by John McClaughry
First published June 27, 2006
Like the appearance of seventeen year locusts, the subject of education governance has again arrived on the public agenda. The instigator of a renewed dialog on this subject is Education Commissioner Richard Cate. His concern is spurred by his belief that the present public education structure is unwieldy, inefficient, and excessively costly, and falls short of producing the best possible educational outcomes.
The public education system for Vermont’s 95,000 pupils consists of 284 school districts. Every town or city school district either has its own supervisory district (11, in the larger towns and cities), or belongs to one of 51 multi-town supervisory unions. Supervisory union board members are elected not by the voters, but by and from the local boards. Because the boards choose them indirectly, the one-man one-vote rule does not apply.
These supervisory union boards select the Superintendent who must meet state-prescribed qualifications. Originally, the superintendent was charged with the selection and training of principals and teachers. Since each town raised the property tax dollars to pay for its own schools, the supervisory union had no role in school finance.
Today – and especially since the enactment of Act 60 in 1997 – the superintendent’s role is quite different. His or her main job is to see that the schools and districts comply with the ever-growing volume of state and federal education laws and regulations. Chief among these are those controlling school finance, assessment, and special education. The superintendent is the resident authority for citizens elected to school boards, who can hardly be expected to navigate the thicket of education laws and court decisions on their own.
The superintendent’s job is powerful, exhausting, but well-paid. Though selected by local supervisory union boards, superintendents have increasingly become emissaries and agents of the state Department of Education.
In 1964 Gov. Phil Hoff proposed to convert some 60 supervisory unions districts into 24 administrative districts. The legislature and public dismissed the proposal out of hand. Twenty three years later, Gov. Kunin’s commission on school governance, co-chaired by Hoff, proposed 65 unified districts, each with a K-12 system and a single board. That proposal aroused such an outcry that Gov. Kunin was forced to disavow it a week before it was to be made public. The fact that the report was ridiculously and dishonestly titled “Strengthening Local Control” didn’t help its reception.
Commissioner Cate has now put on the table a similar proposal. There would be 63 unified school districts made up by combining current local districts. The state would make education payments to the new districts, not to the component towns.
The new district’s board members would be elected by voters in the towns, but their votes on the board would be weighted to meet the one-man, one vote requirement. The new board would hire the superintendent, who would have full control over all public education in the district. Cate later added that parents would be able to choose among the public schools within each new, larger district.
The Cate proposal would solve the real problem of frazzled superintendents having to deal with as many as fourteen local school boards. It might – but would not necessarily – achieve some efficiencies in administration and purchasing. But there are a lot of arguments on the downside.
Citizens will quickly learn that the new, large districts don’t belong to them, but to the state Board and Department, which as a result of Act 60 already wield enormous control over the personnel, curriculum and financing of public education.
Consolidation of governance in the name of efficiency inexorably leads to consolidation of schools in the name of efficiency.
Superintendents with greater responsibilities will demand more money and more staff assistance.
Organizing taxpayers across town lines to resist large-district spending excesses will be next to impossible. Organizing Vermont-NEA teachers’ union members across town lines to defend higher spending and more generous union contracts will be easy.
With a public high school in every large district, the parental choice system, now practiced in 90 tuition towns, will evaporate.
It may be instructive to look at the experience 300 miles away in New Brunswick, Canada. In 1967 that province enacted its own version of Act 60. In 1997 the government concluded that “the current layers of administration and decision-making, together with the competing forces of many interest groups, are formidable barriers to improvement in the system.” In other words, the provincial government had gotten tired of paying for too much of the empty shadow of “local control”.
The perfectly rational result was the abolition of the powerless local school boards, and the formal centralization of all power in the provincial Ministry of Education.
With Act 60, Vermont has already gone a long way down that path. “Governance reforms” may take us the rest of the way.
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The author, a Kirby resident, is founder and former vice-president of the Ethan Allen Institute. With his permission, VDC gratefully re-publishes commentaries written in years past but still spot-on today.