School Daze?
Monday, August 10th, 2009
It’s the middle of August, give or take a day or two, and you know what that means: Summer’s almost gone.
Say it Ain’t So.
OK, it ain’t so. Officially, summer will be around for seven more weeks, and even in Vermont, there is lots of nice, warm, weather to come before the snows and the temperatures fall.
(In fact, there is something perverse in the delight many Vermonters take in dreading September and October, which are the best months to be alive in these parts. But that’s a whole separate subject).
Still, there is this one irrefutable sign of summer’s impending end. Even before the first maple leaves turn red, the stores have started their ‘back to school’ advertising campaigns. So let’s forget the weather for now and concentrate on the schools. With the 2009-2010 school year on the horizon, the News Guy will devote most of the next several posts to examining the cost and quality of public education in Vermont.
They are both high. As has been noted here before, Vermont schools are: (a) good; and (b) expensive.
There is some dissent about (a), which will be dealt with in a later post. For the nonce, we will proceed on the assumption that all those test scores showing Vermont kids doing better than their peers in most other states mean what they seem to mean – that the schools are doing a pretty good job.
There is almost no dispute about (b). Not that the pillars of the education establishment, meaning essentially the School Boards Association and the Vermont branch of the National Education Association (that’s the teachers union) go out of their way to call attention to the high cost of schools. But when asked, they don’t out-and-out deny it, either.
One more observation before we get to the news. To state that “the schools are doing a pretty good job” is not to state that the schools are great or that they could not be better. But people have been arguing about how to make schools better at least since Plato put in his two cents, and for now we will not get into the philosophy-of-education battles.
Now here is the news: Vermont’s public education system is about to get a jolt. That education establishment may get roughed up a bit. When the fur has stopped flying, the result is likely to be either profound change in the way public education is run in this state or…well, or no change, possibly meaning reaction and heightened opposition to any change.
The agent of this impending struggle is Armando Vilaseca, the state’s relatively new (he took over late last year) Commissioner of Education. He thinks the “governance structure” of Vermont’s public school system is clumsy and inefficient, and he’s determined to change it.
Goal One: “Reduce the number of districts to between 50 and 60,” he said in an interview.
Considering that there are now 307 school boards in the state, with a school board member for every seven students, that’s not just change; it’s close to revolution.
But waitaminit. Didn’t Vilaseca’s predecessor, Richard Cate, make almost exactly the same proposal back in 2007? And didn’t he effectively get his head handed to him? So why should the result be any different this time?
The answers are yes, yes, and maybe they won’t be ,but maybe they will because Vilaseca seems to be politically shrewder than Cate. The former commissioner put his consolidation plan in writing (perhaps a mistake; it creates a specific target of attack), and then failed to follow up effectively.
Vilaseca is nothing if not persistent. He hasn’t been drumming up a lot of publicity for his campaign, which could explain why it’s flying just under the radar. But neither is he staying quiet. At almost every opportunity, educators, say, he keeps telling members of the education establishment what some of them don’t want to hear.
At one recent meeting with school board members, an educator said, Vilaseca said to the assemblage, “there are too many of you.”
School board members, not surprisingly, do not think there are too many of then, a fact which illustrates both the peculiarity and the strength of the obstacles Vilaseca faces.
Almost nobody serves on his or her school board for the money. Unlike most political squabbles, the vested interest opposing change in this one is not economic. Not for the school board members, who earn small stipends for their troubles. Not for the superintendents, most of whom would keep their jobs even with fewer districts. Not even for the teachers, because consolidation of districts doesn’t mean they’d be paid less. Even consolidation of schools, another possibility, wouldn’t cut their salaries, though it might cut their numbers.
The real opposition to Vilaseca’s “governance” agenda is Vermont’s tradition of…well, it’s called “local control,” but that’s not really what it is. After all, even if (and this is not under consideration) Vermont moved from 300 plus to 14 county districts, school governance would still be “local.” It just wouldn’t be town-centered.
Precisely what bothers many Vermonters, including school board members, who consider themselves (with some justification) to be honorable representatives of their towns and stewards of the schools. Their distrust of centralized authority is a real Vermont tradition, and in and of itself a healthy one.
“I understand that people are very concerned about the fabric of their community,” Vilaseca said. “At the same time, I understand that fiscally, we can’t continue on the way that we’re governed.”
The problem is that even if the number of school-children in the state were not declining (and it is, though not for too much longer), the present set-up is inefficient and expensive. It isn’t that the board members cost much, or even that their small support staffs over-burden the taxpayers.
But the price of town control is often the reverse economies of scale. Or the un-economies of scalelessness. Five small school districts, each buying its own books, pencils, computer systems and cafeteria lunches spend far more than the five of them would if they were one unified district buying greater quantities from the same vendors.
Furthermore, if the superintendants of the 60 supervisory unions only had to report to (and attend the meetings of) one school board, rather than schlepping around to five, six, or seven of them every couple of weeks, those superintendents might have the time and energy to…uhhh, you know, ..do their jobs.
Not to mention burn a lot less gasoline.
Vilaseca acknowledges that he lacks one important weapon in his fight.
“I’m missing one huge element,” he said. “I don’t have the numbers to support it when I say this will save us money. I need to have a good study, non-political, looking objectively at the whole system.”
The budget bill passed by the Legislature calls for a study of school governance, but it has to be done quickly, and only by elected officials. Not exactly what the commissioner has in mind.
So he has a ways to go, and of course he may not get there. The School Boards Association is opposed to his consolidation plan. But the supervisory union officials are not. As for the teachers union, Vermont NEA spokesman Darren Allen said that while the union worries that talk of consolidation can be “used as a code to fire teachers,” it has “consistently said this is a conversation which should be had.”
The lure of the status quo is always strong. So far, there is little indication that most Vermonters are unwilling to pay the high cost of public education in Vermont. What appeared to be a rather clumsy effort by Gov. Jim Douglas to gin up a taxpayers revolt against school spending earlier this year was a big flop.
But the costs keep going up, and the difference now may be that the state has an Education Commissioner, who does not report to the governor or use the governor’s anti-teacher, anti-school, rhetoric, but who won’t stop saying that there are too many school boards, even when he’s talking to the school boards.
