Three Prescriptions for Vermont Education 
By John McClaughry

In the past six weeks three major reports have appeared on the future of Vermont education. One, by far the least valuable, was produced by a legislative committee created by politicians. The second came from a commission created by education professionals assembled by the State Board of Education. The third and far most interesting came from a private sector commission that, unlike the first two, actually discovered a way to bend down the education spending curve for the benefit both of students and taxpayers.

The 15-member legislative committee - twelve of them legislators or appointed by legislators - met six times over six months to "examine potential improvements to the structure and funding of the Vermont educational system in light of the state's limited financial resources." It produced a five-page report recommending a handful of intricate supervisory changes, but totally ignoring the funding question. File this one under "tax dollars wasted".

The State Board of Education's 15-member "Transformation Policy Commission" was quite a bit more prolific. Its 114-page report focuses on educational practice, governance structure, standards, and the educational challenges of the 21st Century.

It avers that "academic knowledge and skills must be fewer, higher, and deeper", whatever, that may mean, and opposes "high stakes testing" (trouble!)  in favor of "performance assessments over time" (a favorite theme of the teachers union). It supports more flexibility, partnerships, teacher quality, and accountability, and more dual enrollment in high school and college. It proposes that the Department mandate the rapid installation in all Vermont schools of "multi-age learning communities" presided over by "small interdisciplinary groups of teachers" in place of classes based on age.

The Commission report criticizes imposing "mandatory school inputs with little attention paid to practices and outcomes". This point has been made since 1970, but generations of state boards and commissioners have rarely relaxed their grip on public school prescribed inputs and practices.

The Commission explicitly avoided any consideration of taxpayer costs, other than offering the rather disturbing maxim that "education policy should drive funding mechanisms rather than funding mechanisms driving education policy." This appears to mean that the educational insiders will impose what they think is best for other people's children, and the taxpayers should be grateful to pay the bill.

The Commission's most controversial command and control proposal is its urgent appeal to allow the commissioner, with the advice of one of the many new commissions the report would create, to establish by decree 13 to 20 "regional education districts". The report observes that this "might not greatly reduce costs or administrative positions" (surely true), but it's necessary to expose pupils to "larger learning opportunities". This argument was a key point of Commissioner Scribner's ill-fated "Vermont Design for Education" in 1969. The disruptive ideas of choice and competition are notably absent.

It's clear that the Commission, composed of education "stakeholders", believes that the educational establishment knows better than anybody else what children ought to learn, how their education should be delivered, and how their behemoth of a "system" should be structured. The report is an affirmation of the proposition that the best and brightest deserve to be firmly in command at the top of the pyramid, presiding over commissions, experts, and commissars, and in the last exigency wielding the Big Stick.

In dramatic contrast, the Ethan Allen Institute-sponsored Commission on Rebalancing Education Cost and Value says that we should simply scrap the ever-enlarging, ever-centralizing, bureaucrat-intensive, overpriced, underperforming, government monopoly school "system".

The report's policy recommendations are "based on the idea that the great majority of parents and children have the capacity to identify the kind of education most suitable to their children's needs and preferences, and that public financial support should flow not through overgrown and nonproductive bureaucracies, but directly through the consumers to a wide range of educational providers, some public, some private, that attract revenues by offering a product that their customers want."

This Commission believes that empowered parents, consumer choice, and provider competition is the only recipe that holds any promise of bending down the education spending curve, now cresting over $15,000 per pupil.

And that's exactly what parents and children want. A 2009 Friedman Foundation poll of over a thousand Vermonters found that "89 percent prefer choosing a school for their child among options that include private schools, charter schools, virtual schools and homeschooling."

There's also an economic bonus: If only twenty percent of this year's public school pupils opted to depart for the type of education they prefer, at a cost of roughly half of public school costs, taxpayers would save $81 million.

At least one of the three reports got it right.

John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute (www.ethanallen.org).