Vermont pays two dollars for every national dollar of school administration and half again the nation's upkeep — about $1.3 billion over twelve years, above the cost-adjusted national rate — while its results have fallen to the national average. The premium, the buildings, and the questions they leave.
Vermont pays about two dollars for every national dollar of school administration, and half again the nation's per-student upkeep bill — while paying its teachers slightly less than the national average. Over the twelve years the federal books cover, the premium on administration and upkeep comes to about $1.3 billion. Over the same stretch, Vermont's standing on the nation's tests fell from near the top to the middle, its chronic-absence rate rose past the country's, and its college continuation stopped clearing the national bar. The Gazette adds up what the premium bought — and asks the question the numbers cannot answer.
The Gazette reported in Vermont's yardstick moved that Vermont's schools now deliver roughly national-average results: three of the state's four leads on the federal test gone by 2024, the fourth down to a few points, and the median Vermont system fallen from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th. This story is about the other side of that ledger — what Vermont pays, per student, for the system that produces those results. The spending figures come from one instrument, the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of School System Finances, which counts every district, state, and the nation on the same definitions. The account-level figures behind this story are public, district by district, on the Excess Budget page.
On the Census Bureau's own published state table for fiscal 2024, the United States spent $351 per pupil on general administration — the superintendent's office and the school board — and $946 on school administration, the principals' offices. Vermont spent $566 and $2,039: 1.6 and 2.2 times the national rate, and $2,605 against $1,297 — almost exactly two dollars for every national dollar — on the two together (elsec24_sumtables.xlsx, Table 8). The comparison survives every honest adjustment. Computed conservatively — the same line items summed identically on both sides, the national figure raised to Vermont's price level — the combined ratio is 1.83. NCES's published state tables put Vermont's combined administration at 1.65 to 1.73 times the U.S. for fiscal 2021 through 2023 (Digest table 236.75). Three instruments, one answer: roughly double.
Two honest counterweights, both from the same files. Part of the superintendent-office gap is district size: central-office cost per student falls steeply with district size everywhere, and U.S. districts under 5,000 students run about $526 per student — roughly where Vermont sits. Small districts are the expensive part, and Vermont is a state made of them. But size does not explain the principals' offices: school administration runs about twice the national rate under every weighting tested. And the nine most-rural states — states that run small schools too — spent $443 per student on superintendents' offices and $795 on school administration in fiscal 2024, with both figures raised to Vermont's price level. Rural is not the explanation either.
Where the premium does not go is teachers' paychecks. On the last year the federal salary series covers, fiscal 2022, the average Vermont teacher earned $63,669. The average American teacher earned $66,397.
Vermont operates more school than almost any state, per student. In 2022-23 it ran 305 public schools for 83,654 students — an average school of 274 students, against a national average of 499 (Digest 216.70 · 203.20). Per student, that is 1.8 times the nation's count of schools. Only five states run smaller schools on average — Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska — and the first two are in the rural comparison basket that still runs its principals' offices at less than half Vermont's rate. Over the decade Vermont's enrollment fell about 7%; its school count fell 4%.
Operating more buildings costs more to keep them open: Vermont's operations-and-maintenance line ran about one and a half times the cost-adjusted national rate in fiscal 2024, and NCES puts the state at 1.31 to 1.43 times the U.S. across fiscal 2021-2023. (As a share of its own much larger budget, Vermont's upkeep — 8.0% — is actually below the national 9.3%; the per-student gap partly reflects that Vermont spends more on everything.)
What Vermont has not done is renew the stock it pays to keep. Over fiscal 2020-2024 the state put $6,049 per student into capital — construction, renovation, land, durable equipment — against a cost-adjusted national $9,791: 38% below the national rate of investment. The bill for that arrived in 2023, when the state's Act 72 assessment surveyed 301 school buildings and found an average facility-condition index of 0.41 — repair costs equal to 41% of replacement cost, where 0.30 is the threshold conventionally read as "consider replacement" — a worst building at 0.86, and $4.4 billion in assessed deferred maintenance: about $53,700 for every enrolled student, never on any year's bill.
Add the premium up, one instrument, both sides at Vermont's price level, fiscal 2013 through 2024. Superintendents' offices: $166 million above what the same students would have cost at the national rate. Principals' offices: $647 million. Upkeep: $494 million. Together, about $1.31 billion in twelve years — for a system enrolling about 83,000 students. Capital ran the other way: $658 million below the national rate over the same years, which is how a state comes to owe $4.4 billion on its buildings while spending half again the national rate keeping them open. The figures are nominal — a 2013 dollar and a 2024 dollar counted alike — and the price adjustment is small for Vermont (within about 2% of the U.S. in every year) and works in Vermont's favor on both comparisons.
The Gazette has already published the outcome side, and it spans the same years. On the federal test, Vermont held leads of 9 to 12 points in 2013; by 2024 three of the four checks sat at or below the national average and the state was falling at close to twice the nation's pace on the grade-8 checks — most of the loss booked before the pandemic. On the Stanford scale, the median Vermont system fell from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th. Chronic absence ran 18 to 21% before the pandemic and 27% in 2023-24 — above a national rate that has itself worsened to 24%. College continuation fell from 62% to 46% on Vermont's 16-month count, while 62% of American graduates enroll by the first fall — a shorter, stricter clock than Vermont's. Even graduation, long the state's safe number, reads 83% on the last federal count against a national 87% — only nine states lower. On no measure the Gazette can find did Vermont's national standing improve while the premium was being paid.
Nothing in a finance file assigns a cause, and this story does not. What the record settles is narrower, and it is enough to put three questions squarely:
Why does Vermont pay two dollars for every national dollar of school administration — a premium that district size does not explain for the principals' offices, that the rural states do not share, and that does not reach the people in front of the classroom — for results that have fallen to the national average?
Why does Vermont operate 1.8 times the nation's schools per student, and pay half again the national rate to keep them open, while investing 38% below the national rate in renewing them — so that the repair bill now stands at $4.4 billion, about $53,700 per student, on buildings whose average condition index sits past the threshold where replacement is normally on the table?
And what did the $1.3 billion buy? Over the twelve years Vermont spent it, proficiency fell to the middle of the country, chronic absence rose past the national rate, and college continuation stopped clearing the national bar. If the premium was buying something the national comparison cannot see, the burden of naming it now sits with the people who asked for it.
Responsibility for oversight of our school districts sits with our administrators and our school boards in Vermont. It's time to ask them these questions and what they are doing to put our local districts back on track. If they don't have any plans, it's time to remove and replace them with Vermonters that care about our community and are willing to do the work needed for all of our children to thrive.
The evidence is public. The Excess Budget tool carries every district's accounts — against its peers, the state, the rural states, and the country — so the questions can be asked with the numbers in hand.
No line here says administration caused the decline, or that cutting it would reverse one. Small rural systems are genuinely more expensive to run, the accounts shown are four lines of a budget and not the whole bill, and the outcome measures carry every caveat the Gazette attached to them in July. What the numbers do settle: the premium is real on three federal instruments, it is concentrated in administration and upkeep rather than teacher pay or capital, and the results it accompanies are no longer above the country's. Above or below a national rate is a fact, not a verdict — but two facts this large belong in the same sentence.
Method and caveats: dollar figures are Census F-33 line items — general administration (E08), school administration (E09), operations & maintenance of plant (V40), total capital outlay (TCAPOUT), per fall membership (V33) — one definition for district, state, and nation. Statewide Vermont figures sum every Vermont LEA row; national rates are re-expressed at Vermont's overall price level using BEA regional price parities (Vermont has averaged within ~2% of the U.S., so the adjustment is small); the twelve-year totals are nominal sums, fiscal 2013-2024. The 2.0× headline ratio is the Census Bureau's own published Table 8 for fiscal 2024, unadjusted; the conservative same-method, price-adjusted version is 1.83×. Schools-per-student divides NCES Digest school counts (2022-23) by fall-2022 membership; schools are not the same units as the 301 buildings Act 72 assessed. Teacher salary is the NCES/NEA state series, discontinued after 2021-22, against Vermont's AOE-derived average for the same year. Outcome figures and their methods are as published in "Vermont's yardstick moved." The account-level comparisons survived a six-vector adversarial review, documented on the Excess Budget page.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33), FY2013-FY2024 district files and FY2024 state summary Table 8; NCES Digest of Education Statistics tables 236.75 (per-pupil expenditure ratios), 216.70 (schools by state, 2023 ed.), 203.20 (enrollment by state, 2024 ed.), 211.60 (teacher salary, discontinued 2021-22); BEA regional price parities; Vermont Act 72 statewide facilities assessment (2023); Vermont AOE Teacher & Staff FTE report; NAEP, Stanford Education Data Archive 2025.1, AOE attendance and postsecondary series as published in "Vermont's yardstick moved."
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