This is not breaking news but deserves repeating. Mill Moore, writing for Campaign for Vermont exposed this startling new reality earlier this month in a terrific article highlighting Vermont’s decade-long public school performance nosedive, which has coincided with an upward trend in math and literacy scores in Mississippi. Yeah, that Mississippi. The (formerly) “Thank God for Mississippi” Mississippi. The Mississippi whose students now perform better than ours.
As Moore points out, “Mississippi is now ranked at ninth among all states in math and sixteenth in reading while Vermont now ranks a very mediocre thirty-sixth for both subjects.” Another astute Vermont writer on this subject, former State’s Economist and UVM professor Art Woolf, dug deeper to show that when accounting for demographics, Vermont’s scores look even worse with non-Hispanic white Vermonters (that’s about 90 percent of our student population) scoring 47th and 48th compared to their peers nationally in math and reading.
That’s really bad.
But here’s the kicker Moore and Woolf didn’t mention: Mississippi is achieving these stellar results while spending around $12,500 per kid. Vermont spends nearly $29,000. Overall, we are the 2nd highest spenders in the nation and Mississippi is 45th (Source: NEA). Yet they are improving and we are deteriorating. Makes you wonder.
The excuse we hear in Vermont for this failure is most often “poverty.” Yet Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation with the lowest per capita income, and their schools are still managing do a better job for their students. Vermont per capita income ranks 16th from the top. Please explain!
The other day I heard an educrat in Vermont lamenting our “teacher shortage.” But Vermont has by far the lowest student to teacher and student to staff ratios in the country at 10.5 to 1 and 4.3 to 1 respectively. Mississippi is getting by with a 14 to 1 student to teacher ratio. The national average is 15.3.
And who pays their teachers more? That would be Vermont. According to the NEA, Vermont’s average teacher salary is $69,562 and Mississippi’s is $53,704 – 51st in the nation! Out of 50! (Well, there’s DC, but the point is made.) So, teachers’ salaries aren’t the issue.
What about blaming the parents for not preparing their kids at home? Vermont has the fifth highest number of citizens per capita with a college degree or better. Mississippi? They rank 49th. There’s also significantly more crime in Mississippi than in the Green Mountains. The list goes on, and… for crying out loud, it’s Mississippi!
But somehow with far less money, fewer teachers (and those working for less pay), less educated parents at home, more children living in poverty and all the issues that come with that, Mississippi public schools are doing a significantly better job of teaching their kids to read, write and to math than ours. Well, tip your cap, and W…T…F!
In a press release put out by the Vermont Agency of Education following this embarrassing juxtaposition with the Magnolia State, Chief Academic Officer, Dr. Erin Davis, said, “…I know how important it is that we resist the urge to assign blame….”
Sorry, but no. Consider that urge no longer resisted. There needs to be consequences for this level of systemwide failure. It’s not just our students who are being robbed of a quality education and any future that requires one, but taxpayers are being driven into bankruptcy to pay outrageously for this bloated failure factory.
And we know exactly who is to blame: The Vermont Teachers’ Unions, the Superintendents Association, and the Principals’ Association, the State House lobbyist equivalent of Cerberus, the three headed monster guarding the gates of the underworld, also known as The Blob. Here their job is to keep the money flowing in ever-increasing bucketloads while reducing their accountability for performance to non-existent. Or, in other words, to ensure we all just pay up and “resist the urge to assign blame.” In both of these endeavors they have succeeded.
Of course, the Blob couldn’t have achieved this level of political and financial success despite this catastrophic failure to do their job without their total ownership of the majority Vermont Democrat Party. In the 2024 elections the VTNEA endorsed around 120 candidates for state House and Senate – almost all were Democrats. The payoff for this support was putting The Blob in charge of reforming the education system The Blob has destroyed and has no incentive to reform.
This took place with the farcical Vermont Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont, which was tasked in 2024 with coming up with cost savings measures for legislators to discuss in 2025 – and they just didn’t do it. And now the School District Redistricting Task Force which was supposed to develop maps for more streamlined and cost efficient school districts for discussion in 2026 – and they just didn’t do it. They’ve very purposefully wasted eighteen months, spending even more taxpayer money, to spike reform that was supposed to save taxpayers’ money. Oh, the irony! Welcome to Montpelier.
It’s deliberate sabotage. But until this dynamic is fixed by the voters, breaking the Democrat/VTNEA cabal that has turned public education into little more than a lucrative grift, our taxpayers will continue to be robbed blind, our students will continue to be deprived of a quality education, and our schools will continue to be a punchline… in Mississippi.
