Reciting What You Know Ain’t So 
By Martin Harris

In a recent column in this space, I implied, unintentionally and inaccurately, that the political profession is the only one which chooses to operate without the formal constraint of an exculpatory-evidence rule, such as the one which requires attorneys to disclose all the facts of a case, even those inconvenient truths damaging to their desired conclusion. Actually, there’s at least one more such profession, not even counting the recently-exposed professional climate-expert group: the professional educator group. In the absence of any such Item #4 in the educator Canon of Ethics (such as I described in the prototypical California Bar rules) edu-crats have frequently asserted "facts" which even an amateur researcher like your present scribe can find not to be so.

Contrary to Mark Twain’s famous comment --"It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know [and say, I would add] that ain’t so"—the educator class has successfully repeated over recent decades many repeatedly disproven assertions, with no apparent ill effect on their own credibility standing, and no apparent good effect on either the educational achievement of their students or the cost-vs-benefit productivity analysis of their publicly funded enterprise. There’s been one, so far minor, negative effect on their industry --the loss of "market share" as parents opt to home-school their children or to enroll them in non-public alternatives, which set of decisions, in Vermont for example, is partially responsible for recent public school enrollment declines—but, more typically, their assertions have been accepted as the basis for school governance even though professional researchers have repeatedly proven them wrong. There are four major articles-of-faith guiding contemporary public ed –1. that smaller class sizes produce improvements in student achievement; 2. that spending on the special-ed end of the achievement spectrum deserves higher budget priority than spending on the gifted-and-talented end;  3. that pre-K classes in the Head Start model improve subsequent student achievement; and 4. that school district consolidation is the best way to save a lot of taxpayer money. You wouldn’t over-state by too much to call them The Four Horsemen of Educational Revelations.  All have been repeatedly discredited through professional statistical research, but I have enough column-inches here only for #4.

Like my hero Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the papers. In this case that’s the phone-book-sized National Digest of Educational Statistics in which I find within Table 167 of the 2007 edition that for the US as a whole, total public education spending was $449B in 2004-5, while within that total General Admin, which includes SU and State costs (local "school admin" is a separate category) consumed $8.5B or 1.9%. For Vermont total spending was $1.3B and General Admin consumed $29.5MM, or 2.3%.

If you want to argue the savings supposedly to be captured by school district consolidation in VT, you might theorize that Vermont’s General Admin spending, after consolidation to mimic larger districts elsewhere in the US, would then match the national average, or the same 1.9% of the state total. That would be a reduction of .4 of 1 percent, or about a sixth of the 2004-5 2.3%. A sixth (17%) of $29.5MM is about $5MM.

In contrast, the actual numbers show that changing the p/t ratio offers more potential savings. Vermont, like all other States, spends about 60% of its total public school budget on direct, front-line, classroom instruction through instructor cost. With a total budget of $1.3B, 60% is $780MM. That’s for a present p/t ratio of 11/1. An increase to the national average of 16/1 would be an increase of 5 up from the present 11 to 16 students in the classroom, about a 50% increase in students or reduction in teachers and other instructors.  A 50% reduction in the instructional sub-budget would cut it from $780MM to $390MM, or $390MM. It would necessitate the politically-impossible-in-Vermont RIF’ing of half the instructional staff. Would it damage achievement? Cutting the p/t ratio in half over the last three decades sure didn’t help it any.

If you want to strive for the noble goal of national average for General Admin spending but fear the politics and don’t want to strive for the ignoble goal of national average in p/t ratio, you might try upping class size by 1 whole student (wow) from 11 all the way to 12. That’s a percentage increase of 1/11 or 9%. Since the instructional sub-budget is $780MM, a 9 percent decrease would be $70 MM. Compare that to the theoretical $5MM from going to larger districts, and producing a perfect match of the national Gen Admin percentage-of-total-budget.

Will the above mathematical exercise influence hearts and minds in Vermont public education? I’d guess not much.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights