[RunawayJim]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

My mom was a teacher, back before the teacher's unions started wielding power. I agree wholeheartedly that education (not indoctrination) is an important aspect of civilization. But when a blanket statement is made about the value of education run by the government is made, I think of the situation in Rhode Island, where the school board had to ultimately address the problems of this concept by firing an entire school-full of teachers and administrators. Why? Because there was no real education happening, even though the money was being paid out for it. My mom was glad to retire, not because she was tired of teaching, but because she was tired of the institutionalized BS and politics that had invaded the public school system.

The issue in RI was odd. While I believed that it was a good thing to fire all the teachers (I don't think that actually happened), hiring only 50% of them back, the issue wasn't entirely the teachers' fault. Central Fall is a very poor town and one of the most densely populated cities in the country. It really shouldn't have it's own school district, but it does (just as the entire state of RI shouldn't have as many school districts as it does).

A big part of the problem in that school is that students attended school solely because their parents would lose welfare or some other form of government assistance if they dropped out. So those students weren't even doing the work, just sitting there to say they went to help their families live off the government. I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of dead weight in that school. A good teacher can get even the worst student to get somewhat decent grades. I'm just saying that it's not entirely the teachers' faults.

[68vette]

http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp59.pdf (broken link) This is information from the tax foundation. The mission of the Tax Foundation is to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of the tax burden borne by Americans at all levels of government. It's a sixty page document. It starts off dealing with business rankings, but on page nine of the document it shows Vermont ranked 41st in tax burden. Property tax index is ranked 44th in the country. A year ago Vermont was 8th worst in the country.
Most people have a valid point on the taxes in the state, but our state government is not making the decisions that need to be made. They are inefficient. Look at states like Indiana. As bad as the economy has been, the state is very efficient. They have a surplus (one of only 5 states), low taxes, higher paying jobs and a very good quality of life. What else can people ask for, and they don't have to pay for it.
To address the town voted budgets.When people vote for the school budget as an example, all they are hearing for the most part is the board of ed saying we need x number of dollars to give our children a good education. This is where a great deal of our money is wasted. This has been covered to death, but look at the facts. We have 290 separate school districts, one for every 312 students, 63 different supervisory bodies and a State Board of Education. That’s a total of 354 different education governing bodies for a state with only 251 towns. Since 1997, school staffing levels have increased by 23 percent, while our student population has decreased by 11.5 percent. The number of teacher’s aides has gone up 43 percent. The number of support staff has gone up 48 percent. For every four fewer students a new teacher, teacher’s aide or staff person was hired. There are 11 students for every teacher – the lowest ratio in the country – and a staggering five students for every adult in our schools. With personnel costs accounting for 80 percent of total school spending, it’s no wonder that our K-12 system is among the most expensive in the nation at $14,000 per student per year. I would call this tax money inefficiency. Our state government has known about this issue for several years, but have done nothing about it. I stand corrected they have done one thing, continued to collect tax dollars to fund this mess. If every Vermonter knew this information, how many school budgets do you think would pass?

[jackmccullough]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

Vermont was forced into a major mistake a number of years back. Reapportionment of the legislature wrested control of the state government from a conservative group of small town farmers and gave it to a group of lawyers and popularity contest winners from the cities. Whereas the farmers HAD to be neighbors and HAD to be accountable to their constituents, the new crop of legislators had no such checks and balances.
.

What you call "popularity contests" the rest of the country calls "elections".

Under the system you pine for, the town of Ferdinand, population 32, had the same representation in the House of Representatives as the city of Burlington, population 38,897.

Under the system you pine for, employers had the power to refuse their employees time off to serve in the legislature, which meant that it was mostly farmers who had the freedom to do so. No more.

I don't deny that it can be unpleasant to be in the minority; it's the position I've usually found myself in. Still, I don't go wishing for the return to the semi-feudal state you paint as some kind of golden age.

[harry chickpea]

I don't really disagree with you all that much, but you miss the larger point. It was a watershed event in Vermont history that changed the representatives from being part-time legislators directly connected with constituents on a neighbor to neighbor basis, to a system where the representatives were professionals at law and opinion making and influencing mass opinion. The idea of employers refusing time for employees going to Montpelier to vote was and is a strawman argument. More likely the response was "Hey Willard, get us some recognition and business out of this." It wasn't Guard duty, the employers didn't have to pay the employees while they were out, and it was a few weeks midwinter, when sales were slow anyway and people could be let free without problems.

The change of reapportionment, which was inevitable, reduced the influence of individual citizens and agriculture in favor of the influence of those with money and power. It was not "semi-feudal" in those days, if anything it was the antithesis of that, with the serfs running the government. However, to be honest and fair, it was intensely frustrating if you wanted any change at all, and when Hoff came in against the recalcitrance that existed, a lot of us promoted him. I don't think we realized back then the depth of change we were getting into and where it would lead in ten or twenty years.

The big sell was exactly as you stated. "Under the system you pine for, the town of Ferdinand, population 32, had the same representation in the House of Representatives as the city of Burlington, population 38,897." On the surface, there is an inherent unfairness there. Even when you examine it further, there is unfairness. What doesn't come to the surface is that the representative from Ferdinand had little hope of pushing dollars the way of Ferdinand, and little influence, so he voted his mind and what he sensed as fair. When the representativeS from Burlington later voted as a block, and wielded power as a group, they understood that individual morals had to take a second seat to the goals of the voting block. There is far more to it than that, but in deference to brevity and those who can't grasp more than one concept at a time, I'll leave it at that.