools in light of our demographics, 
• More equitably pay for them, and
• Preserve our small schools with small classes under community control.

Our current school governance and taxation system is poorly structured, based on arbitrary town lines surveyed in the 1700’s before the state was settled. We need to structure schools instead around the organic patterns of geography and community, and patterns of sending and receiving schools that have developed over the last 250 years. These patterns are shown in the school map . They resemble webs, with threads that have linked elementary, middle and high schools over many decades, vital threads that cross town and county lines. See the A Vermont Design tab for more details.