And yet the neighboring state of New Hampshire, which has some of the lowest taxes in the country (0% sales tax, 0% state income tax), beats Vermont handily in SAT scores.

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-and-act-scores-by-s...

What does Vermont have to show for its higher spending? Why do you see higher spending as an automatically good thing if it doesn't have any evidence of having a beneficial effect?

I would be very careful about touting NH's approach. We fund schools entirely on property taxes, so rich towns have good schools and poor towns do not. I'd guess part of the disparity is that in NH's poorer towns kids aren't even taking the SATs.

Not paying taxes is cool but the annual discussion of "Which completely normal public service will we forgo or curtail this year?" isn't so awesome.

First of all, well done NH. As a Vermont resident I am happy when any Northern New England state does well.

The table you link to shows Vermont coming in #12 in SAT scores, and I'll accept that for it is. Other sites (e.g. US News and World Report) typically ranks us in the top ten for our educational system. It is not unheard of for us to be ranked #1:

https://www.alec.org/press-release/state-education-ranking-s...

My point is, I do not understand how you can be so fixated on NH finishing six places ahead of VT and not actually asking the bigger question of "How do two small rural states even begin to compete?" Let alone trying to decipher why New England consistently does so well overall with Massachusetts and Connecticut ranked #1 and #2.

Vermont is a high tax state, fine. I more than get my money's worth. As someone that goes to Town Meeting Day and looks through the budget every year I know that I head home secure that my dollars are being well spent. Meeting my kid's teachers at school I know they are getting a very solid education and heading off to university next year.

Possibly because until recently NH had all high schoolers take the SATs to be used in statewide assessments. It would follow teachers would then spend classroom time preparing their students for it.

When a metric becomes the target, it becomes subject to manipulation and the metric becomes no longer useful.

That should bias it downward, compared to only college-bound students taking it.

New Hampshire also has higher ACT scores as well. Is there any metric that shows Vermont's education system beating New Hampshire's?

NH education spending isn't very low.

Both are highly ranked for k-12. The difference in scores you are touting is 8 points.

> notoriously high-tax state Some societies think that it is wise to spend on some things such as education (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...). Others think that lowering taxes at whatever cost is better. The former fits with my thinking, which is why I like it here.

It's a little more nuanced than that, and not necessarily an either/or as you have described it. More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient, third-party spender and believe the money could be better spent more wisely elsewhere. While Vermont does rank high in K-12 (4th), it is ranked 36th in higher education. Vermont is also the 2nd least populated state in the country, so it remains to be seen how scale will impact the education system there.

"More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient, third-party spender and believe the money could be better spent more wisely elsewhere."

People say that, but then they privatize functions of government, and if they're lucky, they end up with the same level of service. And then now there's a middleman involved who needs to get profit, meaning wages and service get cut.

I ran across an interesting book on that topic, which describes pitfalls of privatization in a balanced way:

You Don't Always Get What You Pay For The Economics of Privatization by Elliott D. Sclar

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=8014010029039...

> More than likely in my experience, the people who think lowering taxes is good think so because they view the government as an inefficient [...] spender

The government is made up of people. In my experience, it isn't the funding amount that correlates with inefficiencies, it's the distance from accountability that does.

So one can reduce the taxes all one likes, a 30% wasteful department is still going to waste 30%. I'd rather target the inefficiencies themselves.

It depends heavily on how the money is spent, Illinois spends half the education budget on funding pensions alone [1].

89% of all education budget increases went straight to pension funding, with only 11% to the classroom. They already spend far more than other midwest states, with outcomes that lag behind Montana, Minnesota, and other frugal states.

So while I agree that education spending is critical to our future, money alone is not the magic wand.

[1] https://www.illinoispolicy.org/reports/pensions-vs-schools/

Just spending money on education is meaningless unless it is used wisely. This is a common political tactic to talk about how much a politician authorized or increased spending on a program that is important to his or her constituents but it says nothing about the results. President Obama started the military down the path toward "smarter, not more expensive" weapons programs. That thinking should be expanded into everything.

Agreed.

And income is one thing. Should those taxes add value, the actual difference in effective buying power, or ability to save may be marginal.