Vermont's New Centralized Education Regime

The "historic" education bill signed into law by Gov. Dean (Act 60) not only makes radical changes in the financing of education in Vermont. It also makes equally radical changes in the control of education.

Perhaps because there was so little debate in the House on the educational issues, the media decided early that the education provisions were far less important than finances. Even though there was a much hotter education quality debate in the Senate, the media drowned Vermonters in tax details, but left them pretty much in the dark about how Act 60 will change education itself.

In a sentence: Act 60 not only makes the state pay the bills for education, but it concentrates almost total power over local public schools in the state, and it pushes relentlessly forward toward medicalizing educational failures.

First, the bill parrots the Five Supreme Legislators in announcing that the 1786 Constitution declares the right to a public education as integral to our constitutional form of government, etc. Like much of the Court's highly political Brigham decision, this pronouncement is sheer fantasy, but it serves the purpose of the education Blob (educrats, school boards association, teachers union etc.) to keep as much education as possible under public (i.e., their) control. The Senate actually deleted this "public" bias, but the House conferees, worshipful of the Court and always sensitive to the needs of the teachers' union, forced it back into the final bill.

Second, the State Board of Education which will soon be running our schools was given extensive new powers to implement standards for student performance. A joint effort in the Senate by Democratic Leader Dick McCormack (D-Windsor) and Republican Leader Rob Ide (R-Caledonia) to insert the adjectives "academic and technical" before the word "standards" was beaten back.

That rejection can now be construed by the Blob as a mandate to the Board to proceed with more worthless "outcome based education" standards that attempt to gauge how students feel about themselves (and their parents, and global warming, and alternative sexual orientations, etc.) and how well they are "prepared to contribute to the democratic process", instead of making them demonstrate their mastery of academic and technical subject matter.

Third, to make sure that the much-feared (by the Blob) independent schools do not become more attractive by teaching students strong academic and technical curricula instead of watered-down Blob-approved standards, the bill requires independent schools to assess using the State's standards. Of course an independent school could pay little attention to the State's standards and help its students to score very well on tough academic standards. It would then, however, have to do a lot of explaining to its prospective customers when the state publishes its "poor" performance ratings.

Fourth, the new act gives the State Board vast new power to define "school quality standards" and "standards regarding conditions, practices and resources" of local schools, There will of course be the inevitable "statewide strategic action plan", sort of an Act 200 for your kids. Each school must also have its own a "comprehensive action plan" to improve student performance against the state-defined standards,

The idea that Vermont parents would produce educational excellence by choosing to send their children to schools the parents think are best, thus forcing all schools to compete for their customers, was far too radical to consider. Far better - and safer - to have the State Board define our educational goals, and develop a sweeping plan to mandate it on the locals.

The act also gives the Board its long sought power to put local schools into receivership if the locals have other ideas about their children. And it's perfectly logical; if the state is paying the bills, the locals will do it the state's way, or else the state will take over the local school and run it its way. An effort by McCormack and Ide to allow the state board, in dire cases, to declare a non-complying town a tuition town - so the parents can choose to relocate their children to better schools nearby - was summarily rejected. The bill declares that only the all-powerful State can take remedial action, not parents who are not trained to understand their children's best interests.

Fifth, the act makes another great leap into the medicalization of education problems. It used to be that students who didn't learn were thought to be dumb, or their teachers incompetent. Nowadays no one is dumb or incompetent - it's bad for self-esteem. Now the kids are sick, The act creates three "regional collaboratives" of education and human services employees to "help children prepare for and succeed in school." It also authorizes expansion of the use of Medicaid funds to deal with the plague of sickness formerly known as low achievement.

The game here is that if an educational problem can be defined as a health problem, and the child-patient comes from a family with an income below 225% of the federal poverty level, two thirds of the bill for the "treatments" (by special educators, counselors, psychologists, mental health aides, etc.) can be passed on to Washington, at least until Congress gets wise.

Sixth, the State Board is charged with doing yet another study of "governance" reform, i.e., consolidating the 251 local school boards into something more easily managed by the State. Since the act vests control of local schools in Montpelier and makes local school boards increasingly irrelevant, the historic resistance to mega-supervisory unions will probably evaporate. The Montpelier educrats will get the eight mega-districts they have wanted since 1965, when Gov. Hoff tried and failed to bring that about.

Finally, parental choice took a beating in the final product. Led by the courageous Sen. Jeb Spaulding (D-Washington), the Senate, by an 18-12 vote, decreed full parental choice of non-sectarian public or independent schools starting in 2003. This was too much for the House conferees, ever mindful of the needs of the passionately anti-choice Vermont NEA. The Spaulding amendment quickly ended up on the conference room floor.

Sen. Barbara Snelling (R-Chittenden), a notable friend of public education for nearly 40 years, passed final judgment on the education provisions:

"There will be significant loss of local control over both financial and educational decisions, a prescription for eventual mediocrity."

She might have said "eventual and very, very costly mediocrity."

What, then, are concerned citizens and parents to do? One idea which ought to get a lot more attention as the provisions of the new act take effect is the Educational Freedom District. As proposed by Rep. Howard Crawford (R-Burke), voters in local supervisory districts could choose to "opt out" of the statewide education regime. Once that is done, their local school board could, with voter approval, implement a host of education reforms built around the ideas of high academic standards, healthy competition among providers, and decision making by parents, not by an increasingly centralized government which believes it always knows better than its subjects.

Such a pro-parent, pro-competition idea is of course doomed in any legislature that could so eagerly enact Act 60. After the full import of both the financing and the educational provisions of Act 60 hit home with the voters next year, however, the 1999 legislature may look quite a bit different from this one. Then many good things will be possible.

June 1997