Considering that they are…well, you know…Democrats, Vermont’s leading Democrats are acting awfully grown-up.

It isn’t just that they’re not being petulant, a surprise in itself, petulance being what the computer nerds would call a Democrat’s default position.

Instead all five candidates for governor have been exuding graciousness and good humor in this post-primary period, none of them more than Peter Shumlin,  the certified leader (by 197 votes) if not yet the final winner of the primary.

But he would be the final winner had runner-up Doug Racine not demanded a recount.  It would be no surprise, then, were Shumlin a might miffed at Racine.

If he is, he’s not showing it; to the contrary, he said the recount was the right thing to do. Meanwhile, Racine keeps acknowledging that Shumlin is likely to end up as the nominee after the recount, and the other three have joined the top two on the campaign trail.

Under the circumstances, this is just what the Democrats should do if Shumlin (or Racine) is to have a chance to beat Republican Brian Dubie. But Democrats do not always do what they should do.

Republicans usually do, and Dubie is. He’s being aggressive and energetic, yesterday announcing a 26.2-hour campaign marathon scheduled to start  early Tuesday and go nonstop into the following morn.

“Vermonters work hard for their money, and they deserve a Governor who will work hard for them,” said Dubie, firmly if not originally, in a campaign press release.

For two reasons, this is just what Dubie ought to be doing. First, he’s taking advantage of the Democrats delay. Second, he’s trying to do what Gov. Jim Douglas did in his last two elections – create the appearance of inevitability, make it the conventional wisdom that “Dubie can’t lose.”

Harder to do against either Shumlin or Racine than against Douglas opponents Gaye Symington and Scudder Parker, two of the more inept statewide candidates (and not just in this state) of recent years. But that doesn’t mean Dubie shouldn’t try. For him, the effort is like chicken soup; even if it doesn’t help, it couldn’t hurt.

Perhaps more amazing than Democrats acting like grown-ups, so are the Progressive Party leaders. Party Chair Martha Abbott abandoned her own candidacy for governor to support…well, to oppose Dubie, though she was apparently not quite grown up enough to endorse anyone, or even, in her statement on the party’s web site (and in the Burlington Free Press) to mention the word “Democrat.”

Still, it was a more politically productive maneuver than an actual Abbott campaign for governor would have been. Nor is Abbott the only Prog venturing into adulthood these days. Anthony Pollina, who ran for governor as a Progressive in 2000 and as a sort-of Progressive (technically an independent) two years ago, ran in the Democratic primary for a state senate seat in Washington County. He won.

Are these signs of a future rapprochement or even merger between the Dems and the Progs?

Not yet. It would be interesting to see, however, if a Governor Shumlin or Governor Racine would appoint Abbott or another Prog to a senior administration position. If that happens, rapprochement/merger discussions might follow.

And now for something that is not as completely different as it first seems. This little outdoor vignette will circle back onto policy and politics.

As has been noted before on this site, the News Guy likes to go fishing, and did so the other day on the Black River (the one in the Northeast Kingdom, not the one that runs through Springfield).

The Black is a beautiful River. There’s plenty of access. Most of it is easy to wade. It is, in short, almost the perfect river for state and local tourism officials to market to anglers in nearby states, and as far away as New York City and New Jersey. Come to the placid, pastoral, easy-going Northeast Kingdom, bring your money, and enjoy a great trout stream.

Just one little problem: the Black is not a great trout stream. Not any more. It was “once considered one of Vermont’s great brown trout streams,” according to Vermont Trout Streams, a guide edited by Lawton Weber and published by Northern Cartographic (2002). “Sadly,” the  guide continues,  “that can no longer be considered the case,” thanks largely to a ”combination of intensive logging and farming practices over the last 30 years.”

Another way to put it is that the fishery degraded because of not enough government regulation.

The Black, alas, is not alone. Most Vermont rivers contain fewer wild trout and other species than they did a few decades ago, and in most cases the main reason is that logging and farming polluted the water, silted over the spawning beds, or denuded the streambanks of the shade that kept rivers cool enough for trout.

There is an economic as well as an ecological price to be paid here. Mediocre trout streams draw far fewer visitors than good ones. That means fewer customers for hotels, restaurants, shops and gas stations. Some of those visitors might have decided to move into the state, bringing money with them, possibly hiring workers.

But in some cases, only if they could live near a great trout stream.

To be sure, maybe it was all worth it. Perhaps the lax regulation allowed farmers and loggers to produce more wealth than the state has given up by not being able to attract as many tourists toting rod and reel. That’s probably impossible to figure out. What is known is that logging and farming are an increasingly small percentage of the state’s economy while tourism and outdoor recreation are growing.

Either way, the point here is that regulation has its economic benefits as well as its costs, and de-regulating can entail an economic loss. For instance, if all those wind towers are erected near the Long Trail on Lowell Mountain, will some hikers from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut decide they’d rather backpack in Maine or the Adirondacks? Wherever they go, some of those folks spend lots of money.

Again, it’s hard to know. But maybe it should be thought about, especially as the candidates propose easing or at least streamlining the regulatory process. Dubie has taken the lead here, calling for less regulation. All three candidates say they’d like to speed up the permitting process for developers, and all say their proposed changes can be put into effect without hurting the environment.

Maybe they can, but it could well depend on just what they want to deregulate. And how they propose to deregulate it.

(Oh, like most Vermont rivers, the Black is not a terrible trout stream. The tally that day for four hours of fishing was one decent-sized rainbow, one smallish but feisty brookie, a few missed strikes. Fine when the river is a 20 minute drive from home, but not good enough to attract folks from away).

The News Guy will not take a Labor Day holiday, but will – appropriately — discuss some of the candidate tax claims and counter-claims, especially as they relate to who might get much and who might get little.

The fight is on, and it promises to be a humdinger.

Attack and counter-attack. Quick response. Thrust and parry. Jab and hook. Give no ground or quarter. The best defense is…well, you get the picture.

All of which is lots of fun, but threatens to obscure the meaningful substantive differences between Republican Brian Dubie and either Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine.

In fact, “obscure,” may understate the case. “Pervert” could be more appropriate. The barbs each side is throwing at the other seem designed to convince voters that the opposition is extremist: that the Democrat would raise everybody’s taxes; that Dubie would permit the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Not hardly.

As mentioned here the other day, the winner will be governor, not emperor. Even if Shumlin/Racine wanted to raise everybody’s taxes, the Legislature would not. Nor would it allow the poor to starve on the sidewalks.

Besides, the Democrats, who are prudent, do not want to raise everybody’s (or anybody’s) taxes, and Dubie, who is decent, does not want the poor to suffer at all, much less starve on the sidewalks.

“People who depend on vital state services are not going to be abandoned by state government,” said Dubie campaign spokesperson Kate Duffy.

Even the semi-defensible attacks are a bit over the top. There is some justification for Shumlin to argue that Dubie’s economic policies would lead to “deficits, unending deficits, tax cuts for the wealthiest Vermonters and budgets that don’t balance.”  Dubie’s determination to cut taxes and his vagueness about what programs he would cut do complicate the budget-balancing task.

But in addition to redundancy (deficits are “budgets that don’t balance”), the attack ignores Dubie’s pledge that tax cuts “won’t happen in one big step or one year,” but would be “incremental.”

Similarly, Dubie may not be dead wrong when he claims the Democrats have “only two solutions for the challenges we face: more government spending and higher taxes.” Both Shumlin and Racine are on record in the past favoring new programs and higher spending. But while they still favor  some new state initiatives, they are not for higher taxes.

Besides, there’s another candidate who proposes new government spending: Brian Dubie. The jobs plan in his “Pure Vermont” document calls for the state to “increase support for (Vermont Economic Development Authority’s) highly successful interest rate subsidy program,” “ increase public investment in the new Technology Lending Program,” “add support for (Small Business Development Center) counseling,” and create an investment tax credit.

All that costs money. Yet the heart of Dubie’s campaign is to hold the state budget to spending increases of  two percent a year. Because revenue is projected to rise at a higher rate, a Dubie Administration could then cut income taxes by a total of $240 million over four years.

This means, said  Duffy, that Dubie’s plan “is not making any cuts.” State spending, she said, would continue to rise, just more slowly than it has been rising, and more slowly than revenue would rise.

Dubie’s arithmetic is correct, except that he first pledges to close the projected $112 million deficit for the coming Fiscal Year (2012). That would require a spending cut of more than 9 percent, creating a new base. Increasing spending by two percent a year for the next four years on top of that new base would mean that spending would fall by an annual rate of about three-quarters of a percent over a five-year period. Extend the same policy out another five years, and spending does go up, but only at an average annual rate of slightly more than one percent.

That might be the smallest growth rate of state spending in decades, if not a century, raising questions about how realistic the plan is. Dubie claimed that in the early 1990s, Gov. Howard Dean actually level-funded (no increase) spending over a three-year period, a harsher reduction than Dubie’s proposed two percent growth.

Not really. Check the esoteric document available from the Joint Fiscal Office web site’s “Appropriations” page,called “Budget History FY 83-present.” It shows that while the General Fund budget actually went down for one year under Dean, it then started up again, and over a five-year period it rose by an annual rate of 3.4 percent a year.

That document provides other interesting information, both casting doubt on the assertion that Dean really “level-funded” spending and confirming that budgeting is a creative art. In those same recession years that Dean was spending less out of the General Fund, some new expenditures are recorded in the Transportation Fund.

Could it be that the state was using Transportation Fund money (financed from gasoline taxes, auto registration, etc) for non-transportation purposes? The document suggests, but does not prove, that the answer to that question is in the affirmative.

If so, it would not be unusual, in Vermont or elsewhere. One reason for that $112 million projected shortfall for the next Fiscal Year, for instance, is that the Legislature and Gov. Jim Douglas have been effectively filching from the Education Fund by not transferring into it as much General Fund money as the law required. (Legislatures and governors, who make laws, can change them as an alternative to obeying them). Reached at home where he did not have access to his records, Joel Cook, the executive director of the Vermont National Education Association, estimated that the shortfall was at least $50 million.

If the Legislature doesn’t repay that (as it said it would) or come up with enough money again this year, the Education Fund could be short tens of millions of dollars. That would require either deep cuts in school spending or substantial increases in local property taxes.

This poses a potential political problem for Dubie. He wants to cut everybody’s income tax rate by about a third, reducing the top rate from nine to six percent and the lower rates comparably. That’s good politics; everybody likes lower taxes.

But the Democrats will try to convince voters that the result would be higher property taxes, which are the taxes Vermonters really dislike. Democrats are already making that argument as well as claiming that, in Racine’s words, Dubie’s “numbers just don’t add up.”

“He wants to add money for various business promotion efforts…but he wants to cut taxes,” Racine said in a telephone interview. “This sounds like the federal budget discussion. Make promises of higher spending for business and lower taxes for everybody. That’s Washington. We don’t do that here in Vermont.”

That’s harsh, but standard political rhetoric. What came out of the Dubie campaign late yesterday may have crossed the line from standard to…well, to  false. In a statement released yesterday afternoon, Dubie said Racine had wanted to use money from the state’s “Rainy Day Fund” to “expand government-run services,” and that he opposed the “Challenges for Change” plan to make government more efficient.

The first of those accusations is simply incorrect. Racine has suggested dipping into the reserve funds, but only to support existing social service programs, not to “expand” government service. The second charge is minimally defensible, but a stretch. Racine supported “Challenges for Change” during this year’s legislative session, voting for it at least twice,  though he voted against the final Fiscal Year 2011 budget which incorporated “Challenges.”

“Fundamentally, Brian is a decent man,” Racine said. “If he wants to disagree with me, that’s fine. But don’t be deceitful.”

It could be a long two months.

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.