Green Mountain Outlook

Rutland — As reports go, it could have been a lot pricier and harder-to-read, but it was quite enough anyway. That’s the recently-published Picus Report, which was commissioned to reassure the Golden Dome folks in Montpelier that their statewide school property tax­,starting with Act 60, and then son-of-60, Act 68, was equitable.

At 299 pages it cost $300,000, less than half a page and half a buck for every legal citizen (not counting illegal aliens) of the Green Mountain State. Its desired finding: school funding is indeed equitable.

No more high-real-estate-wealth “rich towns” easily producing every-student-Proficient graduates, while the low-wealth towns, so unfairly, couldn’t afford to bring their own poor kids to more than 30 percent proficiency.

Now Vermont sets the Basic Education Per-Pupil annual amount, presently about $8,000, which it collects from all towns and distributes to all school districts, and now so-called gold towns pay in more than they get back while non-gold towns do just the reverse.

But the Vermont average per-pupil spending isn’t $8,000; it’s closer to $16,000, and the Picus writers duly note that, in the well-chosen words of Rutland Herald headline writers, it’s “not cheap.” They don’t note, duly or otherwise, as Golden Domer Olsen of Jamaica and Guv-wannabe Randy Brock, both Rs, have, that “there’s no evidence to suggest that higher rates of per-pupil spending have resulted in higher levels of student achievement.”

Nor does it note the way easier in-state tests—first NSRE, now NECAP, soon perhaps Terra Nova or PAARC, have become part of the never-ending search for “tests” which produce higher scores than the now-despised federal NAEP tests, which explains why, just recently, students 70 percent of whom scored Proficient in reading under NECAP are the same young-folks as those 30-40 percent of whom scored Proficient under NAEP.

Most important (non) note, in your Humble Scribe’s opinion: if you accept the historical argument that rich-town kids once made Proficient while poor-town kids didn’t, then the Picus Report should have noted the accomplishment of leveling (and, of course “equity”) in achievement just as it duly noted leveling (“equity”) in spending, because now test scores and (non)Proficiency are pretty uniformly distributed across the State. A page on the SED website shows, in the 2009 NECAP test for grade 8 reading, for example, the free-lunch kids scoring at 260 while the paid-lunch kids came in at 277, (out of 500!) so the rich kids were 43 percent proficient while the poor kids were 23 percenr proficient. In both groups, a clear majority didn’t make proficient, are somewhat equally ill-served by the K-12 system in their inability to read at grade level. Since then, the NECAP test has been “improved” and now the kids make, we’re assured, 70 percent proficient. NAEP hasn’t been “improved”; it still shows 30-40 percent non-proficient. In not-too-ancient history, before a long list of modern “improvements” in reading and math instruction, it was very close to 100 percent proficiency, rich and poor.