From Louis Porter, in today’s Rutland Herald:

Douglas administration officials said their proposal is a necessary brake on education spending that has not taken the same kind of reductions as state government and human services over the last year.

The governor’s proposal would move additional costs into the Education Fund – including teachers’ retirement costs and early education costs – and place a firm cap on education spending for the fiscal year that follows this one.

“Given the investment in education that taxpayers have made in Vermont and the current woes that taxpayers are having in the economy that level funding education spending for one year is reasonable,” Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham said. “Especially when many programs funded by the General Fund are seeing not level funding but cuts in their budgets.”

This isn’t a budget proposal.  It’s an attempt to damage public education by setting more of the burden on property taxes and create conflict between schools and residents at the local level.

First off, spending freezes are not freezes.  They’re cuts.  School programs get a little more expensive each year, so a budget freeze basically means a budget cut.

This means that programs seen as non-essential, even though they have a great deal of overall educational benefit (such as art and music classes), get cut while programs that have a more dubious educational benefit (such as sports programs) tend to stick around.

Don’t get me wrong: I am in favor of sports programs.  I think they’re great.  I just don’t think they have the educational benefit that art and music do and I sometimes question whether pairing them so closely with public school programs is such a good idea.

That said, there’s a term which conservatives like to throw around: “school choice.”  Here’s an example of Douglas referencing it:

Not every child receives an equal opportunity for the best education VT’s public schools can provide. When a school fails to meet the individual needs of a student, wealthy families can pay tuition and choose another school, but poor and middle-class children are left behind. That is wrong. Choice should not be a privilege reserved for only the wealthy. It should be the right of all Vermonters. I will open the doors of our best public schools to every child.

Here’s what Douglas’ proposal above does: it gives parents with the resources to move their kids to another school the option to do so, forcing those without those resources to keep their kids local, but does nothing to actually benefit the school that’s in trouble.  It therefore, keeps poor kids poorly educated, and leaves wealthier kids with more options.

Let’s get back to the Herald piece.  There’s a telling line towards the end:

And the expansion of income sensitivity and other measures have somewhat masked the cost of schools, Douglas said.

“Vermonters need to know what the true cost of our education system is,” he said.

And he’s right.  We should know the “true cost” of all the choices we make with our budgets.   So here’s my thought for the day: the “true cost” of not fully funding our educational system?  

It’s really expensive.