Grassroots Education Reform

Reform of public education comes in many packages: charter schools, parental choice, merit pay, phonics, high-tech teaching, teacher testing, privatization, and many more. Putting these reforms in place faces a major obstacle. Almost all of the current reform proposals require the state board of education, commissioner, school boards, principals, superintendents, and above all the teachers' union to change something they have become very comfortable doing their way (or not doing at all.) Because of their resistance to change, this collection of interests has become collectively known to education reformers as The Blob. (There are some good people within The Blob, but they are often very frustrated.)

The various components of The Blob don't want to change their practices because they are making out pretty well with the deal they have managed to arrange for themselves. Innovations that promise better results for kids run into opposition if they would disrupt routines, responsibilities and power relationships among those in charge of the public education system.

Take public school parental choice. This isn't much of a reform - it's like being allowed to deposit your mail in any post office of your choice - but it is at least based on the idea that parents should be able to choose which school their kids attend, even if their choice is limited to government-run schools.

In his state of the state message in 1998 Gov. Howard Dean declared himself in favor of "empowering parents and children to choose their own public schools." The legislation to effect this (S. 203) is still resting quietly in the House education committee. Because The Blob is threatened by any kind of parental choice, the bill is so shrunken and restricted that Vermonters for Educational Choice, the reform lobby, now hopes it disappears.

Rep. Howard Crawford (R-Burke) has a different and better approach to wide-ranging education reform. Instead of proposing to change the entire public school system for everybody, Rep. Crawford's bill (H. 827) proposes to let the voters of local supervisory unions create their own "educational freedom districts" Once the idea is approved by the voters in the towns, a local commission goes to work to design its own local education reform plan.

After a year of planning and public meetings, the commission would present its plan to the voters for approval. The plan could include a wide range of promising educational features such as unified governance, full parental choice of public, independent, alternative, charter, and parochial schools, home schooling assistance, dual high school and college credits, work-study alternatives, public school contracting, teacher testing, alternative teacher certification, national testing, exemption from the state's "portfolio assessment" and Goals 2000 activities, and recertification of union representation. The district would sunset in four years, unless reapproved.

One great virtue of the educational freedom district proposal is that it lets local parents, educators, and civic leaders redesign their school systems in a way that makes sense to them. They can choose among a wide range of reforms to put in place. This possibility would certainly cause a great deal of interest, discussion, and citizen involvement. Citizens concerned about improving education would at last have the power to do something about it in their own communities, instead of carrying out instructions from Montpelier.

The other great virtue is that Crawford's bill doesn't require everybody - or for that matter anybody - to do anything. If the people of Wilmington or Enosburg Falls or Sharon want to try out their preferred reforms, it doesn't affect other towns that are content with the educational system they now have.

Even this local option feature, the bill will of course be staunchly opposed by The Blob. Why? Because citizen-initiated reforms might actually work somewhere, and then everybody else would be able to do the same thing in their towns. Before long Vermont would have a host of citizen-led, experience-based education reforms outside The Blob's control. What a great idea!

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February 2000