Situational Standards 
By Martin Harris

These days being the historically dismal ides of March (don’t test your recent high school grad, even a Latin major, on this) you may find some contra-puntal humor in contemplating the responses of Vermont’s Beautiful People (BP) to two well-documented situations. One is the clean bill of health given by the researcher-authors of a $2.5 million environmental study to the on-going operations of OMYA, a Swiss multi-national company which makes a profit by converting junk-grade marble into a pure-white slurry used for everything from toothpaste to fine writing papers. 

The other is the latest finding in an on-going series of tests administered to public school students, showing a pattern whereby most of the kids can’t make "proficient", which means they can’t function at grade level. The gentry-left in southwestern Vermont’s Upper Otter Valley are not at all impressed by scientific findings showing that OMYA’s operations meet and exceed all established standards for environmental purity, complaining instead along the lines of how-do-we-know-they-won’t-sneak-in-some-pollution-tomorrow. Conversely, the gentry-left in the Capital District profess undying gratitude for the magnificent performance of their public schools: typical are quotes from locals Chuck Hoffert and Stephen Looke, speaking of how highly they value the education their kids are getting and how happy they are to pay for it. Read the glowing testimonials for yourself on the WCAX web site for 5 March 08. Earth to Hoffert and Looke: statistically, 2/3 of Vermont’s kids are scoring in the low 200’s out of 500 on math and reading: do you really insist on believing that your kids are so uniquely different from their peers that they’re the only ones at the 500 end?

You might summarize the contrasting responses to these two sets of facts this way: an entity we BP’s despise, a heavy-industry corporation, can pass every standard and still not earn our respect; while an entity we admire, public education, can fail almost every standard and still not earn our opprobrium. In a way, you have to admire such a glorious adoption of the cognitive dissonance principle, the remarkable ability to hold two conflicting ideas (in these cases, performance standards) in one’s head simultaneously without triggering some sort of cerebral crisis. Likewise, it harks back to "situational ethics", a philosophical creation of the 60’s, which argued that right and wrong could shift, depending on "conditions". Now, it looks like "situational standards": the rules are important only when we think they should be.

The explanation, of course, is based on pre-disposition. Vermont’s BP’s are pre-disposed to denigrate and oppose every sort of corporate enterprise from Entergy’s Vermont Yankee power station to International Paper’s Ticonderoga paper factory, and respond to every published study demonstrating compliance with published standards with some variant of well-it-isn’t-good-enough. The Rutland Herald headline for the OMYA story captures this point of view well: Instead of headlining the major finding, described in items scattered through some 34 inches of type, that the $2.5 million analysis gave OMYA’s operation a clean bill of health, it warns instead that "Experts Suggest Vigilance for OMYA Site".

Conversely, Vermont’s BP’s are pre-disposed to support and defend public education, blithely ignoring rising costs and stagnant student test scores, growing staff levels and shrinking productivity, sometimes in language which elicits some of that humor I mentioned earlier: consider this quote attributed by Rutland teacher Conrad Tuerk to Brandon superintendent William Mathis, labeling Vermont "an educational superpower".

A spending super-power, yes, with its budget now growing past the $1.5 billion mark as enrollment shrinks past the 95,000 mark; and a public-employment super-power, yes, with its schools showing the smallest class size and the heaviest staff-to-pupil ratios in the country; but an educational superpower, with test scores year after year showing that it can’t instill pretty basic levels of literacy and numeracy in the great majority of its young clients? I doubt it. But then, Dr. Mathis also asserts, with wide BP support, that public education in Vermont has no obligation to bring its students to any particular level of proficiency, and if the feds, ever unreasonable, ask for that, why they’re just gonna have to pay a lot extra for it. Now there’s a chuckle.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights