As state and local officials debate what should be done about the rising cost of education, the conversation often returns to Act 46, the 2015 law that required small districts to consolidate.
People are now wondering: Did Act 46 save any money? The state has never crunched the numbers. But Grace Miller, a Newport native, parsed 15 years of school spending data to answer precisely this question for her undergraduate thesis at Yale University. And while her statistical analysis found that merged and unmerged districts ultimately spent about the same amount, she also found they spent money in very different ways.
Districts that consolidated saved, on average, about 6.5% by spending less on contracted services and administrative costs. But they also spent significantly more on staff salaries, student support services, and, to a lesser extent, materials and transportation.
Now a teacher in Tennessee, Miller spoke to Vermont Public education reporter Lola Duffort about her findings.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Lola Duffort: People often complain that we spend too much on the administrative side of the ledger in education, and not enough on direct instruction. And it seems like you found that merged districts did precisely what we say we want schools to do. They increased spending on teacher salaries, and they decreased expenditures on more administrative things.
Grace Miller: Absolutely, and I think that's really important. And I think that when you say, like, oh, like, found no savings from the merger, from the merger policy, you know, that's only such a small piece of what my project went into. And yes, the reallocation of salary and benefits, teacher and student support services and materials is a huge positive.
Also, some principals would tell me, you know, they were able to hire better trained personnel for a wide variety of positions that before, the principal was entirely taking on. And 6.5% of an average merged budget in 2024 is a decent amount of money. Is it going to solve the financial crisis that we're seeing in Vermont? Absolutely not. But that's an entirely different conversation of, what are we expecting to happen from the mergers? What do we want to happen? And I think we need to be a little more realistic and honest with the public when we're having those conversations.
Lola Duffort: What, for you, is the lesson, when you look at your findings and you see that there were savings, it's just that those savings were immediately reinvested back into the system?
Grace Miller: You're educating students with such diverse backgrounds and such diverse needs, a lot more goes into that building than just education, and if you're not funding a state budget that's addressing those needs in other sectors, then you're going to have rising education costs.
"A lot more goes into that building than just education, and if you're not funding a state budget that's addressing those needs in other sectors, then you're going to have rising education costs."Grace Miller
Lola Duffort: Schools talk a lot about how they've essentially turned into the social safety net of last resort. Do you worry that small school districts and small schools are, you know, on some level, being scapegoated for these underlying problems that drive up the cost of education?
Grace Miller: Rural towns and small schools, you know, want to be treated, want to be taken seriously, and want to be taken seriously as voters and as people.
It's not necessarily that they're throwing up their hands and saying, you know, you can pry these school doors out of my cold, dead hands. But it's more just like, they know that nobody's doing the hard work it's going to take to find these numbers to prove to them, this is the actual amount of money that we can save if this school closes down. Or, you know, these are the specific benefits that we're going to see if we, you know, these are the student achievement benefits we're going to see if we put more people in one building and we have larger class sizes. And I just don't really think those conversations are happening, and these people know that, and these people know that they're not being taken seriously.
I had a great conversation with a superintendent. He was attempting to close down a school because it needed to be closed down. And he, you know, had this board meeting. The public showed up, and this old lady, he said, came up to him near the end, and was like, "I'm so mad at you, because I came in here fully, fully with my mind set to vote 'no' to closing down the school. But you just convinced me why we should." And of course, she was so upset but, you know, she listened.
Lola Duffort: Are there any key questions that you now have because of this project?
Grace Miller: With the amount of care and attention that our education system gets in our state, why is that same care and attention not placed on the research side? I feel like usually our conversations are, "Oh, this amount of superintendents cited that we saved money. X amount of superintendents cited that we didn't save money," and that is not causal or statistical research. It sure is important. You cannot create policy decisions off purely quantitative and anecdotal evidence. You can't only have that, you need numbers to back it up and you need to understand the causal effect behind the policies that you're instituting.
Lola Duffort: Do you think your research can tell us anything about what we can expect to happen if schools are closed? Because Act 46 was about consolidating districts, not schools.
Grace Miller: Yeah, that's a good question. And like, overall, can my research say anything about what would happen if we closed schools? It can say nothing. Of course, we can speculate. But I think the biggest lesson you can take away from my thesis is that speculation is not good.
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