Ballon d'Essai  
By Martin Harris

In an earnest effort (I’m trying really, really, hard) to stay au courant with, and au milieu de the elevated intellectual climate for which the gentry-Left (plural noun) of Norwich expect to be known and appreciated, I’ll characterize as a ballon d’essai the following quote from School Board member Geoffrey Vitt as reported in the 8 January issue of The Valley News. Here it is: "…cutting too much out of the budget could lead parents to send their children to private school, and…exacerbate school funding problems". 

If the "trial balloon" symbolism (it’s not really an analogy) dating from the Great Depression years and the then-new-use of weather balloons to measure what was coming, doesn’t work for you, perhaps the more recent "let’s run it up the flagpole to see who salutes" imagery, supposedly spawned in the Madison Avenue NYC ad-agency culture of the 1950’s, will. Either way, it’s a new tactic in the please-vote-for-our-tax-increasing- school-budget strategy  in the annual campaign on this subject. Until now the argument has been couched in terms of "we’re doing wonderful and excellent things for the inadequately prepared children you’ve dumped on us, and if you vote against our barely-enlarged budget over which we have little control, it’s because you’re too cheap and stingy, too intellectually-challenged to comprehend and appreciate our efforts, but ultimately we’re at fault for our failure to explain it in terms even you can understand, so if you don’t vote yes we’ll just bring it back iterum  iterumque until you finally get it right". In Benson, in the mid-90’s, they brought it back a dozen times, never gained voter acceptance, and so the Board and edu-crats went to the Legislature instead for approval. They got it, of course. So much for the old-rural-Vermont legend of local control. Unlike Benson, where the Board demanded and got higher-level Golden Dome adult supervision, in Norwich the tactic is a cost-threat: "approve our spending or your taxes will go up even more because you’ve caused our enrollment to go down even more".

In recent years, like most Vermont school districts, Norwich has responded to an enrollment down-trend with a staff up-trend. On the assumption voiced by Board member Vitt that enrollment declines were caused by too-large classes --the Norwich average was actually over 13 in 2006--  the Board approved class size reduction to below 12 in 2008. Last year’s numbers aren’t available from the School Report website, because the State Ed Department has decided it would be imprudent to continue to furnish such data for public inspection. Over the same years, enrollment has shrunk from 306 to 297, while teaching staff and instructional aides increased from 41.2 to 42.5, and the total budget went from $8.9MM to $13.3MM. That’s a 49 percent spending increase, which, interestingly, the Board ascribes to a change in the Common Level of Appraisal causing a 17% tax increase in the unusual absence of a proposed spending increase. Clearly, the previous 49% spending boost wasn’t enough, in Mr. Vitt’s view, to prevent "driving students out of this school".  And equally clearly, my view has been wrong all along.

I had (incorrectly, I now admit) ascribed Vermont’s so-called "brain-drain" of adults in the 25-44 age cohort, as documented by economist Art Woolf, to the pressures on younger members of the work force to flee the State in search of better career opportunity and pay, and the corollary (unjustified) assumption that, when such young adults leave, they take their children with them. Now, under the Vitt thesis, I can clearly see my error: it has been the understandably-dissatisfied 3rd graders wanting out, even across State lines,  of their maliciously overcrowded and underfunded classrooms, and dragging their educationally-insensitive and unwilling parents with them. By extension, it’s been the dissatisfied 10K or so students, fleeing the under-spending Vermont schools and causing the enrollment drop from over 100K to just over 90K, which has caused the brain-drain, and not the State economic situation. And the brain-drain has happened in the public schools, not in the workplace. Who knew? 

As you should expect, even a casual glance at the student test scores reveals the achievement superiority of Norwich grade-schoolers: on both VtDRA and NECAP tests, almost all scored "proficient" or better, well above State averages, but there’s still a few –in single-digit percentage-points-- who didn’t. The spend-more point: these students were cruelly failed by the Marion W. Cross School in which, because of overly-large class-size and grossly inadequate instructional investment, they were left to flounder. And they have statistical proof: from 2006 to 2008, as a result of Board budgeting priorities, the percentage of spending allocated to "direct instruction" went from 69 to 61%. The Common Level of Appraisal numbers weren’t even involved. For shame. 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights