I’m not sure which decade it was, maybe the eighties, perhaps the nineties, but there was a buxom red-headed comedienne with a Southern drawl. She was funny. One of her jokes was about smoking and how some people preferred light cigarettes. The punch line was, why would anyone suck twice as hard for half as much.
We can apply that idea to school funding, assuming we can get anyone to agree that the reason we take money from people for administrators, buildings, and teachers is learning. I don’t think we can, because it isn’t, not anymore, but most taxpayers are under the impression that numeracy, literacy, and logic skills (the ability to think or reason for yourself) are included in the price tag. Assessment scores say otherwise and are a lightning rod for cost-versus-results debates.
Vermont spent $28,818 per student in fiscal year 2024, the third-highest in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Mississippi spent $12,324, fifth from the bottom. That’s a difference of $16,494 per student in fiscal 2024….
Mississippi’s fourth graders ranked 49th in the nation in reading in 2013. In 2022, they rose to 21st. In 2024, they beat the national reading average for the first time.
Vermont is paying twice as much and getting a lot less value. Maybe not half the value, but there is a valuable lesson. It’s not what you spend, but what you teach and how you teach it.
We also have over a century of institutional priority issues. Mass public education was always about creating factory workers after the Industrial Revolution. We needed thinkers, but there were private schools and fine universities for them. The rest needed a remedial exposure that might give them enough sense to keep their hands from between the gears.
Plenty of “kids” managed better, but the institution has degraded in priorities and rigor for so long that any student with natural ability who isn’t pulled out and replaced in something more challenging is likely to turn into a groomed, angry, gender dysphoric mass shooter.
The system has failed, but as Mississippi has demonstrated, it is not beyond repair. We don’t have to suck twice as hard for half as much. The current education system appears to view children not as charges who need to learn, but as revenue assets. We get x dollars per seat warmed, and its job is to protect the revenue generators.
The buildings and systems are nothing more than rooms that salaried staff and teachers must fill. It’s a jobs program for credentialed management and (likely) union dues payers whose salaries rise regardless of output, and whose job is to ensure the adjacent political class protects their budgets and monopoly.
Vermont’s problem echoes the landscape of most blue cities, counties, and states. Schools are ideologically captured institutions guarding a pile of political gold instead of mining future generations’ intellectual capacity for the benefit of children, parents, their communities, and the American republic.
It’s not hopeless. Mississippi realized that by focusing on reading in elementary school, actual reading, you could improve the rest.
Vermont appears to be trying to do exactly that, but the pessimists suggest it could take years and more money. Mississippi had outside help, they say.
We could wait for the institution to figure it out or we could encourage legislators to make it more competitive. It kids are just a dollar sign, then make them earn every one. Charter, private, and home education opportunities abound in most states and more so in others. For a fraction of the cost and half the time, you can already get a kid that’s at least twice as educated, and not at all confused about the body they were born in.
