Op Ed: Time to realign an education system that has been out of alignment for 30 years

Thank you, Cliff Duncan, for your recent letter concerning education financing. Both you and other readers will be surprised at how much I agree with the two major points you made.
Your first point is the value of using the strategies and tools of economic development to manage Vermont’s education system. Your second point is that Act 60, Vermont’s education financing law enacted 30 years ago, is the core problem. I agree with you on both.
On the first point: there is one essential economic tool used not just in the for-profit sector, but in nonprofits, government agencies, and even every one of our households. That tool is the profit and loss statement, or P&L — though it goes by other names depending on the type of organization. At its core, a P&L tracks the revenues and expenses incurred over a fixed period of time to carry out an entity’s mission. Every organization has strategies for balancing revenue and expenditures; what differentiates one organization from another is what happens below that line, in service of its particular purpose. In Vermont’s education system, this tool is called the Education Outlook, and for the budget nerds among you, it’s available on the Legislature’s website (bit.ly/1846-education-outlook).
On the second point: surprisingly, Cliff, I agree that Act 60 is the core of the problem. But we part ways on how to solve it.
Act 60 was enacted 30 years ago to solve an equity problem — to provide equitable education financing for all Vermont children — and it has been very successful in accomplishing that goal.
However, Act 60 also has had an unintended, and still unrecognized, consequence: it changed the underlying architecture of Vermont’s education system. Before Act 60, Vermont’s education system was made up of distinctive school districts, including both public and private schools, each responsible for its own financing, governance, and accountability for outcomes, with the Legislature, the Agency of Education, and the Vermont Board of Education playing an oversight and regulatory role. Act 60 turned that into a single statewide system tied together by its financing structure. Equally significant, under Act 60 the state took custody of property tax revenue for the first time — now $1.7 billion annually.
So today’s problem is a systems problem, not a spending problem. Turning back the clock 30 years isn’t practically possible, nor would it be right to undo the equity purpose Act 60 achieved.
Effective public-purpose systems need their financial, governance, and accountability-for-outcomes structures to be in alignment with each other. Act 60 changed the financial structure but left governance essentially untouched, and broke the accountability loop altogether. The system has been out of alignment for 30 years.
Our job now is to finish what Act 60 started: to recognize that Vermont has a community-based, bottom-up education system, best managed with carrots and sticks, not top-down hierarchical directives; to implement effective transparent accountability for outcomes that aligns with the new system; and to bring governance into alignment so we can effectively achieve outcomes for students, at a cost Vermonters value.
Ann P. Manwaring is a former Democratic member of the Vermont House of Representatives, representing Windham-6 from 2007 to 2017.