Fraudulent Choice for Vermont Parents

In his 1998 state of the state message Gov. Howard Dean offered a strong defense of parental choice in education, provided, of course, that the parents choose a public school controlled by the state Education Department and organized by the teachers union, the Vermont NEA.

Over two years have passed since Gov. Dean's extremely modest call to action - a call which was notably not repeated in this year's message. This month the House finally responded by acting on the "public school choice bill" (S. 203.) The Vermont NEA can take a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that thanks to its diligent lobbying efforts the resulting bill is, at best, close to worthless. At worst, it lays the groundwork for the extermination of such parental choice as now exists in Vermont.

The bill was passed by the House May 4 on a 99-30 vote, and was subsequently sent to the Governor with only a few minor amendments. It inches slightly away from the present Vermont standard of "no parental choice at all in towns that have public schools, unless parents can afford to buy their kid's way out." Starting in the fall of 2002, the lesser of six dissatisfied high school pupils, or 3% of a school's enrollment, can transfer from any public high school to any other public high school in its designated region. Elementary school pupils are left out altogether. There are plenty of exemptions for high schools that don't want to allow even this much parental choice. The bill specifies that even this pitiful effort will be terminated after five years.

In an effort to stimulate some slight movement toward a broader parental choice program, Rep. Frank Mazur (R-So. Burlington) offered an amendment to require a committee study of the merits of charter schools. These are independently chartered and operated public schools, over a thousand of which are now offering real choices to parents in 36 other states. The education establishment - led by the Vermont School Boards Association and the NEA - managed to beat this back on a 67-68 vote. These vested interests can't risk even a peek into what they fearfully see as the Pandora's Box of charter schools. Why? Because if charter schools caught on in Vermont they would operate outside of school board and union control, and thus subvert their near-monopoly power over public education.

Vermonters for Better Education greeted House passage of S. 203 with a statement noting that the bill was little more than a fig leaf to allow some legislators to hide from their constituents "the naked truth that they have no intention of ever supporting a real school choice program." Vermonters for Educational Choice (VEC), the parental choice lobby, "declined to support" the bill.

VEC's unwillingness to support the bill was not just a protest against the bill's absurdly limited choice provisions. VEC is convinced that the public high school choice mechanism in S. 203 has been purposefully designed to create a framework for regionalizing the governance of public schools. The ultimate goal, expressed by then-State Education Board chair Diane Wolk in Senate testimony on March 13, is the creation of sixteen high school regions under state control.

The creation of these sixteen "public high school choice regions" would end the venerable and highly popular tuition town system. In operation since 1869, this system allows parents of high schoolers in some 90 towns to send their children to any approved high school of their choice, public or non-sectarian independent, in or out of the state, at public expense. Since under the plan envisioned by the architects of S. 203 every present tuition town would then find itself in one of these new public high school choice regions, all the high schoolers in those towns would have to attend a public high school. They would no longer be entitled to choose an independent school. The fact that the House manager of the bill was retired superintendent George Cross (D- Winooski), one of the most stubborn defenders of the public school monopoly in the legislature, gives credence to VEC's fears.

Thousands of Vermont parents are eager to get their kids out of public high schools that they view as having feeble academic standards, lax discipline, refusal to recognize religious values, morally subversive curricula, hazing, child medication excesses, condom distribution, drug use, invasive family questionnaires, political correctness, union domination, and a host of other afflictions. Others challenge these criticisms as misplaced or faulty, and defend the public schools. But in a free country the unhappy parents have the right to come to such conclusions, and they should also have the right to transfer their children to an educational environment that avoids what they see as the unacceptable defects of their local public school.

The new public school choice bill offers practically no real parental choice. It may well be, as VEC suspects, a mortal threat to the choice now enjoyed by parents in tuition towns. Hopefully concerned parents will not be fooled by a bill containing so little merit, and so much menace.

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May 2000