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?

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.

School starts this week (where it didn’t already start), as does – despite this year’s weird delay – Vermont’s general election campaign.

The two are related.

Whether they should be is a matter of legitimate disagreement. Some argue that education should not be “politicized.” Perhaps not. But it always has been and always will be, if only (and not only) because education accounts for more state and local tax dollars than any other function of government.

And this year, there’s little doubt that Republican Brian Dubie and either Democrat, Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine, will have very different ideas about schools and how to pay for them.

So the News Guy today begins a series of several connected (though not consecutive) posts about Vermont schools – what’s wrong with them and what’s right; how much they cost and how they’re financed; what the candidates are saying about them.

Consider this post a general introduction, but one that will pose some impolite if not downright insolent questions, starting with this one: is the whole “school reform” movement embraced by both liberals and conservatives – the one calling for more transparency, accountability, and innovation – a lot of hooey?

Especially, perhaps, in Vermont, where according to the standards by which American schools are judged, the schools are quite good.

Some qualification: That question is a question, not an allegation or even a suggestion. Nor should it imply opposition to transparency, accountability or innovation, just some doubts about how those values are applied to American public schools.

And those italicized words two paragraphs above are emphasized because there is a plausible case to be made that schools in all 50 states aren’t very good, that American public education has become so preoccupied by process that it does not adequately transmit knowledge. (To be examined in a future post).

Though it received little attention, the State Board of Education on August 17 voted to adopt “Common Core State Standards” in math and English, actually a national standard promoted by the U.S. Department of Education, precisely the kind of step urged by “school reform” advocates.

At first glance, at least, this policy might be a step toward transmitting more knowledge. But as the Board acknowledged this transition “will certainly come with cost,” as schools and the State Education Department junk their old curriculum programs and the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) testing they have been using for years.

How much cost? The board didn’t say. But with the state likely to cut back on its share of school funding, any cost increase seems likely to fall on property taxes.

That’s one reason to be wary of school reform, and not the only one in Vermont. Earlier this summer, to qualify for $1.2 million in federal aid, the Burlington school district fired Joyce Irvine as principal of the Integrated Arts Academy. By almost all accounts Irvine was an excellent principal, but the school was “failing,” as measured by test scores, and the federal rules required a rough response – such as firing the principal – as a condition of more aid.

But the school did not “fail” because Irvine was a bad principal. It “failed” because it is chock full of children from poor families and immigrant children who do not speak English. Of course those kids do poorly in standardized tests.

There is only one word to describe Irvine’s dismissal: stupid. Not that the Burlington school officials were stupid; they did what they had to do to get the money they thought they needed. The whole structure is stupid, raising an interesting question: is school reform going to teach children that stupidity is the path to success?

None of this means that schools could not and should not be better, nor that, in Vermont, they might be cheaper. But it does raise questions about the wisdom (lack of stupidity?) of some of the “school reform” movement’s specific proposals.

One pet idea of some school reformers can be ignored– vouchers, or “school choice” as its promoters prefer, under which all parents would get vouchers to send their children to any public, private, or parochial school. This will not happen. It has fervent and well-financed devotees. But it is dead.

Who says? The American people. Voucher plans were put to public referenda in ten locations, including such large states as California and Michigan, in the 1990s. The results were clear. Even though in every case the early polls predicted easy approval, voters rejected all ten by large margins.

No, the pro-voucher side was not outspent. Instead the voters learned something during the campaigns. What they learned was that in the final analysis the “choice” (Americans love choice, which explains those early poll results) lies not with the parents or children, but with the private schools that taxpayer-funded vouchers would support. If it is not discriminating on the basis of race, religion, sex (or, in some states, sexual orientation), a private school may accept or reject any applicant for any reason or for none at all.

With few exceptions, the voucher advocates know they’ve lost. That’s why they’ve retreated to their drop-back position, charter schools. These are public schools operated by private (including for-profit) entities which are exempt from the some of the restrictions and requirements applied to conventional public schools.

Charter schools have not been rejected by the public. Furthermore, some of them seem to be quite good.

But others are quite bad, and on balance standardized tests reveal no convincing evidence that charter schools are any better than regular public schools. A report last year by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)found that “a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half…have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”

In general, studies have found that students who benefit most from charter schools are poor, minority, children whose alternative is an inner-city school, often in a troubled neighborhood. There are, for all practical purposes, no such schools in Vermont. Still, education reformers recommend establishing charter schools around the state.

A good idea? Or an effort to fix something that ain’t broken?

One more observation before ending this introductory post, an observation for which no special expertise about education is needed. If improving schools is the object, making war on the teachers makes no sense.

This does not mean that teachers or their union should be coddled or granted every wish. The National Education Association is a union like any other. It always asks for more than it can or should (or knows it will) get. In this whiney society, teachers tend to be whinier than most, their closest competitors being building contractors, hunters, and farmers, the last of whom have somewhat more justification for their complaints.

Still teachers are  the employees of the entire community, and dissing your employees is not the way to get the most out of them. Like firing a good principal, it’s just plain stupid.

Yet some folks seem to get their jollies by bashing the teaching profession. One wonders where (or if) they went to school.