 Yeah, we are continuing on our waiting formulas. And we have Professor Tammy Colby from UBM right, and she was the consultant on this bill and professor. I think we've been told our first job is to decide if we're going with weights or equity payments, or it's been suggested we could do a combination. I think we're still trying, you know, in a couple of days to get our minds around several long months of work and looking what are the pros and cons that you see with either system. And then some concern about wide shifts. We're going to take a look at some unnamed cases to see if we can, but we understand at least one school is going down $10 million. And we have to look at that kind of impact on the Ed fund. So the floor is yours. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. For the record, Tammy Colby, I'm an associate professor of education policy at the University of Vermont, and I was one of the co-authors on the waiting study along with my colleagues at the American Institutes of Research and Rutgers University. I thought I shared some PowerPoint slides as a PDF in advance. I also thought it might be helpful if I shared my screen with those slides. Yes, that would be helpful. What I would say is that I know that this, I think about this stuff all the time. So, you know, I know that when we're talking and going through these kinds of things, sometimes for the first time, there are immediate questions that come up that are clarifications that would be helpful in the moment. If you have one of those, just stop or put something in the chat and I'll try to, I'll try, so don't feel the need to save questions for the end if it's going to be the case that not having answer or clarification to a question is going to impact your ability to sort of understand things. So I would appreciate everyone's deference and being polite, but I also, my job here is to be useful to you today. So I want to make sure that I'm able to answer your questions as they come up. So let me share my screen here. And I pulled together some brief slides for us to think about today. And we'll start from the beginning. Okay. So the first thing I want to do is to start out by saying a little bit about history. I know there's been a lot of conversation around the people waiting study. I think it's important to sort of understand and level set where we are right now. The first thing I'll say is our initial study was commissioned by the legislature. We submitted a report in January of 2020 and then COVID hit. And so there's been some time now since the studies results have come up. The task force and implementing the recommendations, both Senator Rock and Senator Hardy were part of this summer. They made two additional requests back to our team for some additional analysis. One was the first request to update or recalculate the weights based on some revised assumptions. And those recalculations came back in a memo on October 28. And then there was a second request for some additional information on how they might calculate eight amounts for categorical grants where we developed pure people cost estimates and also some design considerations around those. And that all came back to the general assembly in the form of a memo on January 11. So there are these three documents really sort of floating out there right now. There's the original study. And then there's these two updates. And so just so that we're all on the same page, the updates all are summarized in one table in your handouts, okay? So we have the proposed weights off of that are the revised weights. And these reflect the new assumptions about how we measure poverty and also the way to be additive. We also have categorical grant amounts, one in fiscal year $18, the other one in fiscal year $23, which is just an escalator for inflation. And over here on column four are the categorical grant amounts that JFO pulled together for the task force report, because our estimates were not yet available and they use slightly different methodology. Our numbers are very close. So I just want everybody to have that in front of them as we're talking through. My understanding here is that the proposals on the table are twofold. One, excuse me, I keep bumping my mouse, is to update the existing weights that are in the formula or two, to move in a different direction towards these new cost equity grants. And I've been asked to evaluate these policy proposals. I think Senator Cumber said pros and cons. What I want to do is I just want to I want to do I want to present my analysis with some some parameters around for you. First of all, the way the way that I'm approaching my analysis is that both of these policy proposals have shared goals. And those shared goals are to put in place a fair and efficient mechanism for adjusting for differences in educational costs. I think that's really important for us to remember, right? What what are these weights? What are these grant payments supposed to do? They're supposed to adjust for differences in costs across school districts that are outside of school district control. And the other consideration we have to have here is that we're thinking about these cost adjustments within Vermont's existing school policy framework, which is unique, very unique in the country. Most states operate foundational formula. We don't operate anything close to that. So what it means is that conversations around weights and categorical grant programs, we have to think about how those policy options might interact with these other design elements that are embedded in our funding formula already. And the two big ones we have to take into account when we're thinking this through, I call Vermont specific considerations, are as the priority placed on local control, that is, Calities get to decide how much they spend. And two, we have this self equalizing system for how we generate revenue. Those two features are very unique among states. And so any conversation around these options has to take into account the interactions between what we might do for cost adjustments and how they might interact with these Vermont specific considerations. The other thing I just want to say out front is that both of these proposals are viable proposals. And so back to that goal, what we're trying to do, I think, is as policymakers in a state, it's trying to figure out which one's going to be most fair and most efficient, right? But being fair and efficient may also mean that we don't get perfect. In fact, there is no such thing as a perfect funding formula. So there are going to be trade-offs. And so in talking through these pros and cons and cons, what I'm really talking about here are trade-offs that we have to, that I'm going to suggest that policymakers need to consider as they're deliberating sort of option one or option two. With that background, I want to highlight just what is the role the weights currently play in our existing formula? Because I think that's our comparison case, okay? Weights in the existing formula proportionally adjust for differences in local spending that are outside control, right? Economically disadvantaged children, English language learners. And they do so in a way that spending is adjusted so that in the end, towns have equivalent tax rates for equivalent cost-adjusted spending, right? So weights are this fundamental policy lever in our funding formula that are intended to ensure both student and taxpayer equity at the same time. That's a tall order, right? And the architects of Act 60 actually were pretty smart when they came up with this equalized pupil calculation, although it is different than how other states use weights. It does work, right? Within our system of local control and with our self-equalizing revenue-generating system. So what are some of the advantages to weights generally in Vermont's formula? Because weights, Vermont's formula operates differently than weights in other people's formula, other states. First of all, weights equalize spending, right? Because we're adjusting spending decisions. We're adjusting them proportionally while still allowing locals to make spending decisions. And second, when they're appropriately calculated, and our studies suggest that our weights right now are not appropriately calibrated, they fairly and efficiently adjust for these differences in cost. And they encourage spending by meteor logistics and disincentive overspending by less than these districts, right? So the intent of the weights is to equalize opportunity to level the playing field, bring the bottom up, keep the top from spending off the top. That said, they're not perfect, right? And the task force, I think, did a good job and of identifying some of the challenges with the weights. One, they require regular recalibration. One of the part of the situation we have right now is the weights have not been recalibrated ever, right? In fact, they were just kind of rolled over to best of anybody's knowledge, right? From the existing Foundation formula in 1997. So they're not cost-based, nor have they been calibrated as time goes along. But I will say that regular recalibration is the case with any approach to cost adjustment. The fact that we've basically not talked about or touched our cost adjustments in so many years is pretty unusual for a state. The other sort of, I guess, challenge with weights in an equalized people calculation is that they're complicated explained to taxpayers and citizens. I get that. I would say, though, that I think this is also a general critique of Vermont's entire school funding system, and it's also not isolated to waste. We operate one of the most complicated school funding systems in the country. And I would say that the tax force did a really nice job of identifying some strategies that could be put in place that make the weights easier to understand and simplify, in particular, their recommendation for using new poverty measure and for moving to additive weights. And then the third challenge that's sort of percolated here is that the weights don't really have an influence over or it's very difficult to have accountability for local spending decisions. The reality is that's the case pretty much no matter what we do with cost adjustments unless there is legislative appetite for making other kinds of statutory and regulatory changes. Either proposal, this is a challenge. So it's not so much an issue with the weights themselves, but with the existing policy preferences that we have for local control and regulatory limits for AOE and current EQS and the educational quality standards. That brings us to option two, the cost equity grants. And let's talk about what, in fact, those are, right? They're essentially what we in the school funding community recall, reverse foundation grant. They're a fixed dollar amount that goes out on a per pupil basis. And it is intended this dollar amount to offset the cost, these additional costs, either in whole or in part incurred by school districts. Why is a reverse foundation grant? Because usually what happens when we have this kind of categorical grant program, it's applied to a consistent base, right? There's a foundation amount and then we add on top. This is a reverse. We're taking these dollars and we're applying them to different bases, which are different local decisions about average spend. But either way, a local school district would get a fixed dollar grant for specified category of students that are in these grants are intended offset costs. But we have to remember that the grant amounts are equivalent to the average additional spending needed, right? And I'll be talking a lot about the average here in a minute, but it's important to recognize that these are average spending levels. So this is the average additional costs we would expect, for example, for an economically disadvantaged or an ELL student or a small school or a geographically isolated school. We're talking about the average. And the average is really the only way to kind of do this unless we move to sliding scales or something along those lines, which is very difficult to estimate in a Vermont context because we have so many small schools and it's very difficult to come up with sort of reliable scale estimates. So what then might be some design considerations that go along with the cost equity problem? These are things that policymakers might need to think about if they're going to go down this road. And the first one is this issue of average costs. So we have to recognize that grant amounts based on average cost estimates will either provide too much or too little for many districts, right? The average is just that in the middle. That may be okay, right? But we have to recognize that that's in fact what they're going to do. And the other thing is the grants may operate as a spending threshold. And what this couldn't do is it could result in new kinds of inequities and opportunities to learn. What do I mean by that? What it means is that let's pretend that the grant is $5,000 for an economically disadvantaged to making that a problem, right? But a school district really needs to spend $7,500 for people based on their local conditions and then extent of need their district, right? It could be that because the grant amount is $5,000, the school district may opt or to local taxpayers may opt to cap spending at $5,000 rather than spending what it is the additional $2,500. And if they actually spent the $7,500, whereas other school districts capped, will have some districts based on tax preferences and tax sort of capacity and local voters, it could be the case that some districts are actually spending more per people than other districts. And in doing so, we create a new system of advantages and disadvantages. Again, these are design considerations. And I'll talk about it at the very end. These are all things we can design around. These are just considerations that we have to take into account about potential kind of unwanted effects. Second thing we have to think about is that this issue of proportionality, which is what all districts receive the same dollar amount per pupil as a cost adjustment. The unlike a foundation formula where we're applying it to a stable base that's just $10,000. That's what everybody gets. And then we put these things on top. The effective way to proportionally as a cost adjustment is going to vary by district. And because of that, the grants don't equalize costs. And that's one of those key tenants in our existing funding formula for the equalization to work for wealth taxpayers and students. The cost adjustments have to effectively equalize costs as specified by school budgets. What categorical grants do is they off some portion of the additional costs and they will do so to greater or lesser extents in certain school districts. So the extent of the total offset is going to depend on spending levels in a district. There's also been discussion of what in economic terms we like to talk about the fly paper effect. And what the fly paper effect is, one advantage of a grant is that the dollars stick. So now we know $5,000 is what we should be spending, for example, on an economically disadvantaged student. And we can build some policies around that to make sure those dollars stick to economically disadvantaged students. I think we just have to recognize that that can be the case, but that also will require changes to statute and regulation. Currently, there's no way to ensure that districts in fact spend dollars for a particular purpose. But this is no different from the current policy with the weights. And so remember I said, like, these are those considerations, like if we start to think about option two, these are some of those other kinds of policy parameters that we might need to take into account. And then we know from quite a bit of existing research that categorical funding may introduce new administrative inefficiencies into the funding system, their transaction costs, right? And we've seen those kinds of transaction costs in the state with running other categorical programs. But again, as a tradeoff, it doesn't necessarily make it a fatal flaw. The things we have to think about are some of the advantages here, right, with a cost equity proposal. And one of the big ones that we've heard about in the task force talks about is sort of transparency and predictability. In fact, that was a goal as a task force, really tried to think this through. And certainly districts being able to say, I'm going to get this amount of money for people, regardless of local spending decision, is transparent and predictable. And there's also this potential to attach new types of monitoring and accountability for local spending, right, through other kinds of statutory means and regulation. But we have to be careful about that, because that can turn into create other kinds of equity concerns for monitoring accountability, where districts who are, who may receive cost adjustments and others that don't, that means some districts might have certain monitoring and accountability provisions where others challenge. Again, something we have to think about as we're designing policy. What are some limitations I think we need to think about? The first big one I alluded to before, and that is this issue of gosh, excuse me, is to think about this issue of Categorical Grants as an adjustment versus cost equalization. That's kind of an important thing, because our entire system, remember I talked about the weights being that lever, the weights are the lever for ensuring sort of these dual goals of student equity and taxpayer equity. And if we're not equalizing costs in a way that balances two things and we're just adjusting for costs, remember I talked about the adjustments are going to be uneven because of the average. That's a trade off, that's a trade off that we have to consider. The second thing is I mentioned around equity concerns, it is likely because some districts will in fact get more money than they need for the average payment, and they are likely to spend up to those dollars, which means they're spending more money than they need to. And other districts will not get as much as they need because of the average is that it could widen the gap between the top and the bottom spenders in the state. We already have a pretty big gap between the top and the bottom spenders that really has been precipitated by the fact that our weights are already miscalibrated. And so unless we think about that and we're thoughtful about that, it is unlikely that the cost equity proposal versus no change in weights is going to help close gaps from what we have right now. We also have to think about, gosh every time I bump my mouse, that goes. The other thing we have to think about is again I mentioned with respect to equity concerns, we have to think about sort of this issue of budget maximization and budget minimization, where it may be the case that some districts are only able to spend up to the average because their taxpayers aren't going to allow them to spend over that, but because of that you're actually spending too little on students who need additional resources. They're efficiency concerns, right? We talked about the administrative efficiencies and again these aren't fatal flaws, again things to think about. Cost containment is something I think we need to be attentive to with this proposal, right? Because the average will likely over adjust for some districts and right now the weights if they were calibrated appropriately should provide, should put almost a governor on the top end of the spending threshold, right? It will cost you more if you're spending too many dollars, right? If you overspend because that local share comes back to your local taxpayers. We lose that with, right? We lose that sort of mechanism within the formula for putting a governor on the top end that is supposed to be there with the weights. It's not working very well right now because our weights are miscalibrated, but that was one of the big design considerations that policymakers put in place when they talked about and crafted x60, which was actually a pretty smart thing. I think we have to be realistic with ourselves around politicization of categorical grants. And you know, sort of if we think about when we have grants, line item doubt, there's always a potential for legislative manipulation. We'd like to say that won't happen, but we also know that current legislators cannot bind future legislators in the spending decisions. And when we have line items out there, I know we've all seen in the meantime, you know, those numbers can be big and that can become a, that can become a political debate. The reality is we have to remember that these aren't for programs. These are cost adjustments. There's something very different. And so we have to think carefully about to what extent we want cost adjustments in this day politicized. The third thing is, and this is relative politicization, I think there was some language in an earlier task force report. I know it's out now, but if the language was there, then somebody thought about it. So I think we need to just sort of make sure that we're keeping our eye on that, which is when these numbers get large, we need to be careful about conversations around competition for resources between, for example, economically disadvantaged students, ELL students and other groups or other kinds priorities in the state budget. These are cost adjustments. And that's different than grant programs for arts education, for example. These are basic operating expenses. And this is what, how we equalize opportunity in the state. Then the last one I want to just point out is this issue of timing. Our report came out in 2020. The rates we have are pretty much calibrated. I think there's quite a bit of evidence at this point that we have issues of equity and efficiency and we have some issues around both those topics in our existing funding formula. And here we are in almost the end of January. And so I think the question is, what can we do realistically right now? And what is the legislative appetite for and capacity to make the other kinds of statutory regulatory changes that might be necessary to make the cost equity proposal a strong proposal at this point? And I think the task force was really wise in how they framed this out in their report by saying, here's an idea, but it needs a lot more work and we need to talk about it and we need to be thinking about these things. And I think that was really stage advice on the task force. But we're sort of in this moment where we still have inequities in our system, right? School funding, you know, tell meeting day happens, regardless. And so, you know, I think you have to think about this issue of timing and urgency and sort of what is the capacity and what we can do now. And also with regard to legislative appetite and capacity, you know, I think the question of the cost equity proposal is going to be not just that, it's the cost equity proposal, at least from our assessment, is an and and both kind of proposal, which is if in fact we go that in order for that route to work well, there will have to be other kinds of systemic changes in our in our formula. And can that be done in a short order? I don't know. I think that's up to you. And I think also, you know, we need to think about the fact that, you know, most states are continually evaluating and updating and refining their funding formula. It's very unusual for a state to have gone this long without any refinement. And so I just bring up the issue of timing and sort of a trade off here, you know, is there a short term? Is there a short term short term solution and a long term plan there that could be. So again, from our perspective, these are two viable proposals. I think I said in the my testimony before that where the task force, you know, I think sometimes it's easy to poke holes at what you know, because the knowns are the knowns. You know, I laid out these trade offs. It's not so much to tear down that proposal. It's just these are things I think we need to consider and think about and be real thoughtful around as we're talking about that proposal going forward, because there are all things we can design around. We can create complementary policies and do things to address lots of these trade offs. But that's other policy work. And that's other kinds of sort of contemplation that would have to go on. So I know I've been asked for recommendation. I saw that in Bruce's note. I've been real careful not to say one or the other. But what I think in talking with my colleagues who wrote the report, I think we would say this is that from our perspective based on our sort of empirical findings, the weights right now are quite miscalibrated. And that's generating some pretty significant issues of equity, both for taxpayers and for students in the state, and that there really is an immediate need to sort of address it. And again, I think the question is, is what can be done sort of legislatively in a more short term versus long term perspective? And rather than saying, like, do this or do that, I think what we'd rather say is that we see that there's an urgent need. And we just want to raise the question of whether or not in the next few months, there is enough time and energy and capacity to fully sort of develop and deal with some of these contingencies that would make the cost equity proposal sort of really strong policy proposal. Is there enough capacity and time to do that? So I'll stop there, rather than I'll take this off. So open for questions, comments. Senator DePierce, Senator Cummings, do you want to take the floor and call on people or should I? Madam Chair, you may have been muted. You are muted, Madam Chair. In which case I move, no, no, just kidding. You can't move without me. All right. What's up? Professor, I hear you trying artfully to not take a strong position, and I won't press you there, even though I have to make a strong decision. I don't get to tiptoe, but I want to make sure I understand what you are saying. And I think I kind of heard you say a small tweak would lean people to change the weightings. If we go into the categorical aid, we have more work to do and it's potentially more complicated to get it right. Is that a fair summary? I think we would agree with the task force on that. And I think the task force said that the cost equity proposal needs more work. And in my sort of tradeoffs, what we try to do is identify here are some considerations that we think need more thinking and likely need more work, which would either be more analytics, but less on the analytics side and more thinking about what kind of complementary policy or complementary kind of things would need to go along with this to ensure that that grafting this new approach to our existing structure doesn't result in other kinds of unwanted or unintended effects. Because what the cost equity does is it basically takes an entirely different and relatively unknown in this context approach to cost adjustment and graphs it on to what is already a very complicated school funding system that operates very differently than any other state. And the two things that we have to pay attention to when we're thinking about grafting this on are its interactions with local control and the self equalization, right? And from our assessment, there are considerations for how we do that well so that we don't end up with these other unwanted effects. If in fact there's more time, there might be other kinds of structural changes that could be contemplated to the larger school funding system that would really make a cost equity proposal strong. For example, moving to a foundation formula, thinking about raising the yield to create a minimum spending threshold. Like there are other things, right? That sort of a justice or complementary policies around thinking about sort of differential tax rates at the top, minimum spending thresholds, right? Like those all those things, sort of this fair game on the policy front, but that's a lot of conversation to have and you're talking about fairly significant structural changes both to the funding system and other kinds of policies. And we're still operating in this milieu that is Vermont where we have local control over spending and we have self equalization on the tax side. And that only works if we that's only fair and fair measured from both a student perspective and a taxpayer perspective. If we are appropriately equalizing local spending decisions, proportional, right? And when we put the average in there, is that we break that? Is that a problem? Maybe not, but if we're not to be at the problem, we're going to have to do other things to make sure it's not a problem. Does that help Senator Pearson? Sort of. You know, every every the more I learn, the more cloudy it gets. Well, there are a lot of if thens. So how about how do I simplify this way? I think there are fewer if thens, right? With respect to updating the weights at this point, then there are with the cost equity proposal, right? We know what's we know how the weights work. We know we're we're we know what's not so great about them, right? We also know that we also know that if they're properly calibrated, what those intended effects will look like. We don't know a lot of things over here yet. And but we can anticipate some of those things. And if we want to anticipate those things and not end up in a position that is worse off than what we are now, right? We're going to need to design around those things at the same time as putting in place the cost equity proposal. Do you do you, Madam Chair, if I could just follow up with one question. Do a lot has been made about the this concern that if you just increase the weights, there's no reason, there's no guarantee that the schools will spend that money really delivering necessary assistance to English language learners, for instance. And I I guess my thinking is that that is clearly true on paper. But in reality, the great majority of English language learners reside in a few, very few districts. And those schools are clamoring for resources to be to be able to adequately educate those kids. And so in your research, do you have any reason to believe the schools that are actually helping the whatever it is, 70, 80, 90 percent of our ELL students would that that's a real risk in those districts. In other words, understanding we're not going to do this perfectly. I don't want to design a system that is is sort of more protective of of the entire system and actually misses out on on the few schools that are are in fact working with this population, if that makes sense. That's my concern. Let me answer that question in a couple different parts, Senator. First, under either proposal, unless the state puts in sort of performance based standards for funding, neither proposal, because we rely on local control has any assurances that dollars get spent a certain way, right? Neither of them. The way that we could do that is through strengthening the educational under sort of existing policy frameworks is through strengthening the educational quality standards, which are regulation, and those regulations are going to be opened up shortly by the state. So either proposal, we don't have policy lever unless you design a policy lever and you could design this for the weights and you could design it for cost equity to write both of them. Either proposal, we have no way right now saying district X, you have to spend this for this is this is what you this is right, or you need to do these things with dollars. Okay, that's our local control. The second thing I would say is we have no evidence in our study that districts in the state who who serve the largest proportions of English language learner students spend money unwisely or ineffectively. We have no evidence either way right like we have no evidence of that. What I can say about ELL students and I think you started to mention this in your comment is that because we are have concentrations of ELL students in some places, we also have a situation where we have problems with economies of scale at other places in the state where we have really small numbers right and we have fixed costs and it's really right and they don't get federal money. What that means is for ELL and we talk about this in one of our memos is it makes it really challenging to develop a funding program for ELL students in the state that is going to be universally satisfactory for all these different kind of contexts. They're just really different and some of the bars that's a little bit unique to Vermont because we do have these concentrated refugee-ready settlement sites that have large concentrations not just of ELL students but multiple languages and other kinds of learning needs versus itinerants and other kinds of programs and other parts of the state which is why in our first memo when we were asked to comment on this we did say that there may be some policy room here to think about to get creative with how we think about funding for ELL programs in the state that said in thinking that through we're going to need to make sure that we adequately fund those programs and what we know from our research is that the ad on average in the state the additional per pupil spending number is around $22,000 for an ELL student. So in our second memo we talk about well then given some of these given some of these sort of unevenness around the state and sort of what these programs look like there might be there might be some options for districts could opt into a wait where they could opt into a grant program with a fixed cost with a fixed amount that dealt with some of the economies of scale there's always an option for reimbursement program right which is what we have right now under special ed although we're transitioning for that but there are policy options here but I think it is it is good to recognize that ELLs in the state pose a different kind of challenge in terms of figuring out like what is the most appropriate cost adjustment but that's different than going down sort of the rabbit hole of saying some districts spend dollars wisely and other districts do not spend wisely it's that I think the program's a really different that helps senator yes it does thank you madam chair you're muted again I got rid of the I had the house phone up here and it's gone off several times it's gone um the I think what you've pointed out is a couple things one is we do have a self equalizing tax rate a penny on the tax rate raises the same amount of money but what we've discovered is that some communities can afford that extra penny better than other communities we tend to have a bunch of very small poor rural communities and a couple of larger and then we have some larger districts and so that ability to pay comes into all of this but I've been here since x60 we have talked about tax rates we've talked about cost containment we've talked about but we have never talked about the rate the weights and they play a seemingly important role in how much money schooled or in what form they're getting it right it's kind of like you know transportation funds we don't talk about those they're given so I think it's good one thing that I spent this morning listening to schools and the mental health issues they're facing with kids and the pressures and I'm not sure how much capacity our schools have to absorb an entirely new system right now which is something I think as we're playing with this we might want to consider in terms of timing or in terms of do we stick with what the schools know and update the rates and then continue we may be putting ELL out as a trial we'll see you know if doing an equity payment there does it work and how well does it work but one thing I would say Senator Cummings and I think you're spot on about the tax rates in the district and and town's ability to pay if we have a town right now that is has lower wealth right and that town is not appropriately weighted they're underweighted dollars are too expensive in that town right and so it means that that town has less capacity to spend and so I think what when we can see that in our data right that systematically town when we adjust these weights we see tax capacity going to places that previously where spending has been really hard now one of the things we raise in our report though is that this is part of that local control right and local taxpayers is that just because you create tax capacity doesn't mean that a locality might take the tax capacity and so one of the things we recommended in our report is that if along with this right remember we talked about complementary policies a complementary policy might be to say if you get if you get tax capacity from this you can't take that as a tax cut the the intent is that you're supposed to make those investments or some portion of those investments so and I just offer that example but I think I think you're really on to an important point right like the fact that the weights have been this calibrated actually created the situation that you're talking about right and if the weights were in theory in the self equalizing system in theory that if the weights are calibrated properly then some of that should go wet right good okay i'm senator hardy i know you know this i'm going to see if anybody else has a question at this point okay senator hardy thank you madam chair and thank you professor colby um for your testimony um i feel like i could like listen to it in my sleep and i probably do and you probably do too at this point um but i just i i wanted to point out i don't know if you saw the pros and cons list that i went over with the committee yesterday mine was a more simplified version than yours but it was pretty much the same as yours with you good slightly different slightly different takes on it but it was a pretty similar list and it was a list that representative cornheiser and i put together earlier this session so um you know i i would debate on a few little finer points but overall i think that um you know i i think your pros and cons list is is good the one exception and is that i i think there's more more to be said about el l and and i know that senator pierce in in particular is very concerned obviously as am i about making sure we get that right and i think that's the one that we that's the reason that's the one area that we pulled out the task force pulled out to say we need to do something different here because it doesn't fit the same um parameters that the other weights and other categories do and in the same way and i appreciated you you know pointing that out and i think that's why we're sort of holding off on that conversation um and the education committee's having it first because it really is a very uh focused educational program as well as a cost adjustment um whereas the other categories are more cost adjustments more generically i mean i don't want to oversimplify it but um well i think they're all cost adjustments but i think that we have programmatic challenges in this state that make it difficult to come up with a uniform cost adjustment in the same kind of way right and yeah we point that out in our original report and all of our memos at that el l is a special circumstance and i think we are all we would concur with you on the fact that there's room for thinking around i would call creative thinking around how why we do el l better given the fact that the program how we provide high quality services for english language learners around the state should look really different in different contexts and that makes coming up with some sort of average or some sort of uniform weight really difficult to do yeah right right exactly so i look forward to more conversations about this but the other four categories are a little bit i wouldn't say easier but i'm gonna say easier to deal with the the enrollment the poverty the the grade level and the school size and and that's where i feel like this committee needs to make the that choice between these two and i will just say if anybody's wondering what i'm thinking um as the co-chair of the task force um that i agree that we have limited amount of time and um moving forward with um a cost equity proposal right now may be a big task that we're not able to get done in this session and we need to do something this session so i'm hoping that we um are able to understand and as a committee and and and and and move forward with the set of weights that are proposed in your the famous october 28th 2021 memo i've cited it so many times it feels famous to me um so anyway just i'll take famous over there we go i'd like to have a couple minutes for committee discussion and we've got our next group on energy savings accounts so um new thing senator pierson so let me just get clear madam chair are we gonna talk about it right now i mean it is special to have professor colby with us yes i i think um we've heard from professor colby i'm trying to figure out uh what the committee might like to know um we haven't heard you know we just scratched the surface of what's there i'm going through our flow chart that we saw yesterday um with the pros and cons of the weighting versus uh the equity payments ell we know is a separate issue it will come to us i assume with if it's got money attached to it um from education but for all the other categories um we we have that so i i would love to ask professor colby about um the the poverty metric and and the shift for other reasons in the past i've been interested in uh in a family income sort of reporting particularly because we've i've been one of the people looking at universal school meals and it solves a problem there so it immediately caught my eye but now i'm starting to wonder what you think and this is my question the impact of um if we sort of accept that historically there's been a problem with our our measurement and our wait for poverty and we sort of are saying good we need to address this and as we address it we shift to a much broader metric is there a risk that that we we sort of um maybe jump to a more a more fair system but but overlook a correction in the in the in the sense of um you know as we fix it we go to a new measure and and so we don't kind of address some of the history there do you see my question your question um i'm going to answer this in a couple parts again um the first thing i want to say is let's i think it's important to be clear what our existing poverty measure is in the weights it's okay that we use for weights it is the hodgepodge at best right of a bunch of different things right it can it sort of gets sort of family nutrition but it also it also counts any student whose ELL as impoverished so we have this situation where we have ELL students counted in the poverty weight and also in as ELL students and the existing measure of economic disadvantage is a very restrictive one right it's based on sort of connections of a household to nutrition benefits that we get right from more generally from another agency so we don't have that correspondence with a particular school in the same kind of way and we have we have a problem where poverty where poverty is actually capturing not just poverty is capturing ELL and poverty it also is multiplicative in which means that it counts for a lot let's just say that way right it counts for more than other categories so the task force i think did a good job and really trying to dive into this issue of how do we measure poverty which is problematic not just in vermont it's problematic everywhere it's a really hard thing to do in our study in our original report we tested out a number of different measures and took like all the available measures for a reduced price lunch seems to be the best measure that we have available at least to us i know representative cornhider in particular took some interest in thinking about like how we might even improve on collecting those data you know so my answer to your question is one the measure we have is not very good right it's very restrictive i don't we know it's not doing a very good job of measuring economic the extent of economic disadvantage and it's completed with the number of students who are ELL okay so from our perspective keeping it is not a good right that we need to shift to something what would the criteria be for a shift making sure that we're not counting ELL in poverty and ELL in a separate category right we need we need to break that apart so it's pure right we've got a poverty and we went a measure of economic disadvantage we have a measure of English language language would be the first thing the second thing is is this kind of gets at your other point like so fRL is not a stringent of a measure of poverty right so we're going to have we're going to identify more students and that's going to that's more distributed across the state that's going to have impacts right for waiting because we've distributed the impacts and so this is really i think the second decision that we would say is you got to make a decision like at what point are you going to declare a student economically disadvantaged what we know and the research right is that students who are impoverished and by using impoverish we're using sort of federal guidelines for income on average costs more to educate so if we're using fRL which is tied to that federal benchmark then we have a decent degree of confidence in saying if you're using fRL you are identifying students who are economically disadvantaged enough that we know from research require additional resources to succeed in schools so is the measure they're proposing ideal no i don't think but i also don't know that we have a better measure right now that we can use but there are these trade-offs as you notice right that come with moving from a more restrictive to a more generalized measure of poverty with how that will work in the waiting calculation i think we're going to have to do a few runs to really understand the interaction at times this feels like building an atomic bomb and there's a reaction and you know a counter reaction and i think that at some point i've asked brad james to do us a couple of winner-loser scenarios no names attached so we aren't influenced but to understand how all these things he did one but i can't say i understand except that they do interact but if that's a good thing or a bad thing and i don't know yet um if i may senator comings yeah the one thing i would say is that moving from the existing poverty measure which again double counts el l and is multiplicative to an additive measure of poverty right which means that hold the same way it is all the other things right and doesn't include el l is an improvement over what we have now okay so why then the question is how do you want to measure poverty then right if english language learners are living in poverty why wouldn't we count them they are counted okay they would actually right so right now we actually double count el l students in the weights ah okay because all right any student whose el l is automatically counted as impoverished and as an el l student that that makes things that that shouldn't be right like the weight shouldn't work that way the way the weight should work is if you're impoverished you're weighted for this and if you're el l you're weighted for this so it's not that it's not that an impoverished el l student wouldn't be weighted they'd be weighted as an impoverished student and right with the weight for poverty and the weight for el l Right now what we do is we're, it's a counting problem because when we're counting impoverished students, we're also counting anyone who's ELL, regardless of the resources that they have in the home. That's what I'm thinking. Not everybody is necessarily poor. That's right. And you want these to be additive, right? So all these weights hold, right, hold, right, the same weight in the calculation, right? So we're not compounding the effects of one, of one kind of disadvantage over another. Right? So it's a far more fair system that way. It also means that your, that your adjustments are more pure, right? Like, I'm adjusting for economic disadvantage. I'm adjusting for ELL, right? And I'm doing it appropriately that way. And Tammy, I just want to, or Professor Colby, I just want to add for the weights that, the weights that are in the famous October 28th memo already are recalibrated or recalibrated for this particular issue. That's correct. That's one of the things the task force spent a lot of time on understanding and then asking that the weights be redone so that they're the correct number. And that's part of the reason you saw the shift in ELL weight, right? Because when we, because before we were kind of counting ELL as poverty and we were kind of getting it out here. And so the weights were capturing them in two places, right? When we broke it apart and we said just poverty and just ELL, this is like we purified both of those weights, which is why they shifted the way they did. The poverty weight actually came down because we're no longer double counting ELL. The ELL weight went up because we're only counting ELL there. Okay. Okay, we're going to have to wrap this up because our next set of, and I think we've probably absorbed as much as we're going to absorb for one afternoon. But committee, since I think we're going to take a lot less time on that merged market on Friday, I'm going to try and get some discussion about a, how we're feeling about which basis weights or equity payments. And then, or a hybrid, and then we'll figure out where the next step is at where we're going, but I think, and if you, you know, you want further information or further somebody, I'm going to ask if we haven't already. We have no superintendents to come in. I'd like to just get a sense as to how much they feel that they and their, you know, that they can handle at this moment. And that might, because we are going to, I'm assuming do some transition step and be ready, you know, to think about that too. And I know I have at least one school board member who has contacted me and I've told her she can come in and talk. So that's where we are. All right, so my name Madam chair. I also put in the chat for, for people on zoom my email address if there are specific questions that any of you have as far as I'm happy to try to respond. I'm happy to reach out. Thank you. And I'm happy to come back if it's helpful to I think we're at the point where we're still learning enough to ask intelligent questions. Great questions. We're working our way through. Okay, thank you. Thank you.