We’re just a week away from Election Day, and I’ve been thinking about who to vote for in the races for Vermont Senators and Representatives from our district (although I hear there’s a Presidential election happening this year, too). As I was reading the very helpful election coverage in this week’s Addy Indy, I noticed something interesting about the way the candidates responded to the critical issue of Education Funding. They all agree that we have a big problem there, but they have very different views on how to approach it.

For anyone who does a household budget or manages a business, the budgeting process starts with knowing how much money you’ll have available to spend. Once you know that, you can decide how to spend the money, based on your basic needs and then on your personal priorities for whatever is left. Unfortunately, with education spending we generally do it backwards: we decide how much we want to spend and then we go looking for sources of money to pay for it. That’s how school budgets get defeated multiple times.

There are a few candidates this year who are talking about ideas for how we could control the steadily rising costs of educating our kids. But more often, the first thing I see candidates talking about is the need to change “the funding formula” or to “find new sources of funding” (all of which come from our taxes, even if it’s not property taxes). If finding more efficient ways to provide a quality education is important, then starting out by thinking about where we can find more money to pay for it is backwards and ignores the underlying problem. Remember that if you can reduce the costs, you won’t actually have a funding problem. We do have a choice around which one to focus on first.

As you’re considering who to vote for on Tuesday, it might be worth knowing if the candidate has ideas for how to actually minimize education expenses, or if they’re just promising to change the “funding formula.”

Peter Straube

Monkton