Since converting (as it were) to its current thrice-a-week new posts at the end of June, this web site has not offered one of its occasional self-correcting, self-reflective reports which are (or ought to be) required for any one-person operation, lest that one person get a swelled head.

A review of recent posts reveals only one out-and-out error, which a careful reader spotted and reported at the time, and which was therefore fixed by mid-morning.

Still, those of you who read the July 24 piece “Hang Up and Drive” before 10 o’clock or so, might still be wondering just what was meant by the term “anti-lock breaks.”

Not that the concept is a logical impossibility. Were an employer, for instance, to forbid workers from securing their desk drawers during their 15-minute recess periods for having a cup of coffee, the result might be considered an “anti-lock break.”

Or, stepping further into absurdity, we could consider the plural: suppose the boss were to forbid the consumption of smoked salmon during those same recesses: Presto! Anti-lox breaks.

Getting back to reality, what the News Guy meant to say was, of course, “anti-lock brakes.”

So much for sins of commission (unless any reader knows of another; if so, don’t hesitate to inform). But there may have been a sin of omission in last Friday’s report about the Progressive Party’s “ultimatum” to the Democratic candidates for governor.

Considering that the post asked whether the Progs were politically inept, perhaps it should have included Party Chair Martha Abbott’s politically sagacious observation that the Party “would rather not run a statewide campaign, and instead concentrate on increasing our strength in the state legislature.”

That post also might have noted that though the Progs threatened to run their own candidate if no Democrat agreed with them on three issues (scroll down to read Friday’s post; no need to repeat the details here), the Progressives don’t seem to have a candidate. Their most likely (and potentially most powerful) contender, is Anthony Pollina, who ran last year. But on Vermont Public Radio’s “Vermont Edition” Friday, Pollina didn’t sound like a guy who was keen on another statewide campaign. He didn’t rule it out, but he sure didn’t display any enthusiasm.

One commentator and a few e-mailers also suggested that in that post the News Guy was furthering the myth that it was the Progressives who cost the Democrats the last few gubernatorial elections.

Let’s erase any ambiguity here. They did not. Republican Gov. Jim Douglas got outright majorities in the last three elections. A divided opposition did not elect him.

But it could next year. Nobody expects that any Democrat could swamp the incumbent governor. The best the Democrats could hope for is winning by a few points, something like 51-to-49 percent. With a Progressive in the race taking a few points, almost all of it from the Democrats, that 49 percent probably re-elects Douglas.

While we’re dispensing with political myths, let’s get rid of the one that finds any significance in Pollina finishing a few votes ahead of Democrat Gaye Symington last year.

That election meant nothing. It never become a race. Politically involved folks tend to forget that the not-very-politically-involved folks (which is most folks) don’t take a campaign seriously unless they perceive it to be competitive. Last year’s campaign never crossed that threshold. From the outset, it was clear that Symington could not win.

Or Pollina, either. No Progressive has ever won a statewide race. Barring the most bizarre circumstance (both the Democratic and Republican candidate are discovered in flagrante delictu, preferably with one another, in mid-October), no Progressive ever will. It was not for nothing that Pollina switched from running as the Progressive candidate to running as an independent last year. The Progressive brand does not appeal to anything close to a majority of Vermonters.

Finally, a little in-house business: The News Guy is grateful to those who have added their names to the list of subscribers in the last few weeks, as well as for all those who have decided to make him a Facebook “friend” and to follow the web site on Twitter.

(Though this does not include the tweets from fetching young females [or tweeters who so describe themselves] suggesting all sorts of interesting if not entirely proper consequences. Really, ladies. If you knew the age of your target here you’d direct your energies elsewhere).

Alas, this evidence of enhanced interest in the site has not been accompanied by donations, and the News Guy has not yet attained the great break-even point. Those who find the site of some value to Vermont’s political/social/governmental/economic/educational/environmental discussion and who have not yet done so are urged to make a contribution (check under “pages” near the upper right hand corner for instructions; checks preferred).

The Progressive Party has made the Democratic candidates for governor an offer they must refuse:

Agree with us on these three issues, say the Progs, and we’re yours. Fail to agree with us on all three, and you’re toast.

OK, OK, that’s not exactly what the Progressives said, as shall be explained presently. Still, what the Progressives really did say puts the Democratic candidates in a political pickle.

Let’s not waste any time feeling sorry for those candidates. If you don’t want to be placed in a political pickle, don’t run for office.

Instead, let’s take advantage of the opportunity to answer a few interesting questions the pickle provides, including:

(1) Will the Democratic candidates have the gumption to refuse (or at least ignore) the Progressive dare to toe the line?

(2) Are the Progressive leaders really, really issue-oriented idealists who believe that the purpose of politics is “doing something about issues…not just winning a popularity contest?

Or (3) Are they really, really…well, we have recently learned not to refer to anyone as “stupid,” so let’s just say really, really inept?

The answer to that last question is—Not really. First, because one ought not to characterize people, as opposed to their statements and actions. Second, because as explained by Progressive Party Chair Martha Abbott (quoted above about the purpose of politics), what the Progs did seems to make sense.

“This was part of a positive attempt by our party to be clear about the issues that are important to us,” Abbott said. The intent, she said, was less to put the Democrats on the spot than to encourage them to speak out on issues that are important to many Democrats as well as to Progressives.

Absent persuasive evidence to the contrary (and there is none here) a person’s – or a political party’s – assertion of her or its intent should be accepted. But one requirement of the politically non-inept (the politically ept?) is to understand how public statements will be interpreted, regardless of intent.

Following a meeting of the Progressive Party State Committee in Newport last weekend, Abbott, on behalf of the Committee, issued a statement saying that, “ Progressives will be looking to support a candidate who demonstrates strong support …for a single payer health care system for Vermont in which the single payer is NOT private ‘for-profit’ insurance companies; labor (policies) that do not require more sacrifices on the part of labor and the unemployed; strong opposition to allowing Vermont Yankee’s continued operation.”

Unless one of the Democratic candidates adopts those positions, the statement said, “the Vermont Progressive Party may feel compelled to offer a candidate of our own.”

A candidate of their own, of course, would split the left-of-center electorate – perhaps even the left-of-right electorate – all but guaranteeing another victory for the right-of-left candidate, presumably Republican Gov. Jim Douglas.

A “litmus test,” said Shay Totten in Seven Days. An “ultimatum,” said WCAX-TV (Channel 3).

“Whatever we do we get creamed by the press,” said Abbott. “We’re sort of the bad guys in the room.”

Could be. But you know what? If that statement was not exactly an ultimatum with a litmus test it certainly wasn’t not an ultimatum with a litmus test.

And one thing a candidate can never do is cave in – or even seem to cave in – to either one. Any candidate who responded by saying, in effect, “Ok, sign me up on all three issues, just don’t run your own candidate for governor,” would appear to be a wimp.”

Uhh, correct that. Edit out “appear to.” He or she would simply be a wimp. That’s why, so far at least, Secretary of State Deb Markowitz and Sens. Susan Bartlett and Doug Racine have stopped well short of meeting the Progs litmus test.

Still, the three of them (and Sen. Peter Shumlin should he decide to run) might be tempted to meet the test even while claiming to be reaching all three positions independently of the Progressive Party, and it will be interesting to see how (or if) they perform this particular two-step.

At this point, a Progressive Party member would say – with some justification – “but enough political strategizing; what about the issues themselves.”

Fair enough.

As regular readers should know, the News Guy generally does not take positions for or against specific issues. In this case, there is certainly a good case to be made for both shutting down Vermont Yankee when its license expires in 2012 and for a single payer health care system.

And a good case to the contrary. But through the prisms of both political viability and intellectual rigor, any politician who asserts unequivocal support for a single-payer health plan and against Vermont Yankee leaves him/her-self open to criticism from liberals, moderates, and neutral observers as well as from conservatives.

Nuclear power has its downside, and Vermont Yankee and its owners have raised ample doubts about their competence and their integrity. But once a nuclear power plant has been built, generating power from it does not contribute to global warming. If climate change is, as many liberal argue (and they’re probably right), the world’s greatest danger these days, shutting down a power plant that doesn’t exacerbate that danger also has its policy as well as its political downside.

As to health care, despite the nonsense going on around the country this month (a bit of it even in Vermont), there is still a better than 50-50 chance that before the year is out Congress will substantively alter the health care financing system for the whole country. If so, the vast majority of the people, even in relatively liberal Vermont, will prefer to wait and see how the revised system works before tinkering with it any more.

And even in relatively liberal Vermont, almost everybody will be “health-cared out,” dead set against hearing anyone talking about cost shifts, pre-existing conditions, or public options until 2013 or so. The candidate who stumps for a single-payer system in Vermont next year is likely to be viewed as a pain in the neck, not a farsighted leader.

The labor issue has not been as prominent in the public discussion, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. The Progressive stance has two components – opposition to reducing unemployment compensation benefits, and opposition to laying off any more state employees.

That first component is a perfectly legitimate, if disputable, political stance. So is the second, with these two complications:

(1)—Democrats in the Legislature are about to spend at least $100,000 on a study to see if more workers can be laid off without degrading or diminishing the level of state services. No politician could (or should, come to think of it) reject this possibility out of hand;

(2) It’s a political payoff.

No, not a corrupt payoff. No money changed hands and there not have been any “I’ll scratch your back…” words. And no doubt the Progressives hold their belief in complete sincerity as a matter of good policy. But look at the record. Last year, the Vermont State Employees Association endorsed Anthony Pollina, the de facto Progressive candidate for governor (he ran as an independent, but clearly was the Progs choice). Now the Progressives endorse the VSEA.

No scandal, It happens all the time, in politics, in business, in academia, in organizations as respectable as the Kiwanis Club or the Presbyterian Church.

Oh, and in the Douglas Administration, which has been reducing the state work force in several departments, but especially in the Natural Resources Agency, which now has fewer enforcers of environmental regulations, to the benefit and delight of builders and realtors, who are among the Administration’s biggest supporters.

Again, no scandal. Aside from perfectly legal campaign contributions, no money changed hands, and, again, quite likely there was no, “I’ll scratch your back…” conversation.

Just the way the world works, on the left and on the right, even in Vermont.

It’s the midsummer lull, and it seems that half of Vermont is on vacation.

Must be the half that the News Guy was trying to reach to put the finishing touches on a few good stories in process.

They will be found, those people, and those stories will be written. For today, though, how about taking another look at the “Vermont Transitions” Study completed late last year by the Center for Social Science Research at St. Michaels University for the Council on the Future of Vermont.

Because we’re concentrating on the public schools this “back-to-school” month , we’ll check in on the education chapter, written by the report’s two main writers of the report, Professors Vince Bolduc and Herb Kessel.

This chapter, like the others, is calm and even-handed. So it comes close to being a walk on the bland side. But this saves it from being blinded by ideology. It is analytical, not opinionated. It diagnoses, but does not prescribe.

That’s OK. There is no shortage of Vermonters telling the rest of us – often in loud tones – what ought to be done about the public schools. Bolduc and Kessel don’t do that. They tell us what’s happening, a prerequisite for deciding what ought to be done.

No one who has been paying attention will be surprised to learn that one of the things that has been happening is that there are fewer kids in Vermont schools than there were a decade ago. In 2000 there were more than 105,000 pupils in the state’s public schools; by 2008 there were fewer than 95,000.

(This differs somewhat from the most recent “Fact Sheet” of the Department of Education, which shows a public school population of 95,572.).

The decline will not last forever . The report says the student population will “decline over the next ten years,” meaning nine more (their data are about a year old). According to other projections, the elementary school population will bottom out and start to grow after 2018, and the number of high schoolers will start to rise a few years later.

Still, the report notes, school enrollment will “not hit its previous peak for 20 years.”

Less well-known is just where the declines are taking place. The “enrollment changes are spread disproportionately across the state,” the report says. Basically, there are just as many kids in Chittenden County as there were a decade ago. It’s in the smaller towns and rural areas where the school population has fallen.

This is at least broadly consistent with trends among the general population, growing in Chittenden County, shrinking slightly in Southern Vermont. Populations are holding steady or growing a bit in the northern rural counties, but apparently the people moving into those areas, many of them retirees, are less likely to have children in school.

Another surprise might be the pace of the growth in minority students. While still few in number, minority students are no longer an inconsequential percentage of the total. In 1990, they made up only 1.8 percent of the state’s public school pupils; in 2008, they were 6.10 percent.

Here, too, the concentration is in Chittenden County, and many of these students come from homes where English is not spoken. Burlington and Winooski alone, the report notes, “have seen a 60 per cent increase in the number of English as a Second Language students in 2000. In the Burlington schools, there are students with 47 different languages as their primary dialect, and in Winooski one quarter of the students are ‘English language learners.’”

People may argue about whether this diversity is exciting or disturbing. Either way, it is expensive, and one reason why it is hard to cut costs even as the student population drops.

“At first glance, it might appear that falling enrollments would ease financial pressures, but that is not the case,” the report says. “For political contractual, and/or economic reasons, it is difficult to reduce or reassign personnel to where the need is greatest.”

The result is that Vermont has the lowest student-teacher ratio and the sixth highest per pupil cost in the country.

This is not because the teachers earn a lot of money, the report says. “In 2005, Vermont teacher salaries were ranked 21st in the nation and 4th in New England,” it finds. “Between 1993 and 2003, the growth in Vermont salaries was only 22 percent…45h lowest in the nation.”

Nor is that high per pupil cost simply (or perhaps even primarily) the result of too many teachers. As the report points out, “the most notable change in Vermont’s K-12 educational system is the growth in the number of personnel,” as total employment grew by 22.2 percent between 1996 and 2006, even as student enrollments fell by 6.7 percent.

But most of those “personnel” were not teachers. The number of aides grew sharply, in part because of a large increase in the number of special education students, many of whom are assigned their own individual aide. Special education costs grew by a far higher rate than did the cost of regular education between 1995 and 2001.

That growth rate has since calmed down, the report said. And according to the Education Department, the number of elementary school teachers has started to decline, although slowly. As the pupil population continues to go down, so will the teaching staff.

This does not necessarily mean total costs will drop. As Bolduc and Kassel note, reducing school expenses is harder than cutting costs in a typical business.

“(I)n the private sector, increased costs can often be offset by productivity increases,” they say. But in schools, better productivity is not always desirable. “Adding students to a classroom is one way to reduce costs, but the results may not be educationally sound,” the report says.

.As do most assessments, this one indicates that Vermont schools seem to be doing a relatively good job. The drop-out rate in Vermont is lower than the national average, and has declined since the mid-1990s. Test scores are generally above average, though the authors do point out that Vermont parents tend to be more educated than their peers elsewhere. So the kids might score well on aptitude tests such as the SATs even if the schools were mediocre.

But in several nationwide tests taken since this report was published, Vermont students scored well above the national average on achievement tests as well as on aptitude tests. To the extent that standardized tests are valid measurements, Vermont schools seem to be pretty good.

Maybe even worth all that money, though Bolduc and Kessel never say that. Like good reporters, they just write the news.