Making schools equal: Vermont shows it ain't easy.

The right of every American child to a public school education is nearly as sacrosanct as the Constitution itself. Some public schools, of course, are better than others. Because the public school system in the United States is for the most part funded by local property taxes, the discrepancy in the quality of education from town to town can be dramatic. Wealthier municipalities will usually spend more on their schools than do poorer towns. Money isn't everything, but a strong correlation does exist between school spending and student achievement. Many people, as well as the activist American Civil Liberties Union, argue that the failure to equalize spending across school district lines places poor children at a disadvantage and is an unconstitutional denial of equal opportunity. Successfully suing in state courts, equal-spending advocates have forced states from California to New Jersey to reconfigure school funding.

Certainly laudable in the abstract, equalizing school spending is much trickier in the details, especially when it deprives voters of their traditional control over local taxes and school budgets. In California, for example, voters have notoriously refused to increase taxes, not without effect on a once exemplary public school system. However much justice requires comparable school spending, any scheme that deprives successful schools of previous funding would seem destined to face widespread resistance from parents.

Perhaps the most far-reaching "equalization" court ruling is now being fitfully implemented in Vermont. According to the Vermont Supreme Court's Brigham decision in early 1997, some school districts routinely spent twice as much per student as other districts. The court concluded that the funding system had "fallen short of providing every school-age child in Vermont with an equal educational opportunity." To achieve equity, the General Assembly passed Act 60, which replaces the local school tax traditionally paid to the town with a state education tax. This tax, currently gauged at $1.10 per hundred dollars of assessed property value, is meant to cover only a bare-bones education (roughly $5,000 per pupil).

Under Act 60, individual towns may vote to increase their taxes to enhance the quality of local schools beyond the state's bare-bones funding. However, the law further requires that a portion of all monies raised above the basic tax rate go to the state for redistribution. If wealthier towns - called "gold" towns - want to spend extra money on their schools (say another $2,000 per pupil) they must also raise extra money for poorer towns. According to one estimate, for every additional dollar wealthy Stratton (a ski resort) sends to the state, it will get back four cents. Another well-off village, Dorset, is due for fifty cents per extra dollar. Towns with the lowest property value-per-child, on the other hand, will get a return of $4.50 or $6.00 for every extra dollar they remit. In short, taxes for school spending, once jealously controlled at the local level, will soon be collected on a statewide basis and redistributed according to an esoteric formula that determines "need."

An underlying assumption of Act 60 was that wealthier towns would continue to fund education at previous levels. But as other legislative snafus from Washington on down have demonstrated, such assumptions are by no means a certainty. To match their before - Act 60 spending, gold towns face doubling and tripling tax bills. Not surprisingly, opposition to Act 60 soon became a firestorm, with opponents designing numerous creative end runs around the new law. Privatizing public schools is one startling solution afoot in two towns. Taxpayer revolts of several kinds are also taking shape.

Among epithets directed at Act 60, one often hears "Socialist." As it happens, Bernie Sanders, Vermont's sole U.S. representative, is the lone self-described Socialist in Congress. Yet were he governor, Sanders has said, he would have tied school spending more to a progressive income tax rather than to property taxes. In fact, an income tax element was part of the original bill the Vermont House passed, before a conference committee changed it.

While income tax went out, a degree of "income sensitivity" was incorporated into Act 60. Vermonters with household income under $75,000 a year and a homestead with no more than two acres of land, will not pay more than 2 percent of their income toward the basic state school tax. They will also contribute proportionately to additional town education taxes. To facilitate the adjustment, those residents have recently received a transitional "prebate," a one-time check from the state to help pay next year's higher taxes. Still, nothing seems straightforward when fine-tuning the tax system, and applying for the prebate turned into a time-consuming headache for accountants and an even bigger chore for the lay tax preparer.

Despite Act 60's income-sensitivity provision, all lower-income owners of more than two acres of land will slip through the cracks. In the state's pristine Northeast Kingdom the town of Victory provides a salient example. It is home to sixty voters, largely retirees who own former farms of typically 100 acres. To educate its six students, Victory pays tuition to schools in other towns. Due for a doubling of the tax rate under Act 60, the town asked the state to allow it to continue under the old system. "We do not think that Act 60 was intended for communities like us, land rich, relatively low-income, with no schools in operation," the town's Select Board wrote in its unanswered request.

There are other complications. Under Act 60, two-thirds of the money for education in Vermont will come from the state's biggest income producers, tourism and recreation, with the prospect that jobs will be lost. Owners of second homes, a significant economic resource in Vermont, will also be hard hit. Their school taxes will double or triple, and in some cases rise by a factor of six, when Act 60 is fully implemented in July 2000.

Employing signs, flyers, and internet sites, Act 60 opponents are scaling the barricades. They are outraged at the prospect of good schools dismantled and the loss of revered local control. East Dorset resident Mary Barrosse, mother of three young children and a doctor's wife, who chairs Vermont Parents for Quality Education (VPQE) says, "The legislature got it all wrong. What Vermonters really wanted was not for some schools to be brought down, but for all schools to be lifted up. We believe that education is the best opportunity for middle- and lower-class kids."

Besides Barrosse's VPQE, other groups are rallying opponents. Out in front: Vermont Coalition of Municipalities with a roster of fifty-two officials, a quarter of them from towns that will benefit from but are philosophically opposed to Act 60; and the Stowe Act 60 Action committee, a leading advocate statewide. The antis are uniting around an alternative-funding proposal called Education Revenue Sharing (ERS), crafted to meet Brigham's demands, and now a bill in the legislature.

ERS would repeal portions of Act 60 and retain others. It creates a new formula for distribution of state aid, the key to which is not the property wealth of the school district, but the income of residents. The district's ability to pay would be calculated for all - whether individuals, businesses, or second-home owners - from the residents' state income tax figures. In districts where need exists ERS would enhance school funds.

As the groundswell of opposition indicates and even its proponents admit, whatever its merits Act 60 was far from perfect. In March 1998, the legislature passed Act 71, a "technical corrections" bill that attempted to iron out the multiple wrinkles in the law. Tagged the "soft landing," it provided assorted adjustments designed to ease the transition for hard-hit gold towns. Since Act 60 became law, those towns have feared everything from 50 percent cuts in teaching staffs to pay-to-play high school sports. Thanks to Act 71, layoffs and cutbacks were reduced temporarily, although they were not eliminated.

Still other groups are determined to circumvent Act 60. New to the scene is the Dorset Educational Foundation (DEF). Its goal is to maintain the town's higher-priced school without raising taxes. The foundation will raise money privately to bridge the gap between Dorset's actual school budget and the state's basic block-grant payment. If the foundation is successful in raising private contributions outside the tax system, the state would get nothing from Dorset as its contribution to Act 60's equalized-yield mechanism. Says Geoff Chapman, president of DEF, "We don't disbelieve in what is behind Act 60 itself, but we certainly disagree with the method chosen to fund it."

From the capital to the town offices, the schools and the taxpayers all across the state, Vermont is seized with Act 60 uncertainty. Yet comparable school opportunity, regardless of wealth, is a matter of fundamental fairness. Other states, including New Hampshire, Maine, Colorado, and Arkansas are at different stages on the road to eliminating the classic relationship of property taxes to schools. Given Brigham, Act 60, and the subsequent fallout, Vermont serves today as a virtual lab school where the nation can observe just how hard a job it will be to achieve equal educational opportunity.

Susanne Washburn, a former Time magazine reporter, lives in Dorset, Vermont.