Party Line 
By Martin Harris

A lesson I learned the hard way as a young second lieutenant in Korea was that bottom dogs don’t challenge, even inadvertently, top dog policy. The official doctrine, in the immediate post-shooting-war environment, was that the South Koreans were our friends and allies, and when they shot at us while drunk or stole military cargo off the excruciatingly-slow (bandits could and did jump on and off at will) supply trains north from the port of Pusan to the DMZ, we were supposed to grin and bear it for the sake of UN unanimity. My transgression was to organize an informal squad visit to the village of Munsan-Ni near Freedom Bridge to re-possess some badly needed US Army issue insulated boots and mittens (which had never gotten to our troops) at bayonet point from black-market street peddlers. Somehow it was duly noted and then formally and sharply rebuked at battalion headquarters. Far more politically sensitive than I, more than a half-century later, is Vermont Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham, highly skilled and knowledgeable in educational finance, who writes an op-ed in the Rutland Herald (18 Feb 09) on cost-saving in public education and obediently avoids identifying the budget elephant in the room, because his boss, the Guv, doesn’t want him to.

The budget elephant is, of course, Vermont’s lowest-in-the-nation pupil-teacher ratio or smallest average class size (technically different but from a practical viewpoint, the same problem) which consumes about 60 percent of overall public education spending. No other category even comes close. Particularly not administration, which requires about 8 percent (capital outlay and debt service for new construction are twice as large, at about 15 percent) but nevertheless it’s administration which is the preferred target of the Commissioner’s editorial angst, because it consumes in Vermont about $1100 per pupil annually, out of a total of  $13,000. "The average state cost was $697", he writes as a point-prover. What he doesn’t write is that $697 is about 8 percent of about $9000, the average all-state  cost per pupil, so that Vermont spends, on administration, in typical proportion to what all other states spend on administration. He doesn’t write on what Vermont spends, in unique proportion, on small class size. That hasn’t been a permitted subject in Montpelier, which explains why, when former Education Commissioner Richard Cate spoke of per-pupil costs, he carefully avoided the abnormally-small average class size question, except on a couple of occasions when he actually defended the spending as productivity-justified. (Of course, the prediction that test scores would go up as class sizes have gone down over 30 years, has failed to materialize --as he well knew-- but that’s another statistical subject for another time.)

What Commissioner Pelham could have written, had he dared to challenge the Guv’s party line, is a brief run-down on the fiscal impact of moving Vermont’s p/t ratio from 11 to 16, the national average. The Instructional Cost category of all school budgets was, as a national average, 61 percent of annual per-pupil cost in 2004-5, per the National Digest of Educational Statistics, and for Vermont it was 60 percent. In theory, a class-size policy raising Vermont’s average number from 11 to 16, or 50%,  would subsume a parallel 50% decrease in instructional cost, from $752MM (2004-5) to $376MM, for a direct savings to taxpayers of $376MM. That’s noticeably larger than the $25 to $35MM in the Pelham administration-savings proposal. An order of magnitude larger, in fact.

Let’s assume, for reasons of bureaucratic inertia or union resistance, that Vermont public schools would evade fully subscribing to a 5-student class-size-increase policy, or that they’ll subscribe in a way designed not to capture the full theoretical savings. Let’s look, then, at the actual experience in Utah, which has the largest average-class-size in the nation: 22. It spends 51% of its annual $5500 per–pupil cost in the Instructional category. If Vermont were to spend the 51% of  its per-pupil total which is in the Instructional category and not 60 percent, the number would be $642MM and not $752MM, for a savings of $110MM, at least 3 times the Pelham proposal. To paraphrase Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, a few tens of millions here and there and you’re into real money.

Let’s guess why fiscally-skilled Tax Commissioner Pelham would choose to critique administration, suggesting obliquely thereby the sidewalking of maybe a few dozen superintendents but hiring at least that number of new assistants, while choosing not to propose something which might sidewalk several thousand instructors all of whom, as well as all of their extended families, vote. In such situations, the vote count does, indeed, trump the dollar count, which explains the party-line prohibition against a government official discussing any proposal which would displease the educator bloc.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights