I've been learning a bit about Vermont education funding, as it's been a A THING up here; for very different reasons, but still a wild statewide chaotic mess... lots of impassioned arguments on Front Porch Forum ( VT's answer to Next Door that includes many more cows on the loose and many fewer instances of flaming rhetoric ), and something like 1/3 of school budgets were vetoed this month.
Vermont has a unique system: education is still funded largely via homestead taxes, but instead of staying within the town/county, the taxes go into a state fund, and then are redistributed out to local school budgets, with weighting to create a more equitable funding landscape. So, up in the Kingdom (where I live), which is the poorest part of the state, districts receive a higher percentage of funding relative to actual taxes collected. And then there's additional weighting for student populations that are more expensive to educate -- high schoolers, students who speak English as a second language, etc...So, cool! Equitable funding, good idea!
But! It seems the problem is that the whole system is so insanely complicated, that no one can really explain how it works...so when legislatures make adjustments, we get a big mess and lots of mad people, without much comprehension over what the actual problems or solutions are.
There's an elementary school up for closure nearby, ended up skipping that measure on my ballot because I truly had no idea what I should think about it all.
Kate!! My dear friend Bob Gensburg was the shit-disturbing lawyer in St J who took on the state in that case and led to Act 60's reforms. He was a hoot and a half, I miss him a lot. 🥰
I lived across the river (in Littleton and Landaff) for 15+ years, and one of the quirks of NH's school funding setup is that if the voters reject the school budget during town meeting, the district defaults to using *last* year's budget numbers instead.
So I have, a very few times, voted *against* the school budget because last year's was a higher number. And enough grumpy people (especially in NH) reject all budgets on principle, that those years the schools ended up with a surprise extra few thousand dollars. 🤷♀️
I have a good friend who was in the state legislature when they passed all that -- bet they knew Bob!
I love that NH story about better funding via vetoes. I don't *think* that's how it works here, but again, wildly incomprehensibly complicated. I don't have children and don't own property, so I don't have any personal experience of what's going on.
This is so fascinating, you two! I feel like that, if the goal was to make sure that every school, especially schools with a lot of kids in poverty or in need of services like ELA, had plenty of money that there would be an easier way to do it
Per last week's community thread, I would really love to know more about the history of what we fund via property taxes and why (anything tied to the value of privately owned property seems ripe for maximum contention), vs what is funded via sales tax, business taxes etc...
Listen, you have been an incredible resource in learning how the American left should not lionize Canada, but also… this one’s pretty bad and dumb! It’s almost as if the Great Deluder Satan is up to some mischief!
I would be interested to know how it works in Wisconsin, but here in California, any tax needs to pass with TWO-THIRDS OF THE VOTE (66.67% to be exact), which is a ridiculously high threshold considering how many people just vote no reflexively on any tax. (I believe there's a way for seniors to opt out of paying school taxes, which is a bummer but probably a necessity considering the number of people who go "I don't have school-age kids, why should I pay for schools?")
We just had our primary election, and one of the measures was a school tax. It passed with 76.15% of the vote, which I'm happy about. There didn't seem to be any organized opposition this time and the volunteers did a good job of getting out the vote, distributing yard signs, etc. My property taxes are eye-wateringly high already, AND I am childfree, but I always vote "yes" and am proud to do it.
One of my favorite topics that, oddly, no one else ever wants to talk about. I live in Texas where school funding is insanely complicated. I’ve heard our superintendent, who has been in Texas education for 20+ years, say she sometimes doesn’t understand! We have a complicated weighting formula, a complicated formula to determine a “property wealthy” district’s “recapture” amount, and zero transparency in how the money the state “recaptures” from property wealthy districts flows to property poor districts. Add to that we have a two tier tax rate (paid wholly by local property owners) that limits the amount a district can collect for maintenance & operations. Bond propositions are only allowed to cover new facilities, extensive facility renovations, technology and new buses. Oh, and our lege hasn’t adjusted the “basic allotment” since 2019 while it sits on $33 billion! And now our attorney general has start suing districts because he determined some of their get out the vote efforts were “too political”, forcing districts to use money that should go into the classroom on lawyers. And don’t even get me started on voucher efforts ! It’s a royal mess!
It's telling that even though you described all of these layers succinctly and clearly, I still felt like I needed to lie down for a second after taking all that in! What a mess indeed!
None of this is hostile, I swear. But your fatalism on education always shocks me!
If the referendum passes, which is fine by me, we likely will be 1 of the 10 best-funded big districts in America by purchasing power, somewhere around 20 just looking at dollar amounts.
We will be living the dream. All but the top-funded big cities would salivate at our budget.
Genuine question: how would that affect how you feel?
Our best-funded districts are rural ones with Indigenous students, and for reasons you well know, they are the lowest-performing in Wisconsin. $25,000 per child isn't even doing it. Worse, it matters to fewer people, so fewer pitch in.
I say this not to claim that Milwaukee voucher and charter are, as a group, significantly better (sadly) or to run down the city in which I reside.
But though I dislike when the anti-Milwaukee crowd dehumanizes the district as uniformly incompetent, I find it equally dehumanizing when the Saint Milwaukee crowd pretends like luxury conditions are necessary to do, let's say, an okay job. Let's not aim for Miami! But we don't have to be Memphis. That we are so is because of the same board and administrative leadership who will write the next budget.
So, sure, billionaires could get every child a tutor, counselor, and integrated buildings, and every school could be magnificently successful.
But in this realistic world, genuinely, I do want people to call their shot. When we are funded as well as anybody, will we be "okay?" "Solid?" "Respectable?" Or is racism a social ill that we cannot sufficiently minimize to the extent that everyone is afforded, at least, dignity?
Not taken as hostile at all! I think, to answer your question, as somebody who believes in government funding for social programs that is both (a). universally generous and (b). reparational in nature, I think that MPS should, at minimum, be a top five funded urban district in the country because (if I'm reading that chart correctly) it has the fourth highest percentage of students in poverty in the entire country.
We do, sadly. The percentage of free/reduced lunch kids is lower, but the percentage in severe poverty is higher than others. Thank you! And a compliment to part: thank you for not believing education is magic or the entirety of what society owes children. Blessings!
"You all, is there a seventeen-syllable German word for a political reality that you’ve known about (and decried) for your entire adult life but that still finds new ways to grind your gears?"
It wasn't that long ago that Montana, property taxes were a decent way to get the major enterprises -- rail, mills, mines -- to carry a lot of the load. I don't have the stat in front of me, but back when we had mills, the burden of taxation looked very different.
I'll admit, though, that I find myself irked that blue communities like mine are subsidizing red communities which consistently vote, at the state level to underfund education and everything else.
I understand the frustration, but appreciate that even though it’s always tough when others are less likely to extend a helping hand, that you still help out their kids. I wish that it wasn’t up to us, community by community, to choose whether or not we extend the safety net
Thank you for talking about this! It's such a weird way to fund education. Education referenda come up in a lot of my local elections and I always vote for them (disclaimer: I am married to a public school teacher, but also, even before that, I've been of the mindset that schools can always have all of my money! As one of my friends succinctly puts it, "We don't need any more dummies runnin' around."). Though last time, we had a particular head-scratcher for me: the referendum was to fund pre-K programs, but the district was going to use the money to contract with private providers instead of expanding the offerings through the public school system. So it would help families, but it would privatize services. ARGH! I ended up voting for it (literally deciding on my way into my voting location) with the hopes that we could pressure the district and superintendent to restructure the program to integrate it into the school system. It squeaked by (in a town where referenda luckily usually pass by a wide margin) and it remains to be seen what will happen with the program.
“ … What other American institution, public or private, has to run an austerity gauntlet simply to justify “keeping its current level of services?”
The MBTA! It used to be funded by fares, advertising space on the T, and the MA legislature would cover the deficit each year in what is now called ‘backward funding’.
In 2000, they switched to a new strategy, where the T would be funded by fares, ad space, and 1% of the 5% MA sales tax would go to the T. And then, the T would have to ‘live within its means’. This is called ‘Forward Funding’ and the architect of that plan was some up-and-coming political guy named Charlie Baker.
It hasn’t been good for the T, which also absorbed a chunk of Big Dig debt for required public transit changes related to the Big Dig. Note that no other Big Dig Debt was piled on to any other agency; I believe the rest is just held by the legislature. And… unsurprisingly, the T ‘living within its means’ has been an unfolding, ongoing disaster for maintenance, reliability, and (of course) traffic, culminating spectacularly in an Orange Line train catching on fire and riders having to bust out of the train on a high, sketchy bridge, with a possible live third rail over the Mystic River — one rider dove 50+ feet in to the water and swam off to get away. It’s slowly improving under Phil Eng, the GM who turned around the LIRR that Healey brought on, but why did we have that austerity mindset in the first place? All it did was make things worse for everyone.
Living this way is terrible for everyone in greater Boston, even if they don’t take the T, and it’s costing all of us in time in traffic, life stress, pollution, and so many other ways. It’s the same problem as school funding — which I see as better in MA than in my home state of Ohio, but nowhere near good enough. There are ‘crown jewel’ schools like Boston Latin — and then so many other schools that don’t get a second glance and are struggling so much. Which is insane and saddening considering how much wealth and education is in this city and in the Commonwealth.
Preach! I grew up in MA and was in high school when Proposition 2 1/2 was passed in 1980. It limited both the total amount of taxes that could be levied (2.5% of total value) and the amount of increase each year (no more than 2.5% increase each year). The bloodletting began. School programs disappeared. I started attending an alternative high school that year, but it closed up shop shortly after. I left high school a year early for that year. It was a formative experience for me. The message was crystal clear - adults were sick and tired of having to pay for schools and didn’t give a damn if kids suffered as a result. I always vote yes on school funding. It’s such a minor expense for me and it’s so important.
I've been learning a bit about Vermont education funding, as it's been a A THING up here; for very different reasons, but still a wild statewide chaotic mess... lots of impassioned arguments on Front Porch Forum ( VT's answer to Next Door that includes many more cows on the loose and many fewer instances of flaming rhetoric ), and something like 1/3 of school budgets were vetoed this month.
Vermont has a unique system: education is still funded largely via homestead taxes, but instead of staying within the town/county, the taxes go into a state fund, and then are redistributed out to local school budgets, with weighting to create a more equitable funding landscape. So, up in the Kingdom (where I live), which is the poorest part of the state, districts receive a higher percentage of funding relative to actual taxes collected. And then there's additional weighting for student populations that are more expensive to educate -- high schoolers, students who speak English as a second language, etc...So, cool! Equitable funding, good idea!
But! It seems the problem is that the whole system is so insanely complicated, that no one can really explain how it works...so when legislatures make adjustments, we get a big mess and lots of mad people, without much comprehension over what the actual problems or solutions are.
There's an elementary school up for closure nearby, ended up skipping that measure on my ballot because I truly had no idea what I should think about it all.
Kate!! My dear friend Bob Gensburg was the shit-disturbing lawyer in St J who took on the state in that case and led to Act 60's reforms. He was a hoot and a half, I miss him a lot. 🥰
I lived across the river (in Littleton and Landaff) for 15+ years, and one of the quirks of NH's school funding setup is that if the voters reject the school budget during town meeting, the district defaults to using *last* year's budget numbers instead.
So I have, a very few times, voted *against* the school budget because last year's was a higher number. And enough grumpy people (especially in NH) reject all budgets on principle, that those years the schools ended up with a surprise extra few thousand dollars. 🤷♀️
I have a good friend who was in the state legislature when they passed all that -- bet they knew Bob!
I love that NH story about better funding via vetoes. I don't *think* that's how it works here, but again, wildly incomprehensibly complicated. I don't have children and don't own property, so I don't have any personal experience of what's going on.
This is so fascinating, you two! I feel like that, if the goal was to make sure that every school, especially schools with a lot of kids in poverty or in need of services like ELA, had plenty of money that there would be an easier way to do it
Per last week's community thread, I would really love to know more about the history of what we fund via property taxes and why (anything tied to the value of privately owned property seems ripe for maximum contention), vs what is funded via sales tax, business taxes etc...
wow, i had no idea school funding in the US was broken in this specific particular way, that's so ghoulish.
and thank you for raising awareness of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647, literally nothing could be more important to me!
Listen, you have been an incredible resource in learning how the American left should not lionize Canada, but also… this one’s pretty bad and dumb! It’s almost as if the Great Deluder Satan is up to some mischief!
darn that l'il scamp!
I would be interested to know how it works in Wisconsin, but here in California, any tax needs to pass with TWO-THIRDS OF THE VOTE (66.67% to be exact), which is a ridiculously high threshold considering how many people just vote no reflexively on any tax. (I believe there's a way for seniors to opt out of paying school taxes, which is a bummer but probably a necessity considering the number of people who go "I don't have school-age kids, why should I pay for schools?")
We just had our primary election, and one of the measures was a school tax. It passed with 76.15% of the vote, which I'm happy about. There didn't seem to be any organized opposition this time and the volunteers did a good job of getting out the vote, distributing yard signs, etc. My property taxes are eye-wateringly high already, AND I am childfree, but I always vote "yes" and am proud to do it.
And now something for those of us here who enjoy reading about campaign merchandise: "What I’ve learned about Trump from his merch," by NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben: https://daniellekurtzleben.substack.com/p/the-hot-topic-effect
Whenever I get mad about Wisconsin’s system, I always remember the absolute awful rules they’ve passed in California (this one) and Colorado (TABOR).
As for Danielle’s piece, I’ve been saving it as a treat!
So fucking mad. That’s it. That’s the comment.
AGREED!!!!!!!
One of my favorite topics that, oddly, no one else ever wants to talk about. I live in Texas where school funding is insanely complicated. I’ve heard our superintendent, who has been in Texas education for 20+ years, say she sometimes doesn’t understand! We have a complicated weighting formula, a complicated formula to determine a “property wealthy” district’s “recapture” amount, and zero transparency in how the money the state “recaptures” from property wealthy districts flows to property poor districts. Add to that we have a two tier tax rate (paid wholly by local property owners) that limits the amount a district can collect for maintenance & operations. Bond propositions are only allowed to cover new facilities, extensive facility renovations, technology and new buses. Oh, and our lege hasn’t adjusted the “basic allotment” since 2019 while it sits on $33 billion! And now our attorney general has start suing districts because he determined some of their get out the vote efforts were “too political”, forcing districts to use money that should go into the classroom on lawyers. And don’t even get me started on voucher efforts ! It’s a royal mess!
It's telling that even though you described all of these layers succinctly and clearly, I still felt like I needed to lie down for a second after taking all that in! What a mess indeed!
None of this is hostile, I swear. But your fatalism on education always shocks me!
If the referendum passes, which is fine by me, we likely will be 1 of the 10 best-funded big districts in America by purchasing power, somewhere around 20 just looking at dollar amounts.
We will be living the dream. All but the top-funded big cities would salivate at our budget.
Genuine question: how would that affect how you feel?
Our best-funded districts are rural ones with Indigenous students, and for reasons you well know, they are the lowest-performing in Wisconsin. $25,000 per child isn't even doing it. Worse, it matters to fewer people, so fewer pitch in.
Among big districts in America, we in Milwaukee
-were among the better-funded already.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_215.30.asp
-had the 12th-most of our budget covered by our state and the 8th-most covered by someone other than city residents.
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html
-had the worst Black-student test scores.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/districtprofile/overview/XK?cti=PgTab_GapComparisons&chort=1&sub=RED&sj=XK&fs=Grade&st=MN&year=2022R3&sg=Race%2FEthnicity:%20Hispanic%20vs.%20Black&sgv=Black&sgvs=desc&ts=Single%20Year&tss=2022R3&sfj=NL
-had the 3rd-lowest graduation rate.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_215.10.asp
I say this not to claim that Milwaukee voucher and charter are, as a group, significantly better (sadly) or to run down the city in which I reside.
But though I dislike when the anti-Milwaukee crowd dehumanizes the district as uniformly incompetent, I find it equally dehumanizing when the Saint Milwaukee crowd pretends like luxury conditions are necessary to do, let's say, an okay job. Let's not aim for Miami! But we don't have to be Memphis. That we are so is because of the same board and administrative leadership who will write the next budget.
So, sure, billionaires could get every child a tutor, counselor, and integrated buildings, and every school could be magnificently successful.
But in this realistic world, genuinely, I do want people to call their shot. When we are funded as well as anybody, will we be "okay?" "Solid?" "Respectable?" Or is racism a social ill that we cannot sufficiently minimize to the extent that everyone is afforded, at least, dignity?
Not taken as hostile at all! I think, to answer your question, as somebody who believes in government funding for social programs that is both (a). universally generous and (b). reparational in nature, I think that MPS should, at minimum, be a top five funded urban district in the country because (if I'm reading that chart correctly) it has the fourth highest percentage of students in poverty in the entire country.
We do, sadly. The percentage of free/reduced lunch kids is lower, but the percentage in severe poverty is higher than others. Thank you! And a compliment to part: thank you for not believing education is magic or the entirety of what society owes children. Blessings!
"You all, is there a seventeen-syllable German word for a political reality that you’ve known about (and decried) for your entire adult life but that still finds new ways to grind your gears?"
German here. No, there isn't.
Darn it! But I'm glad to have the confirmation.
It wasn't that long ago that Montana, property taxes were a decent way to get the major enterprises -- rail, mills, mines -- to carry a lot of the load. I don't have the stat in front of me, but back when we had mills, the burden of taxation looked very different.
I always vote for the levies.
I'll admit, though, that I find myself irked that blue communities like mine are subsidizing red communities which consistently vote, at the state level to underfund education and everything else.
I understand the frustration, but appreciate that even though it’s always tough when others are less likely to extend a helping hand, that you still help out their kids. I wish that it wasn’t up to us, community by community, to choose whether or not we extend the safety net
Thank you for talking about this! It's such a weird way to fund education. Education referenda come up in a lot of my local elections and I always vote for them (disclaimer: I am married to a public school teacher, but also, even before that, I've been of the mindset that schools can always have all of my money! As one of my friends succinctly puts it, "We don't need any more dummies runnin' around."). Though last time, we had a particular head-scratcher for me: the referendum was to fund pre-K programs, but the district was going to use the money to contract with private providers instead of expanding the offerings through the public school system. So it would help families, but it would privatize services. ARGH! I ended up voting for it (literally deciding on my way into my voting location) with the hopes that we could pressure the district and superintendent to restructure the program to integrate it into the school system. It squeaked by (in a town where referenda luckily usually pass by a wide margin) and it remains to be seen what will happen with the program.
Oh that one sounds like a real devil’s bargain! I’m not sure what I would have done with that one either!
“ … What other American institution, public or private, has to run an austerity gauntlet simply to justify “keeping its current level of services?”
The MBTA! It used to be funded by fares, advertising space on the T, and the MA legislature would cover the deficit each year in what is now called ‘backward funding’.
In 2000, they switched to a new strategy, where the T would be funded by fares, ad space, and 1% of the 5% MA sales tax would go to the T. And then, the T would have to ‘live within its means’. This is called ‘Forward Funding’ and the architect of that plan was some up-and-coming political guy named Charlie Baker.
It hasn’t been good for the T, which also absorbed a chunk of Big Dig debt for required public transit changes related to the Big Dig. Note that no other Big Dig Debt was piled on to any other agency; I believe the rest is just held by the legislature. And… unsurprisingly, the T ‘living within its means’ has been an unfolding, ongoing disaster for maintenance, reliability, and (of course) traffic, culminating spectacularly in an Orange Line train catching on fire and riders having to bust out of the train on a high, sketchy bridge, with a possible live third rail over the Mystic River — one rider dove 50+ feet in to the water and swam off to get away. It’s slowly improving under Phil Eng, the GM who turned around the LIRR that Healey brought on, but why did we have that austerity mindset in the first place? All it did was make things worse for everyone.
Living this way is terrible for everyone in greater Boston, even if they don’t take the T, and it’s costing all of us in time in traffic, life stress, pollution, and so many other ways. It’s the same problem as school funding — which I see as better in MA than in my home state of Ohio, but nowhere near good enough. There are ‘crown jewel’ schools like Boston Latin — and then so many other schools that don’t get a second glance and are struggling so much. Which is insane and saddening considering how much wealth and education is in this city and in the Commonwealth.
Great point! Although I wish this wasn’t true, but you laid out how maddening it is so well!
Preach! I grew up in MA and was in high school when Proposition 2 1/2 was passed in 1980. It limited both the total amount of taxes that could be levied (2.5% of total value) and the amount of increase each year (no more than 2.5% increase each year). The bloodletting began. School programs disappeared. I started attending an alternative high school that year, but it closed up shop shortly after. I left high school a year early for that year. It was a formative experience for me. The message was crystal clear - adults were sick and tired of having to pay for schools and didn’t give a damn if kids suffered as a result. I always vote yes on school funding. It’s such a minor expense for me and it’s so important.