NOTE: For reasons not worth explaining, for the rest of this week and next (and maybe the week after that) the News Guy has had to abandon his usual headquarters and is working out of what the previous national administration called an undisclosed location.

He is operating without a printer, adding to the danger of typographical errors creeping into the posts (those of a certain age really have to see words in print on paper to edit them). Also a cell-phone-only communications system might, as they say in the corporate world, negatively impact productivity.

Still, the goal is to keep on keeping on.

Vermont is chock full of public vocational schools.

According to a chart compiled by Public School Review, there are 15 career centers or technical centers (at least two are “career and technology” centers), distributed around the state so that no student lives  more than 25 or 30 miles from the nearest facility.

Some have been around for decades. Others, such as the North Country Career Center in Newport, are relatively new, and some of the others have larger student bodies than they had years ago. All in all, vocational education is a growing sector of the Vermont school scene.

No mystery here. Young people need jobs and employers need trained workers. It would seem to make sense, then, that the state is spending more money on vocational schools.

At any rate, Vermonters seem to think it makes sense because, unlike so many activities and innovations of public schools, the growth of career and technical centers has aroused almost no opposition. Rarely if  ever does anyone argue that classes in cosmetology or heavy equipment operation are “frills,” – the word some apply to music or art courses.

For which there appear to be at least two reasons. One is that vocational education is a good idea. The other is that a lot of the folks who often complain about school spending are the business men and women who are being subsidized by vocational schools.

There’s nothing new about this, nor, when one thinks about it, are the subsidies limited to vocational schools. Public education has always been, among other things, a subsidy for business. It’s a whole lot easier to train a new hire who can read, write, multiply and divide.

But vocational education is a more direct subsidy. Consider that North Country Career Center, where one area of concentration is “natural resources.” Students in this program learn “first Aide (sic), interpretation of maps and aerial photography, surveying, soils analysis and erosion control, tree physiology, chainsaw and tractor operation…entry-level work place skill…in harvesting techniques, timber measurement, and processing.

“Natural resources,” in this case sounds a lot like “logging,” a skill in some demand in the Northeast Kingdom. In fairness to the school, it is teaching environmentally responsible logging, with classes about how “our ecosystem has a direct effect on wildlife and recreational uses in our every-changing landscape.”

But clearly, here and elsewhere, the curriculum is designed specifically to prepare the students for jobs likely to be available, and to provide local employers with the skilled workers they need.  On a per-pupil basis, vocational education is expensive. Classes in heavy-equipment operation, auto mechanics, or home construction require more equipment and material even than science labs, much less English class. But employers who sometimes complain about the high cost of education rarely object when the taxpayers agree to pick up the cost of training future workers.

The point here is not to object to vocational education, which also benefits its students and the general public. It’s to demonstrate that one reason public schools cost a lot of money is that they are more than just schools.

Or, more accurately, that schools do more than just educate children. One of their other functions is to subsidize business by training their work force. Another is to serve as social welfare agencies.

This isn’t new, either. In America, at, least, schools have always played a role in protecting children – especially poor children – from dangerous neighborhoods and abusive or negligent parents. But, as with vocational schools, this function of the public schools seems to be growing, and it may be growing faster in Vermont than in many other states.

For instance, as mentioned in last Friday’s post, In and Out of Class, http://www.vermontnewsguy.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2392&message=1

Vermont schools commonly employ behavior specialists, sometimes called behavior interventionists or behaviorists, to work with students who act disruptively in school.

“Some are full-time professionals and some part-time para-professionals,” said Richard Boltax of the Education Department. Many, he said, are actually employees of community mental health centers. In some of those cases the schools compensate the mental health centers. But much of the cost is covered by federal and grants, and does not come out of the general school budget.

“Funds flow in from a lot of different places,” Boltax said. “In some cases, Medicaid may pay as much as 40 percent.”

Like school psychologists and other service providers, behavior specialists have been around for a few decades, Boltax said. But he did not dispute that there are probably more of them than in the past, and that educators think they are more important.

“Most educators will say, yes, the kids coming through doors today  are different,” he said. “Multiple factors that have entered the picture, from financial straits and poverty to technology and how it’s used appropriately and inappropriately.”

In some circles, these social services are also considered “frills,” or at least as benefits that might not be needed if old-fashioned discipline were imposed. But aside from the fact that it might be more expensive to expel students than to help them (an expelled student being far more likely to end up in prison), the culture would probably not permit that approach.

Nor, according to Boltax, would the law.

“What has changed in the last 50 years is that because of federal and state laws, schools have had greater responsibility of regulatory oversight to keep these kids connected,” he said. “There are more requirements not to usher these kids out the door.”

Like most educators, Boltax did not like describing schools as, among other things, social service agencies. But, he acknowledged, “We are in effect the mental health center, the local workout club, and we feed the kids. Education includes serving the whole child. You can’t start teaching a kid if he’s hungry.”

Whether Vermont schools provide more social services than schools in other states will be examined in a future post, as will a few other possible reasons why schools here cost so much.

Including this fundamental question: Are Vermont schools so expensive because they’re so good?

All together now folks, stressing the alliteration: Who will wind up the whiniest, wailingest. whimpering winner?

Peter the petulant?

Or Brian the bleater?

Well, at least each campaign has a descriptive if unofficial slogan: Ma! He’s saying mean things about me.

The latest round in the battle of the caviling, kvetching, candidates commenced Tuesday evening at the Vermont Public Radio debate when Republican Brian Dubie decided not to answer the first question of the evening so he could snivel about how Democrat Peter Shumlin had unfairly exploited Dubie’s earlier goof about how he would “target the most vulnerable” in order to balance the budget.

As noted in last Wednesday’s post [(Whose?) Pants on fire; scroll down], Dubie had a point. Anyone with half a brain in his/her head (presumably a description that includes Shumlin and his staff) should have known that Dubie was guilty merely of a slip of the tongue.

(Though in fairness to Shumlin, or, in the spirit of this post, in equal un-fairness to Shumlin, he has a point when he notes that Dubie’s actual policy positions, unencumbered by slippery tongue, do seem to target the most vulnerable).

Justified or not, Dubie’s decision to ignore a question about policy so that he could bellyache about what he considered an affront to his honor is not a good sign. It’s an indication that this campaign is going to be less about how the state will be governed than about…well, about itself.

Post-modern politics comes to Vermont.

But thanks to Shumlin as much as Dubie. Two days after the VPR debate, Shumlin held a press conference. To talk about public policy? To explain his position on a major issue?

Naah. That’s soooo Twentieth Century.

To whine about a Dubie television commercial.

Like Dubie’s earlier complaint, Shumlin’s gripe was somewhat justified. The ad – from the Republican Governors Association, not the Dubie campaign – cherry-picks its own version of ‘fact,’ to make a point – that “Shumlin has a history of supporting tax hike after tax hike,” which ignores the reality that he has also opposed tax hikes.

Still, holding a press conference solely to carp about what somebody said about you is possibly not the best use of the candidate’s time, and is certainly not the best use of the voter’s time.

Neither is challenging the other guy to a special tax-policy debate two days later and then accusing him of “ducking” the debate when he declines the invitation.

To repeat a point from last Monday’s post (Vermont Politics: Where Men Are (maybe not) Men) there is a decided lack of adulthood emanating from both camps.

Indeed, the campaign has reached such a parlous state, that in the (forlorn?) hope that it is not too late to fix things up, the News Guy is going to break precedent, speaking directly and exclusively to the two candidates. So will everybody else stop reading right now while the three of us schmooze.

Peter. Brian: Nobody gives a rat’s patootie who voted for what tax bill in 1991, 1997, or for that matter last year.

Nor are voters terribly concerned with whether you are being one hundred percent candid in describing your past statements or your opponent’s record. Voters assume you are not. Nobody is.  They want to know your plans for the future, not the details of your petty spats.

Got that? Ok, now for our one-at-a-time segment. Brian, you step back while we chat privately with your opponent.

Peter, you have voted to cut taxes, but you’ve also voted to raise them especially on the wealthy. That’s what Democrats do. They believe in enough progressive taxation to finance what they consider necessary government services. Last year, all you Vermont Democrats increased taxes (albeit minimally) on the wealthy as you cut them (minimally) for everyone else.  On balance, though, it was a tax increase to minimize the cuts in social programs. You were proud of it last year. Be proud of it now. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a Democrat? Or of running for governor?

OK, now you step back and give Brian his turn.

Brain, your case is a little more complicated, because you’re not over the gaffe problem. The “doctor from Taiwan” you scoffed about during the VPR debate (William Hsiao) is an American citizen who grew up in  Queens, which is part of New York City. He’s now at Harvard, which is down in Massachusetts. Also, the “quote” you quoted of Democratic Auditor candidate Doug Hoffer was not what he said.

But those are details. Like Peter, you have to acknowledge what you really are and stand up for it, rather than complaining all the time. As he is a fairly liberal Democrat, you are a fairly conservative Republican. You want to cut taxes, especially (though not exclusively) for the wealthy because they are (in your words) “the job creators.”

Like Peter’s support for a single-payer health care system, this proposal of yours entails political risk; it can be described as “trickle-down economics.” But it is your policy and you should advocate it. Keep making the case that it is good policy. There is a case to be made.

Oh, and Brian, you really gotta do something about this Corry Bliss guy, your campaign manager. In one of his recent missives, he replies to Shumlin’s claim that Act 60 “reduced property taxes for Vermonters by $64 million” in its first year, by saying that since 1996 “overall property taxes paid by Vermonters have increased from roughly $450 million to more than $900 million.”

Assuming the accuracy of that statement (and perhaps one should not), it says nothing – as in nada, rien de tout, gornish, bupkiss – to refute Shumlin’s claim.

If Bliss doesn’t know that, he’s not smart enough to manage a campaign for dog-catcher. If he does, well, he’d best stop calling Shumlin  “ethically challenged.”

OK, the rest of you can come back now. We’re done with the candidates, and in fact done for the day, save for these random political notes:

–At one point in the VPR debate, Shumlin talked of the “difference between me and he (Dubie).” Perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t say “between he and I,” but that’s small comfort. In addition to being adults, the candidates could be grammatical.

–Oh, and to that blogger at Green Mountain Daily: One “lies down with dogs.” To “lay down with dogs’ is something else altogether, not fit for discussion on a family web site.

–And what got into the usually sensible and perspicacious Jane Lindholm of VPR that she kept pressing the candidates on whether government “should be in the business of health care.”? It has been since 1798, when the U.S. Public Health Service was formed.

How come Vermont schools are so expensive?

Okay,  “expensive,” is a value-judgment term, not a neutral description.  Re-phrasing: How come Vermont schools spend $14, 421 per student, according to the New America Foundations Federal Education Budget Project, the seventh highest per pupil expenditure rank in the country.

The usual explanation for this state of affairs is that  the state is dominated by oodles of small towns (242 to be precise), most of which want their own school, so there are oodles of small schools and therefore oodles of sparsely-occupied classrooms and therefore oodles of teachers per student.

True. In fact, according to the latest information from the National Center for Education Statistics,, Vermont, with a total staff of 19,370 for 92,446 students (for the 2008-09 school year) has the lowest student/teacher ratio in the country – one teacher for every 10.5 kids.

Presto! An easy way to cut costs. Just get that ratio down to the level of the next lowest (North Dakota at 11.6), or  New Hampshire to the east (12.6), or better yet Massachusetts to the south (13.6), and Vermont schools could cut their professional staffs by hundreds if not thousands of teachers, thereby saving millions. Right.

Wrong. Looking a little deeper into the NCES report reveals a more complicated picture. Vermont schools, it seems, do not have the smallest classrooms in the country. On the elementary school level, 16 states – including all the other New England states and New York – have a lower student/teacher ratio than Vermont’s 17.9 students per teacher. Connecticut and Maine tie for the lowest ratio at 11.3 kids per teacher.

On the secondary school level, Vermont ranks closer to the top (or bottom), but still trails six states and is tied with Missouri at 8.5 students per teacher. Kansas, with 7.4 students per teacher, was lowest.

So who are all these teachers who are teaching in neither elementary school nor secondary school classrooms? Go to the next column of the IES study, the one for the ratio between students and “other instructional and student support staff.” In Vermont, there is one of them for every 15 kids in school.

That’s not just the lowest in the country. It’s the lowest in the country by some ginormous extent. The not-at-all-close runners-up are Maine (22.6) and New Hampshire (22.8). Most states have ratios in the 30s and 40s. California employs only one “other” staffer for every 63.7 of its school-children.

Now we’re getting somewhere. But we still have to figure out just who all these “other” staffers are and what they are doing.

According to Education Department spokesperson Jill Remick (via email), “the vast majority are paraprofessionals, many of whom are required for Vermont students’ Individual Education Plans… for students with disabilities.”

Presto again! There are thousands of these paraprofessionals, 4,448.24 according to an official document from the Education Department. (Obviously there are no such thing as .24 of a person; these are not individuals but “full time equivalents”). Reducing their numbers would save…well, some money, but probably not enough to have a significant impact on anyone’s taxes.

That’s because while there are a lot of these folks (almost all of them women), they don’t earn much – less than $17,000 a year. The state would have to eliminate a lot of those jobs to put a meaningful dent in the education budget.

Besides, the state may not want to eliminate many of those jobs. “The state” here does not mean the government, the Legislature, or the education establishment. It means the general public. The folks. You. Whereby hangs a tale.

One night back in the early 1980s, a political reporter (OK, this one) heading home to Washington from New Hampshire, where political reporters go from time to time, got delayed at Boston’s Logan Airport because of bad weather.

As it turned out, almost everyone was delayed, including a friendly acquaintance of the reporter’s, a prominent New Hampshire Republican. As two fellows stuck in an airport will now and then do, these two fellows repaired to one of the terminal’s beverage emporia for a libation, over which they talked shop.

The Republican was explaining – and praising – his state’s policy of low taxes, which he admitted required a relatively low level of public services. In a bit of mock self-deprecation, because he is not a hard-hearted person, he said, “if you have a handicapped child, don’t move to New Hampshire.”

No suggestion here that New Hampshire neglects handicapped children. But to hold down taxes, it has made the decision to provide somewhat less generous services to – among others – handicapped children and their families than do many other states.

Vermont, for decades, has gone the other way.

“Historically, we’re more inclusionary (in treating children with special needs) than other states,” said Richard Boltax, an Education Department consultant, noting that Vermont is more likely to include those children in the regular public schools rather than segregating them in special facilities. In this “mainstreaming” policy, many of the children have their own aide who spends most or all of the school day

That’s expensive. But it’s the choice the state made, and because of that choice Vermont is held up as a model by advocates for handicapped children.

It is also a choice Vermont is free to reconsider, and in fact is doing so.

“We’re cutting back a little,” Boltax said, noting that there are slightly fewer teachers aides than there were a few years ago. According to the Department, there were 18 fewer aides in Fiscal Year 2010 than the year before, and 148 fewer teachers engaged in “direct instructional services,” or regular classroom teachers as most people would call them.

Still, the total staff edged up by about 20 FTEs. That’s partly because not all of those “other” instructional and support staffers giving Vermont the lowest ratio in the country were paraprofessional aides. There were also school psychologists, curriculum coordinators, home-school coordinators, guidance counselors, and behavior specialists.

Behavior specialists?

Yup. There are quite a lot of them, and they’ve been around for a while, as have other education professionals who are doing something other than teaching kids.

There’s a reason for this. Schools are not just for teaching kids. There’s nothing new about that either. And there’s nothing new about people – including politicians and educators – trying not to notice it.

Elaboration sometime next week.