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.

But first, some correction and amplification:

Until about 1:15 PM Friday, readers of Friday’s post may have understood that the State Senate was toying with the idea of diverting $6.89, otherwise known as six dollars and eighty-nine cents, from one fund to another.

Presumably most readers of this web site are alert, more alert in this case than is, at least sometimes, the writer of this web site, and understood that what the meant was $6.89 million.

But what’s few zeros among friends? And thanks to the readers who noted the omission.

Also, Sen. Ann Cummings is chair of the Senate Finance committee, not, as Friday’s post said (again, until corrected), the Appropriations Committee. Susan Bartlett is Appropes chair.

Something else was absent from Friday’s post because it was not clear on Thursday, at least not to the News Guy, and apparently not to many legislators. That $10 million to be raised by considering some capital assets – expensive houses, stocks and bonds, etc. – when applying the “income sensitivity” provision on the statewide school property tax is not slated to go into the Education Fund.

Instead, for the first time, money from the school property tax would go into the General Fund.

Like any policy change, this one might be defensible, or even wise. But it does stretch if not violate the understanding that the school property tax would be used to support the schools, not the rest of state government. It’s only $10 million, but when it comes to taxes, experience shows that the first exception is rarely the last.

Now, to today’s main order of business, also inspired by readers who have communicated by email, old-fashioned phone calls, and even older-fashioned personal conversations (you may remember them; the kind where the conversers are actually in the same place at the same time).

The question: why, right after the entire United State Government adopts a comprehensive change in the health care financing system, is the Vermont Legislature passing a bill to study comprehensive change in the state’s health care system?

Good question, because it can be answered with one word: politics.

That’s a description, not a condemnation. Politics, the method by which free people govern themselves, is not a pejorative. It’s a reality.

The political reality against which lawmakers have based their political decision to pass S.88 http://www.leg.state.vt.us/docs/2010/bills/Senate/S-088.pdf (in separate House and Senate versions that have yet to be resolved) is that Vermont is home to a politically significant  minority of voters who are convinced of the superiority of a ‘single-payer’ health care financing system—basically Medicare for everyone.

No, that was an understatement. These folks are not merely convinced of the superiority of a single payer system; they are committed to such a system with a fervor approaching that of a religious zealot’s  devotion to his faith, with comparable intolerance toward dissent.

This too is description not (except for the intolerance part) condemnation. Clearly, there is a case to be made for a single-payer system. It is how most civilized (prosperous, democratic) countries finance health care. In those countries, everyone is covered, they live longer, healthier lives than Americans, and it’s all done for a lot less money per person.

The focus here today. Though, is not on the policy, but on the politics, the first requirement of which is, in the words of  Richard J. Daley to “know how to count,” raising the question of how big is this constituency of single-payer enthusiasts.

Not very. Nobody has polled on the matter, but we are almost surely talking about less than 10 percent of the adult Vermont population, though probably more than five percent. For purposes of discussion, then, let’s say seven percent, or about 20,000 voters.

Ah, but it’s a strategically positioned seven percent. Just about every one of them identifies with either the Democratic or the Progressive Parties. Furthermore, just about every man (and woman)-jack of them will vote. Unless the Progressive Party puts up its own candidate for governor, most of them will vote in the Democratic primary in August. In what is likely to be a low-turnout election, this faction will make far more than seven percent. It could come close to a majority.

Obviously, then, two outcomes Democrats – and especially Democratic candidates for governor — want to avoid are: (1) Displeasing these primary voters and (2) Annoying the Progressives so much that they decide to find a gubernatorial candidate of their own, who would siphon off more votes from the Democratic contender than from Republican, Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie. Months ago the Progs declared that Democratic support for a single-payer health care system was among their sina qua nons for staying out of the race.

So it should be no surprise that Sen. Doug Racine, one of the five Democrats running for governor, introduced the bill to engage a consultant to study health care reform, with specific directions to look into the single-payer option. No surprise either that few Democrats opposed it.

There is no suggestion here of insincerity or cynicism on the part of Racine or the other Democrats. Racine has long been a single-payer proponent. He no doubt thinks it would benefit Vermont, and he could be right.

(Or not. If there is a strong case for the entire nation to adopt a single-payer system, there is an equally strong case for a single state to avoid it, for reasons to be discussed in another post soon).

Nor is the earnestness of other Democrats and Progressives in the Legislature open to doubt. Judging from a couple of overheard conversations outside the second floor cafeteria in the Statehouse the other day, some of them are so solemn and intense about the subject that they may have lost touch with reality.

But sincerity and political self-interest are not mutually exclusive, and there seems little doubt that whatever else they may be doing, the Democrats are pandering to one of their core constituencies. Absent that intense minority of single-payer enthusiasts, this bill might never have come before the Legislature.

Again, this is observation, not condemnation. All political factions pander to constituencies. Gov. Jim Douglas, for instance,, has of late been pandering to the home builders and the all-terrain vehicle riders. Politicians not only have to pander, but up to a point they should. It’s part of democracy.

The point at which they should not pander, of course, is reached when the interest of the pandered-to constituency is actually contrary to the public interest. But that does not seem to be the case here. The worst that can be said about this consultant study is that it will spend $250,000 that may not have to be spent. As unnecessary expenditure, this is small potatoes, and for a function likely to be more productive than the comparable expenditure on the pointless pornography-detecting software the Douglas Administration is in the process of installing on state computer systems.

Besides, the process might do some good. The consulting firm is likely to look at the possibility of replacing the fee-for-service method of paying doctors. Many health care economists consider fee-for-service second only to the high price of prescription drugs as an explanation for why health care is so much more expensive in the U.S. than elsewhere.

But the consultant report will not pave the way for Vermont to adopt a single-payer health care system. That’s because Vermont, on its own, is not going to adopt such a system, not now, and possibly not ever. Federal law forbids it until at least 2017, and while Congress could theoretically grant the state a waiver from the prohibition, the prudent Vermonter would be advised neither to hold his/her breath nor to bet next month’s mortgage payment on that outcome.

The real – if not, it should be stressed, the intended — purpose of this legislation is not to change Vermont’s health care system. It is to send a signal to a small but potent constituency. It seems to have worked.

The News Guy is going to (sort of) violate his usual policy today to (sort of) take a position on a bill before the Legislature.

As regular readers know, what the computer nerds call the default position of this site is to inform and to analyze, not to advocate or oppose. There is no shortage of advocates and opponents, hence no need to add to their number.

Besides, to the reporter, casting the same jaundiced eye on advocates and opponents is what comes naturally; joining either side does not.

Worse, in this case, the joining, however conditional, leaves the News Guy vulnerable to accusations of acting out of self-interest. The accusation would not entirely without foundation. The case about to be made here is being made out of the conviction that it is in the interest of the general public. But there is no doubt that it is in the interest of the news business and its practitioners, all of whom have a vested interest in public information being…well, public. That’s why some of them – including the publisher of the Rutland Herald and Barre/Montpelier Times Argus and the editorial page of the Burlington Free-Press — have come out in opposition to H 331, which is likely to get final approval from the Vermont House of Representatives Tuesday.

This post is going to stop just short of outright opposition. The bill, which would allow big-money contributions to the State College system and the University of Vermont to remain anonymous, is complex. It purports to have protections against the most likely abuses. Corporations would not be allowed make anonymous donations, not would individuals doing business with the colleges or UVM.

But just who would decide whether a donor was doing such business seems absent from the legislation, as does how and through what agency the donation would be either returned or revealed.

It is probably true that the colleges and UVM would raise a little less money if all donations of $10,000 or more were a matter of public record. Believe it or not, some folks don’t want their generosity known. A Free Press article last month quoted UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera explaining, “some do so out of humility. Some wish to avoid unwanted solicitation for donations. And, increasingly, donors wish to maintain anonymity to protect the privacy and personal safety of themselves and their families.”

Well, no doubt all that happens. But you know what else happens? A lot more than any of that other stuff?

People hide what they’re doing because they have something to hide. They keep their names from the public because they don’t want the public to know what they are doing. And they don’t want the public to know what they’re doing because they think the public will disapprove. The public might think that the big-money donors are being at least as selfish as generous; that they have an angle; that some of those gifts come with a price.

The public will so think because it is true, often enough if not usually. Any time rich and powerful people (although the rule may also apply to poor and weak people) are allowed to act in secret, some of them will act in their own interest, not the public’s.

Before the lawmakers vote Tuesday, they might take a look at the impacts of anonymous donations at the University of Oregon and the University of Louisville.

……..

The Oregon story is easily available at the News Guy’s occasional collaborator, the news web site VT digger, in a story by Donald M. Kreis about the new $200 million basketball arena and nearby 40,000-square-foot tutoring center for athletes on the campus in Eugene.

There’s no anonymity about the Knight Arena, named for Phil Knight, the head of the Nike shoe empire, and a big contributor to the university. But University officials are not revealing the cost of the other building, the Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, or who is financing it.

“When donors call the shots…outside the normal requirements of public scrutiny, Kreis warned, athletic boosterism can too often become (a university’s) driving strategic priority.”
The University of Louisville is the alma mater of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is the Senate Minority Leader, and is now home to the McConnell Center for Political Leadership.

Among the Center’s contributors, whose names were kept secret at first, was at least one company that benefitted from “earmarks” McConnell shepherded through Congress, and others with close ties to the senator. As revealed by the web site of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, When the Louisville Courier-Journal sued to get the names of the donors, the Kentucky Supreme Court allowed the University to maintain the anonymity of those who had already contributed, but not of future donors, who, the court noted “may not simply wish to conceal their identities, but rather may wish to conceal the true purposes of their donation.”

Because the secrecy of corporate donations would not be protected by the Vermont bill, the situations are hardly identical. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be those who “wish to conceal the true purposes of their donation.”

It isn’t even necessary to do business with a university to corrupt it. Consider the possibility that the wealthy head of a pharmaceutical or biomedical company makes a secret donation to UVM to finance a health research center. Having put up the money, he has some say in who runs and staffs the center. The director and the researchers will know who buttered their bread, even if the public does not.

What this health care mogul might have bought himself is a study that concludes that the new product his company is about to take to market is a safe and efficacious cure for fallen arches, lower back pain and unrequited love, when a panel of unbiased doctors might have found it as helpful as soda pop. Neither the donor nor his company would have done a shred of business with the University.

Whoever doubts such a thing can happen is invited to Google “medical research fraud,” and prepare for several hours of fascinating reading. And health research is one of the “spires of excellence” on which UVM is planning to concentrate as it rearranges itself for the future.

Members of the House ought take these dangers into consideration. And they ought not comfort themselves by the assurance nothing like that can happen here.

Absent public access and open records, it can happen anywhere

The most important things that happened on Town Meeting Day were the things that did not happen.

Actually, not much happened. With the exception of that vote about how Burlington votes (tune in Monday for an examination of the Burlington brouhahas), the voters of Vermont last week endorsed: (1) The status quo; (2) the love of money (part of the status quo); and (3) their public schools, even if those schools cost some of that money they love.

So Mayor Mary Hooper of Montpelier presided over an administration that got bilked out of 400 grand. She gets re-elected anyway. So Coventry Town Clerk Cynthia Diaz has been charged with income tax evasion. Leave that to the feds, said the voters of Coventry, re-electing Diaz by a 3-1 margin.

Roughly the same margin by which voters in neighboring Lowell endorsed a wind power project in their town, either because they are committed to renewable energy or because the wind company will lower their tax bills, or both.

But peanuts compared with the almost 5-1 margin by which voters in Island Pond approved of selling the state airport in town to make way for a pellet plant that could provide more than 30 jobs. Both the Lowell and the Island pond votes are advisory, and do not officially decide either issue.

But the main thing that did not happen was a “taxpayers revolt” against school spending. Au contraire, as they say just north of here, despite the Great Recession, despite objections from no less than Gov. Jim Douglas that the current school financing system was “broken” and “twisted,” despite the tax commissioner’s official advice to raise the property tax rate and warnings that more tax hikes are in store, the voters overwhelmingly supported the school budgets.

According to the Wednesday afternoon count by the Vermont Superintendents Association, 228 budgets were approved as submitted, four passed after reductions from the town meeting floor, three were  postponed, and only 14 were defeated.

It was the smallest number of rejections since 2004.

Furthermore, most of the approvals were by large margins, while several of the rejections were by razor-thin majorities.

Always beware of over-interpretation. The results do not mean that voters are indifferent to their tax bills, or to the cost of public education. One reason the budgets were approved was that they didn’t go up much, if at all. Though final figures are not in, Brad James, the Education Finance Manager for the Education Department said that, “as of 23-Feb, we had received 261 proposed budgets out of roughly 280.” Based on those districts, James said, “overall budget increase for the State was up (one half of one percent).”

Furthermore, said James (via email), “education spending, which is the lion’s share of the Education Fund and is the figure that drives tax rates for individual districts, is down (by one tenth of one percent).”

In other words, all those warnings from Douglas, Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca, and others had an impact. So did the Recession. As a result, said John Nelson of the State School Boards Association, local boards made a major effort “to keep budgets in line.”

Board members knew that “people in their communities weren’t getting raises and were being laid off,” Nelson said, so understood that spending would have to be restrained “ if they were going to get support for budgets.”

But also beware under-interpretation. The budget votes prove that the current school finance system is not “broken.” It is not perfect. But no school finance system is, not in any state. Vermont’s present system – Act 60 of 1997 as amended by Act 68 in 2003 – works. The schools function. They are, according to the (possibly flawed) standards by which Americans judge their schools, rather good.

They are also rather expensive. But obviously they are not too expensive. According to whom? According to the people who pay for them. If those people thought the schools were too expensive, many more budgets would have been rejected.

In a sense, the effectiveness of the criticism from Douglas et al only prove that the system works. Those criticisms are part of the system. The complaints of politicians (including their hyperbole) are part of any school finance system. Rhetoric, however overblown, neither can nor should be eliminated from any public policy process.

Less certain, but potentially more significant is the possibility that this year’s hold-the-line school budgets signal the start of a long-term spending moderation resulting from declining enrollment.

For years, one theme of the school spending critics has been that costs kept going up, and the number of teachers and teachers aides kept rising, even as the number of pupils fell by more than 10 percent in the last decade or so.

On the surface, not an unreasonable objection. Below the surface, matters get more complicated. A kindergarten-through-sixth grade school with 100 students, evenly distributed among its seven grades, has about 14 kids per class. If a few years later it has only 90 students, still evenly distributed, it can’t get rid of a teacher by combining classes unless educators (and parents) are willing to accept 24-pupil classes, which most educators consider much too big, especially in the lower grades.

So cutting staff in response to falling enrollment – without sacrificing quality – takes time. As Jeff Francis of the Superintendent’s Association said, “you don’t ever decrease capacity at the same rate that you increase it.”

But as enrollment continues to decline, more schools may be seeing an opportunity to reduce staff. There has been a small decline in the number of teachers over the last few years. A few very small schools have closed their doors entirely. There is more talk, encouraged by Commissioner Vilaseca,  of consolidation of schools, districts, and supervisory unions, highlighted on Town Meeting Day by the decision to merge four Addison County districts into one.

All small steps, and perhaps reversible. Brad James at the Education Department said he thought the poor economy “moved ahead the time when some boards planned on reducing staff due to declining enrollments,” while acknowledging that this was “merely a supposition.”

But John Nelson of the School Boards Association said he thought the falling school population was “beginning to kick in,” and that this year’s budget “reflected that there is a response from the school boards.”

Even the teachers union – the Vermont-NEA – acknowledged that there might be fewer teachers in the state’s schools a few years from now. Darren Allen, the union’s spokesman, said that while obviously the NEA did not want to lose members, “if there aren’t the kids to teach, then there aren’t the kids to teach.”

It would take at least another year or two of little or no school spending increases to determine whether this year’s moderation was a fluke,\ or the start of a long-term trend. But if it is not a fluke, it is a political tectonic plate shift. Public schools are the state’s biggest expense. The steady increase in school spending has been a contentious issue both in the Legislature and for local school boards. If that increase really abates as long as school enrollment drops (which won’t be forever), pressure on officials and policy-makers would substantially ease.

Not that schools won’t continue to be a political issue. They will still spend a lot of money. Some of the cuts the boards have made arguably lower the quality of education, so when the economy improves, educators may well seek more funds, perhaps arousing opposition. And some Vermonters don’t like Act 60 because it does what it was designed to do – make school taxes and (to a lesser extent) school spending, more equitable among richer and poorer districts.

For at least another year, though, the politicians who try to argue that Vermont’s public education sky is falling don’t have much of an argument. This week, the sky stayed right up there where it belongs.

BAGS

To illustrate how difficult it is likely to be to reduce the cost of public education in Vermont without also reducing the quality of same, please allow a local example or two.

These postings come to you from Barton, up in the Northeast Kingdom, where 153 children attend the Barton Academy and Grade School, not surprisingly referred to as BAGS by some, a standard kindergarten-through-eighth grade school.

For years, the school employed a professional, highly regarded school librarian, and the pupils had regular access to the library, where they could look up information, browse the shelves, get help selecting a book.

At the end of the last school year, she retired. To save money, the school decided not to replace her, at least for this year. Instead, the head of the computer room would do double duty at the library. By all accounts, she’s doing a great job. She’s capable, energetic, dedicated.

But she’s not a librarian. And because she has other duties, the pupils don’t have quite as much access to or guidance in the library as they did last year, and for many years before.

The decision not to replace the librarian was reasonable. That’s one less FTE (full-time equivalent) employee whose salary and benefits have to be financed by the taxpayers. In a tight economy, with school officials reluctant (as they should be) to raise taxes, leaving that position vacant is, at least debatably, the right choice.

But here is what is not debatable: A school with a fully functioning library presided over by a professional librarian is better than a school without them. It isn’t that BAGS isn’t a good school. Principal George Vanna said the library is “not boarded up” and is open almost as much as it was last year. The younger pupils still get their story hours. But Vanna also acknowledged that he’d rather have a librarian, even if only a part-timer. Maybe next year, he said.

In other words, saving money reduced educational quality. Perhaps not by much. Perhaps saving the money justified the reduction. But reduction it was.

As it almost was up the road at Lake Region High School, where the board decided to save money by cutting both the music program and the Spanish language program from full-time to half-time.

Again, a decision quite reasonable under the circumstances. But – again – a school with full-time music and Spanish instruction is better than a school with half-time music and Spanish instruction. Better enough to be worth the $68,000 needed to keep both programs fully functioning? Who knows? Either way, Lake Region would be a slightly worse school after the cuts (which were partially rescinded earlier this week after a public outcry; the board will try to keep both programs full-time).

The point here is not to express opposition to any of these cutbacks. In fact, it’s hard to see how anyone who served on a school board wouldn’t at least seriously consider approving those cost-saving steps. Whether those programs were worth the money is a legitimate question. But there is no question at all that they were worth something. So eliminating, reducing, or diluting them eliminates, reduces, or dilutes…something, a something which has value.

A lesson worth remembering as Vermont thinks about holding down school spending. In addition to Gov. Jim Douglas’s renewed call to “freeze” school budgets (not much more likely to be heeded than last year), Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca is campaigning to reduce the number of supervisory unions and school districts, and even lots of Democrats speak openly about urging schools to consolidate. In Montpelier, at least, the established point of view seems to be that, in the current Washington health care jargon, something has to be done to “bend the curve” on school spending.

Making it all the more important to be wary of the commonly-heard claim by partisans on all sides that it is possible to cut costs without cutting quality. In theory, it may be. In practice, as the above examples demonstrate, it’s somewhere between hard and impossible.

Besides, some of the cost-cutting steps might not cut costs all that much. Vilaseca recently wrote of his supervisory union consolidation plan that, “my staff and I estimate this would save the state several million dollars a year.”

Kind of vague. Asked for elaboration, Education Department spokesperson Jill Remick supplied a Department study indicating that consolidation in Essex could save more than $600,000, or almost 25 percent, in personnel costs.

To put all this in some perspective, former Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Mathis, who is skeptical about most of the cost-cutting proposals, pointed out (and Education Department statistics confirmed) that only 2.4 percent of the roughly $1.3 billion Vermont spends on public education (not including federal aid) goes to these central administration expenses.

“Let’s say we combined and saved one third of the money,” he said. “That’s less than one percent.”

Not a compelling case against consolidation. Less than one percent of $1.3 billion can be several million bucks. But Mathis’s larger point has merit. Almost everyone agrees that the big driver of school costs is the number of paid employees in and around the classroom, not the central offices. For several reasons (which will be examined in subsequent posts) Vermont has a lot them – teachers, teaching aides, counselors, librarians, technologists. The quickest way – if not the only way – to “bend the curve” of school spending is to have fewer of these educators.

Raising the threat of worse schools. A little-mentioned factor in this discussion is the real question of whether that “established point of view” in Montpelier is all that established among the electorate. Last year there was no “taxpayers revolt” against school spending at town and school meetings, as relatively few school budgets were rejected. With the lingering recession, it would be no surprise if more were defeated this year even though, in response to falling enrollments, schools around the state are cutting back.

Nobody likes high property taxes, but those were not a bunch of raging liberals who pressured the Lake Region School Board (raging liberals are not plentiful in this precinct) to put back the money for Spanish and music classes. A few made clear that if it took higher taxes to preserve today’s level of educational quality, then taxes should be higher.

Quite possible a minority outlook. But nobody’s really taken a poll on the matter, and there was the comment not long ago by one man whose politics are relatively centrist and who has no children in the public schools. When someone pointed out that Vermont spends a lot of money on education, he asked, “where else should we spend a lot of money?”,

Over at the Vermont Tiger web site, University of Vermont economics professor Art Woolf had some kind words for the News Guy’s Sept 14 post about possible threats to free speech in UVM’s proposed (and subsequently altered) “solicitations policy” along with an interesting suggestion.

“UVM has some other free speech issues,” Woolf noted, citing a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) which on its green-yellow-red scale rates UVM a yellow, meaning there are some threats to free speech on campus.

But that’s better, from FIRE’s perspective, than Bennington and Middlebury Colleges, both of whom are rated red. Middlebury, in fact, won the organization’s “speech code of the month” rank last May because of its policy on political demonstrations.

As FIRE’s officials acknowledge, no one has lately complained about not being able to speak his or her piece at UVM, Middlebury, or Bennington (the only Vermont schools FIRE deals with). FIRE presents no tangible cases of alleged free speech repression at any of the Vermont campuses.

Neither, it seems, does anybody else. At the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, director Allen Gilbert said that when an anti-harassment law applying to higher education was passed in 2004, “we worried that someday there would be a case that would challenge the constitutionality were the law applied in certain ways.”

But apparently it has not been so applied, at least not so that anybody has complained.

Will Creeley, FIRE’s Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, acknowledged that the ratings are based on “the language in (a college’s) policy, not any application of the policy… (because ) the mere existence of a flawed policy chills speech on campus.”

As assertions go, this can’t be confirmed. But then it can’t be refuted, either, and it seems plausible.

Take the foundation of that May “award” FIRE bestowed on Middlebury. In its policy governing student demonstrations, the College asserts that, “student organizations bear full responsibility for arranging and financing any Department of Public Safety provisions that may be necessary in connection with controversial speakers.”

FIRE claims that this policy “allows fellow students to exercise a ‘heckler’s veto’ over unpopular speech by threatening disruptive protests, thus requiring additional security and, accordingly, additional—and possibly prohibitive—costs.”

On its face, that objection seems reasonable (and Middlebury officials chose not to respond). Suppose a left-wing student organization plans a demonstration. If the conservatives on campus make it known that they intend to be out in force, holding up their own signs and chanting their own slogans, the leftist group would have to put up the money to pay for extra police protection, money it probably does not have. So the demonstration gets called off.

There are also potential problems with the “harassment” policies of the colleges, designed to protect students against racial, ethnic, or gender-based slurs.

The UVM policy defines harassment as any behavior, including “verbal” behavior (meaning speech), “that has the purpose or effect of objectively and substantially undermining and detracting from or interfering with a student’s educational performance or access to school resources or creating an objectively intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

That leaves a lot open to interpretation, even though the last eight words are taken directly from statute and from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. But who “objectively” determines which spoken or written words might create “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

It isn’t that FIRE objects to all college rules. Free speech does not confer the power to hold a loud demonstration all night, or outside the exam room. Colleges, Creeley said, may impose “reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.” And professors can largely set the speech rules for their own classes.

Restrictions against racial, ethnic, and sexual harassment are also broadly acceptable – even desirable – when it is clear that they govern only person-on-person contact. A university may discipline a student who walks up to another and insults him because of his race, abuses her for being female, or maliciously teases him for being gay.

But what about speech that might insult some students even if it is not directed at them? What about speech that offends many students simply because it expresses views the find abhorrent?

According to FIRE, some colleges are clamping down on that kind of speech, too: at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where authorities would not allow conservative students to protest affirmative action or President Obama’s economic policies; at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) where a student employee “was found guilty of racial harassment for merely reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during his work breaks.”

“When you give administrators wide berth to punish speech merely because it is disagreeable or uncivil, that discretion will be abused,” Creeley said. “It doesn’t matter if it hasn’t happened yet.”

There have been no reports of similar occurrences in Vermont. But it isn’t difficult to envision the possibilities. Suppose that, in class, a student says that the political power of Jewish organizations restrains pubic discussion of the Mideast, or that affirmative action programs lead to accepting unqualified minority students, or that the Abenaki should not get full tribal recognition because that might lead to gambling casinos in Vermont.

Reasonable public policy statements all. But with today’s sometimes supercharged sensitivity, a Jewish, an African-American, or an Abenaki student might complain to the professor that he or she was so offended that his or her “education performance” was undermined, and that the statements established an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

The professor’s response to the offended student should be: “You’re offended? Then be offended. Living in a free society almost guarantees that we’re all going to be offended from time to time. Deal with it” But some professors, especially those still un-tenured, might wonder whether higher-ups would support this response.

That doesn’t happen, said Tom Gustafson, UVM’s Vice President for Student and Campus Life. The complaints that come to university authorities, he said, are more likely to occur when a professor “has been singling out a student who might be African-American, saying, ‘we need the African-American perspective,’ and after awhile the student says, ‘come on, I’m just here as a student.’”

But Creeley argued that the harassment rules can stifle student expression before it is expressed.

“When students are left to guess whether their speech is running afoul (of the rules) it’s rational for them to self-censor rather than risk punishment,” he said.

In the view of some students and faculty, the real “harassment” comes in the form of continual rule changes that seem designed to deter free expression.

“It’s not so much overt restriction as much as the passage of policies that require one to officially schedule space, indoors and outdoors, for setting up a table, holding a speak-out etc.,” wrote UVM English professor Nancy Welch in an email.

Only a “recognized organization” can schedule space, she said, so if I was part of (an unofficial) faculty group…and we wanted to have a table in the Davis Center or outside the library, we could not.”

The intricate rules and regulations imposed by Vermont’s colleges and universities to enhance civility seem to be breeding as much resentment, and perhaps stifling speech. Not to mention that they present examples of the kind of pretentious, turgid prose that (one assumes) the better teachers in the English Department strive to prevent.

Perhaps the state’s institutions of higher learning would be better off with a short, simple, statement banning overt, one-on-one incivility of all kinds, and then simply depending on the old rule that the best (and perhaps the only Constitutional) remedy for narrow-minded, hateful, and ignorant speech is…more speech.

The University of Vermont’s latest proposed re-invention of itself — what it calls its “Spires of Excellence” vision – is complicated, a bit convoluted, and, somewhat controversial.

One might think it’s hard to voice harsh opposition to a proposal that is not yet fully formed, not to mention one that so far has been described in the blandest of bureaucratese, as for example: “will build to the highest levels feasible for the area the capacity to secure external, often highly-competitive, funding for the long-term sustainability of the program, including grants for national research centers…that address critical societal issues…)

Still, the “Transdisciplinary Research Initiative” recently unveiled by UVM has aroused some opposition from the faculty, especially those who think their piece of the pie may shrink.

Which is not to say that the dissent is inspired merely by turf-protection. It is also inspired by the fact that college professors are genetically predisposed to complain.

The above is description, not condemnation. First of all, turf-protection is the default reaction everywhere – in academia, government, business, religion, and, in all probability, the Kiwanis Club. Furthermore, nobody – at least nobody who has a good gig – likes change.

Besides, scholars should be “aginners.” Like reporters, their first reaction to every new proposal should be to look at what may be wrong with it. It’s the lower-class version of what literary critic Lesley Fiedler called the novelist’s duty to shout “No, in thunder,” to respectable social norms.

Essentially, what UVM’s administration wants to do is concentrate on a few areas that transcend the customary academic subject departments in an effort to make the university a leader in selected fields. The chosen “spires” are biological science, complex systems, culture and society, environment, food systems, neurosciences, policy studies, and public health.

As Domenico Grasso, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school, put it “If we want to truly distinguish ourselves and be considered among the very best, we have to be strategic and focused in our allocation of resources. In the past, we’ve tried to be all things to all people. Identifying spires of excellence is the path we need to pursue to become truly exceptional.”

A reasonable outlook especially in the context of the realities of public higher education these days. State universities get less money from federal and state government. That means they have to get more from private grants and tuition. So they have to “market” themselves, both to students and their parents (especially upper-income parents) and to businesses.

By concentrating on the sciences, with their greater appeal to businesses, and aspiring to “excellence” in certain fields, UVM hopes to appeal to both sets of “customers.”

Makes sense. On the other hand, it also makes sense to wonder whether the realities of public higher education these days is really desirable, a question which requires a quick trip back in history.

Like most major social transformations, the growth of public higher education didn’t just happen. It came about because of government planning, a pursuit Americans sometimes try to pretend does not exist. The post-World War II G.I. Bill allowed hundreds of thousands of men to go to college. The 1947 “Truman Commission” report (“Higher Education for Democracy”) paved the way for state and federal policies dedicated to the then-radical notion that college should be available to all qualified students regardless of income.

So for the next few decades, tuition was low, faculty jobs were plentiful and secure, and millions of students were educated. As a result, the United States had more highly trained technicians, engineers, and managers than any country in the history of the world, one reason it became richer than any country in the history of the world.

About 30 years ago, government policy changed, executing a partial but substantial reversal. Government funding dropped, tuitions went up, and so did dependence on private grants. Outside of the sciences, faculty jobs became both scarcer and less secure. State Universities had to be more enterprising to thrive, making it harder for them to be “all things to all people.”

The reasonable question that some faculty members are raising now (and some public officials might raise soon) is whether, assuming it makes this “spires of excellence” transformation, UVM will still be enough things to enough Vermont students.

For example, the concentration on science, especially health-related science, enhances the likelihood that a UVM-educated physician or PhD will one day become a world class researcher, perhaps helping find a cure for a terrible disease. That researcher will, in the words of acting Provost Jane Knodell, be “making a difference in the world,” which is the goal of “Spires of Excellence.”

Great. But will the university still be a good place for a Vermont student who wants to become a family practitioner in his or her home town? That could be considered “excellence,” too, and, in its own way, “making a difference in the world.”

What some professors fear is that the fields with less glitz (and less revenue-attracting potential) — Greek and Latin, theater, English literature, even pure research science (Dennis Clougherty, chairman of the physics department, is a leading dissenter) — will suffer as more of the University’s scarce resources flow into “the spires.”

UVM insists that this will not be the case. But it is pretty much what the administration of President Daniel Mark Fogel just did with athletics – dropping the baseball and softball teams to concentrate resources on its de facto “spires of excellence: — basketball and hockey.

State universities have always been places where elitist and egalitarian values met, collided, compromised, and co-existed. This proposal to tilt UVM not just toward the elite, but toward selective elites, is in its early stages, and likely to be altered by public opinion, politics, and of course, the complaints of professors. They’re good at it.

The following is not – repeat not – from a Monty Python skit satirizing a priggish university don:

“When individual behavior conflicts with the values of the University, the individual must choose whether to adapt his or her behavior to meet the needs of the community or to leave the University. This decision, among others, assists each person to determine who he or she is with respect to the rest of society.”

On the contrary, it is the statement of an actual university official, or, considering that it reads as if written by committee, a cluster of actual university officials (we don’t call them ‘dons’ on this side of the pond) of the actual University of Vermont.

There is no indication that satire was his, her, or their intent.

Now let’s be fair to the staff of the Center for Student Ethics and Standards, author of the italicized paragraph above. What it is doing here is entirely justified. The paragraph is part of a disciplinary proceeding – a punishment, if you will – and it is directed at students who violated University rules.

Punishment, therefore, would seem to be in order.

Nor is this punishment all that severe. The plan, at least, is neither to suspend nor expel. All the miscreant students have to do is….well, eat crow.

Last April, the students in question, to protest university plans to raise tuition and cut faculty positions, walked into the campus building that houses the president’s office, and refused to leave after business hours and despite being ordered to disperse.

They occupied the corridor.

This exercise in civil disobedience didn’t do much good. The 32 protesters were a tiny fraction of the roughly 9,500 members of the student body, most of whom went about their business. The budget cuts at issue were imposed, slightly reduced thanks to federal money, not student complaints

But neither did the protesters do any harm. They hurt no person and damaged no property, unless one counts spilling a few crumbs of the pizzas smuggled in by sympathetic professors.

Still, they were punished. The students having violated not merely university rules, but the laws of the state of Vermont, said state charged them with trespassing, to which they (sort of) pled guilty and were sentenced to community service. Said service having been completed (this being a piece about academia, the ablative absolute is appropriate), their records are now clean.

In other words, as the state’s attorney clearly thought, it was no big deal. Better yet, for months, this not-so-big deal has been O-V-E-R over, which is, one would think, just what UVM’s bigwigs would want.

Not the folks at the Center for Student Ethics and Standards. They decided that community service was insufficient. The students may have been punished, but they would have to be re-punished.

Why? Well, a message to the University’s Communications Office seeking an answer to that question having gone unanswered, we will have to resort to conjecture based on a careful reading of the Center for (Yakkety-Yak)’s statement on the matter.

Which reads, in part, “you will note that your acceptance of the charges will result in a simple sanction that asks you to create a reflective response that attempts to prompt your thoughts specific to the incident. Once that response is submitted by the deadline noted, the matter will be considered resolved…”

This “reflective response” is to be a 1,000-word essay in which the student must “engage…in purposeful thought about what it means to be a member of the University of Vermont community. While it is intended to be a reflective assignment, and your completed work will not be evaluated on its content…be advised that your paper may not serve to merely justify your own actions or evaluate the actions of others”

(Memo to Center for Yakkety-Yak: You should really hire someone who can write a simple, declarative, English sentence).

Failure to complete the assignment , “will result in a $100.00 non-compliance fee, the cancellation of all pre-registered classes, a hold on… registration until these sanctions are completed, and/or further disciplinary action from the University.”

Now remember, we are still in the realm of conjecture, but here is what appears to have happened: Some folks at the Center for (whatever) sat around one day and said, “let’s devise a punishment which will humiliate these students to the utmost of our ability, and make it clear that we are grinding their noses in the dirt because we have the power to do so and they have no recourse whatsoever.

“Better yet, let’s express ourselves in the most pompous, priggish, pedantic language we can muster, just to prove that we are university bureaucrats.”

All of which might have been a touch less obnoxious if the boys at Ethics and Standards were known around campus as consistent executors of disciplinary action. They are not. Students who are part of the enforcement apparatus tell tales of nonfeasance even after they write up violations for drug and alcohol offenses. Present and former athletes report that –as in the old days well-connected Chicagoans took their traffic tickets not to city court but to the precinct committeeman who would “take care of it – so do members of certain teams take their write-ups to their coaches, who “take care of it.”

But some good may yet come of this. If, that is, these students possess both grit and wit. Grit they must have, or they would not have occupied the corridor. Wit is more doubtful. Student protesters are oft afflicted with earnestness, wit’s rival.

But (the rest of this is addressed to those 32 students), a few of you ought to be able to create an essay which, while meeting the terms of your penalty, also exposes those who set those terms as the priggish, pompous, self-righteous twits they are.

If so, send a copy to this web site. The best (assuming any are good enough) will be reprinted here (yeah, yeah; “printed” isn’t exactly the right word). It could be the beginning of a writing career.

As has been noted here before, sometimes very smart people act in ways that are…oh, for now let’s just say that are not very smart.

As has also been noted here before, some of these very smart people are senior officials at the University of Vermont.

Their very-smartness is proven not simply by their advanced degrees, fancy titles, high salaries and sumptuous offices, but also by their obvious success as senior officials at UVM. The university is bigger than it was a few years ago. Its larger student body has higher SAT scores. Its larger faculty earns more money. The entire institution has a higher reputation in academia nationwide. These officials must be very smart people, indeed.

So why do they want to suppress freedom of speech on campus?

Well, that’s a stupid question. All people in power want to suppress free speech in their realms to avoid being criticized, ridiculed, and opposed. This instinct applies to governments, corporations, foundations, universities, churches, and the Kiwanis Club. So let’s re-phrase the question.

Considering that this particular attempt to suppress free speech on campus is possibly illegal, probably unconstitutional, certainly confrontational, and therefore doomed to fail, why did the very smart senior officials at UVM decide to make themselves appear to be not simply would-be tyrants but bungling tyrants?

In fairness, the University has not circulated a document entitled “Proposed Policy to Suppress Free Speech on Campus.” Furthermore, the document that was circulated by UVM’s Provost and the General Counsel’s office – the “Interim Policy on Solicitation,” has not been vetted by a lawyer for either the News Guy nor the UVM faculty. It is conceivable, then, that the policy does not attempt to suppress free speech on campus, but only seems so to attempt.

Meaning the folks who composed it brought trouble down upon themselves unnecessarily. Still not smart.

But not likely, either. Laymen though they may be, the News Guy and the professors can read. And if the words on the page are not designed to give University officials the power to decide what may or may not be espoused, opposed, posted, organized for (or against) or debated, they’re a mighty good imitation thereof.

To be sure, colleges should have policies restricting commercial solicitation. Students ought not be bothered in dormitory rooms, study halls or library stacks by peddlers of software, soap, or sandwiches. But this policy statement is not limited to commercial solicitation. It also covers “Noncommercial solicitation,” which “includes, without limitation, petition drives, public opinion polling, membership drives for recognized groups and organizations, preaching, proselytizing, political organizing, political canvassing, and political campaigning.”

For such activity, the policy says, “prior approval” of the University administration is required. As Alan Gilbert of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, “prior approval is prior restraint,” which is Constitutionally questionable.

Not that the university shouldn’t impose some reasonable restrictions on where political activity could take place; the petition-gatherer need not pursue students into their dorm rooms or laboratories. But on all campuses certain areas are recognized as public forums. At UVM, these would include the big bulletin board outside the Bailey-Howe Library and the Green between the library and the buildings fronting Main Street, including the massive new Dudley Davis Center.

But the solicitation policy asserts that “Because of its fragility and its designation as a historic landmark, the University Green’s availability for solicitation is limited.”

Come on! This doesn’t meet the laugh test. As pointed out by David Shiman, the education professor who heads United Academics, UVM’s faculty union, “the University Green has historically been the agora for campus and community,” the place where debate, demonstration, and, yes, even confrontation, have taken place. It is the obvious site for them to take place. Requiring individuals or organizations to get “prior approval” before expressing themselves on the Green would constitute a blatant inhibition of free expression.

(Full disclosure: The News Guy, very part-time adjunct faculty at UVM, is a member of the union).

To give the credit which is due (which is minimal) the solicitation policy does promise a version of “viewpoint neutrality,” saying, “(i)n those instances in which the University, through the official and deliberate action of authorized officials, chooses to open a designated forum for public expression, the University will not discriminate on the basis of the viewpoint of those engaging in expression allowed within that forum. Defamation, obscenity, and other forms of unlawful speech are prohibited in all instances.”

Oh, now UVM hot-shots proclaim themselves arbiters of which speech is and is not “lawful.”

And no “defamation”? The heart of debate is defamation. All authority should be defamed, starting with presidents (of the United States and the University) and extending to almost everyone else, including the writer of this post.

Besides, as Shiman points out, the “neutrality” pledge is belied by another clause stating that the “approval of solicitation activities will generally be subject to applicable time, place, manner, and subject matter provisions unless, in the considered judgment of the responsible administrative official, the proposed activities are unlawful or are likely to be disruptive, to cause undue interruption of the essential operations of the University, or to infringe significantly upon the rights of University community members or members of the public lawfully using campus grounds or facilities, such as rights of privacy, personal security, or reasonably unimpeded ingress and egress.”

“These grounds for denial,” Shiman wrote to the Administration, “are so vague that the clause about neutrality becomes meaningless. The University…asserts that they may deny permission whenever they want. This is unprecedented for any university, other than perhaps a tightly controlled religious institution.”

Not unreasonably, Shiman wondered whether one of the administration’s goals was to stifle union organizing efforts. Labor organizations are not official university-recognized entities, and under the proposed rules their on-campus activities might have to “be sponsored by authorized University officials…”

or University-recognized student groups or organizations,” which, he noted, could “have a particularly chilling effect for union drives.”

Interim Provost Jane Knodell said it was not her office, but the General Counsel’s office which was in charge of the solicitation policy, and referred the News Guy to Deputy General Counsel Tom Mercurio. Mercurio did not return a phone call, nor did UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera. They might not have had time. Or they might not have wanted to try to defend the indefensible.

OK, it’s an “interim policy.” Perhaps before making it final, the very smart people of UVM will remember that universities are and ought to be places of vigorous, spirited, even if sophomoric (after all, some of the participants are actual sophomores) debate. The folks who run universities should encourage such activity, not stifle it.

Otherwise, they aren’t even slightly smart.

.

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.