Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
In its last session the Vermont House narrowly passed H.883, a bill endorsed by the state’s education bureaucracy that would have eliminated local school boards, usurping a town’s power to govern its school, and handing it to more distant regional entities and ultimately the state Agency of Education. That bill died when the Senate rejected it.
Proponents at first contended that consolidating local schools into “expanded” districts would yield greater efficiency and therefore lower costs, an appealing argument to anybody who pays taxes. It wasn’t long, though, before even the bill’s supporters were compelled to concede that there was little likelihood of savings and considerable probability that consolidation would actually increase education costs.
For every imagined economy of scale, at least as many inefficiencies arise owing to the greater distance of the new bureaucracies from the classrooms where education happens. Leveling teachers’ salaries and equalizing tax rates involve significant costs as well. As for any reductions in central office staff, anyone who thinks those expanded district superintendents won’t be hiring assistant superintendents and assorted other deputies has never met a superintendent. The only positions consolidation would eliminate are local school board members, elected volunteers who essentially work for free.
Local school boards aren’t the bureaucracy. Superintendents’ offices and the Agency of Education are. They’re what cost money, not your local board. All consolidation does, in the name of alleged bureaucratic efficiency, is inflate the power and size of the expanded superintendents’ offices. This greater, more distant expense is less subject to local taxpayers’ control, the same way we have less direct control over what the Legislature does than over what our selectmen do, and less control over Congress than we do over the Legislature.
Sometimes government needs to be farther away. Each American town and state can’t conduct its own foreign policy. That’s why dealing with other countries is an appropriate job for the federal government, even though you and I have little direct control over Congress and the president.
Education is different. Unlike foreign policy, there is no particular expertise or necessity that warrants moving the governing of our schools farther away from the children and communities they serve. If anything, the chronicle of contemporary school reform demonstrates that the worst ideas and the least effective school government have come from higher up the education hierarchy and farther away from local schools.
With their financial rationale discredited, supporters attempted to justify consolidation with vague appeals to “equity,” though they never substantiated any specific equity benefits to students that would result from eliminating school boards.
Proponents assert that consolidated districts can offer specialized courses that smaller schools can’t, but that’s only if you combine schools, which means closing some towns’ schools. Expanding course selection is why some towns, despite other strong educational arguments against large schools, have closed their local high schools and formed supervisory union high schools. That rationale, however, doesn’t apply at the elementary level, where course specialization isn’t needed and doesn’t happen.
During the H.883 debate, some boosters testified that their districts would benefit if they were consolidated into a larger entity. The fact is towns are already free to vote to do precisely that with other willing towns. If you think consolidation is in your school’s best interest, and a majority of your community agrees, by all means go ahead. Just don’t force other communities, by legislative fiat, to do the same if they don’t see consolidation as being in their schools’ best interest.
If you think consolidation is in your school’s best interest, and a majority of your community agrees, by all means go ahead. Just don’t force other communities, by legislative fiat, to do the same if they don’t see consolidation as being in their schools’ best interest.
Hopefully, the House won’t revive its unconscionable attempt to annihilate local school government. However, a few towns have entered into or are discussing mergers without the compulsion that would have been imposed by the defeated bill, as should be their prerogative.
The communities comprising Chittenden East Supervisory Union, for example, are currently considering consolidation of their elementary districts. While the decision rightly belongs to those communities, many of the arguments advanced by the merger’s advocates merit our consideration, wherever we live, as we anticipate the next round of statewide debate.
Each of the six CESU towns currently elects a school board. In addition, the member towns each belong to the Mount Mansfield Union board, which governs grades five through 12. Each town and the Mount Mansfield board are members of the CESU. While the organizational redundancy would appear to lie more in the two multi-town boards, the merger would eliminate the local town boards in towns that vote “yes” on the proposal.
Merger supporters complain that under the existing structure “no single elected body is responsible” for educational decisions. Given that concern, the simplest solution would be a local board responsible for each town’s elementary school, and assuming consolidation into one high school is advisable, as it apparently is in the CESU, one board for the shared high school. That arrangement would offer supervisory efficiency with minimal loss of local sovereignty.
Proponents assert that their proposed “unified system” would “avoid conflicts” between towns. They complain that under the present system, administrative decisions are “subject to review, ratification, or modification” by each town’s school board. Note that this is voiced as a disadvantage to the present system.
Here is the issue each citizen needs to consider. Do you want to retain the power to review, ratify, and modify the actions of your school administration, or don’t you? Because the stated purpose of the merger proposal is to eliminate the inefficiency of six town boards, each of which might each have different ideas and priorities for its community’s school and children.
If towns are in conflict over education issues, that means they disagree about those issues. The wisest, fairest solution to that disagreement isn’t to strip those towns of their power to govern their schools according to their views.
It’s true that autonomous school boards don’t always agree about priorities, policies, or education philosophy. But if the only reason to reach an agreement is they all belong to the same artificially created “expanded” district, then there is no real reason or necessity for them to agree. There’s certainly no justification for one school community to force its views and preferences on another, even by majority vote.
Sponsors of the CESU merger echo familiar financial and equity claims. They contend, for example, that “resources could be better shared” in a merged district, but sharing resources is already possible outside of and within existing supervisory unions. Many independent districts around the state already share part-time staff.
Merger proponents envision shifting students to equalize class sizes, but that doesn’t happen unless you actually bus students to another school. Beyond that, being more “cost effective” means closing schools.
Proponents maintain that mergers are necessary because education is “more complicated” than it used to be. To some degree they’re right, but much of that complication can be traced directly to the expansion of centralized governance, regulations, and mandates. Consolidation would only add another layer of expanded district regulations to the already crippling burden of state and federal regulations. Education today is more expensive largely because of that centralization and those regulations.
Management from farther away is never more efficient.
There is no evidence that eliminating local school boards will “improve educational opportunity” for students. Despite all the promises, consolidation doesn’t mean that “staff could work more efficiently” or “focus more on educational quality,” or that “students would be better served.” In fact, experience and common sense teach us that administering schools from farther away doesn’t serve children better.
Merger advocates appeal to our trust in our neighboring towns. Trust is always an issue in politics and government. But even if you trust your neighbor, that doesn’t mean you agree with your neighbor. All communities may believe in “educational quality,” but that doesn’t mean each community defines it the same way.
Nothing is as close to home as the education of a community’s children. Absent any inescapably compelling reason to reassign control of our schools farther from home, we should leave governing education as close to our communities as we can.
Governing our children’s schools is government as close to home as it can get. That’s how close to home it should remain.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: The government closest to home appeared first on VTDigger.