Vermont taxpayers are screwed. Their Democrat majority government can override any Phil Scott Veto (assuming he’s not also part of the problem) and where there are Democrats, there will be higher taxes and little or nothing to show for the taking. The failed public education experiment is a great example.
Twenty years ago (2004), Vermont had a problem.
A total of 39 schools, or 13 percent, failed to make what is defined as adequate yearly progress this year, Education Commissioner Richard Cate said Tuesday. The results, he said, should be used to better understand how to serve all Vermont students and not to judge schools. “If identification doesn’t mean that terrible things are going to happen, I don’t think we should care quite as much about numbers as we should about the needs of kids,” Cate said. “All I really care about is that all the kids are served.”
If you compare the 2003 troubles reported in that 2004 article to the 2024 troubles (or the 2023 proficiency results), the needs of the kids cost exponentially more while fewer of them are “being served.” Competency is down, and grade-level reading and math are down.
“Bellows Falls Union High School Principal Kelly O’Ryan told the school’s budget committee this week that seven freshmen out of a classroom of 14 students were reading at a first-grade or elementary school level.”
It’s not that only half of the high school students can read to grade level. It’s that half of them can only read to a first-grade level.
It’s not just Bellows Falls but statewide.
As has been reported, Vermont test scores are dropping significantly and have been for over a decade. A recent deep dive revealed that our public schools have been teaching kids to read the wrong way for over a generation. Along that line comes a story from the Brattleboro Reformer, Low Reading Scores Alarm BFUHS Board, in which the Bellows Falls Union High School principal revealed that half of the freshman class “were reading at a first-grade or elementary school level.”
The one thing that IS up is school budgets and spending which brings us to Town meeting 2024. Multiple outlets have reported that a third of towns rejected their school budgets last week. What one commenter suggested might be a historical record.
Well, the reason that so many budgets failed is because property taxes were projected to skyrocket by nearly 20%. And that’s because, collectively, the budgets that were put before voters represented a $230 million increase in education spending. So even before all these budgets went down, lawmakers were already saying, ‘This is a crisis. Something has got to give.’ Tuesday’s results confirmed for them, that they have a mandate for change.
VermontGrok regular Rob Roper wrote about this latest tidal wave tax and the spending last December.
Vermont already spends more per pupil than almost every other state in the Union at the official count of $22,953, but the NEA pegged the number at $25,053 in 2022-23, which is the number you get when you simply divide the education budget by the number of students. And what are we getting for all this increased spending year after year? An unmitigated disaster of falling student outcomes, rising classroom violence, and a shockingly arrogant lack of accountability or common sense by public school officials.
Democrats can’t imagine a solution that doesn’t involve throwing more of your money into a bottomless hole. In the case of public Ed, however, they get some back from union dues to campaign coffers to boots on the ground, and more often than is reported – electioneering. Democrats benefit from recycling your hard-earned dollars through an institution that can’t seem to do much else unless turning generations of kids into helpless illiterate gender queers can be viewed as another positive (though again, you’d be right to wonder for whom).
After spending a barrel of one-time money, Vermont is over a barrel. The state used inflation-driving COVID bailouts to grow school budgets, and taxpayers were left holding the larger bag. That was not an accident. It is a well-honed tactic of government-first progressives: Make government bigger and then cry about how awful things will get if they have to propose cuts. Anyone who dares is smeared, and taxes rise perpetually to fill a space that didn’t exist before the one-time money came along.
Wash, rinse, repeat. When the institution continues to fail, the solution is more money to pay for more failure—a doom loop that few ever escape.
Public education has been in decline for decades, and for just as long, Amininstrators union loudmouths, and politicians have blamed it on money. But the only thing more money can be directly connected to in government schools is dumber children. As the budgets have grown, kids have become less capable, less proficient, and ill-prepared for anything outside that fiscally bloated womb.
It would be nice if you could invest that in something else, but the other problem with electing Democrats is they will do whatever they can to trap your kids in their doom loop.
What exactly you plan to do about that is your decision, but a good start would be to stop electing Democrats for at least as long as your schools have been failing.
