Editor’s note: This op-ed is by John A. Nelson, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association.
Governor-elect Shumlin can successfully manage the state’s role in ensuring a quality education for Vermont’s next generation if he understands three things. First, he must understand the unique standing of education as the only constitutionally required function of state government. Second, he must respect the nature of the partnership between state and local entities in the delivery of education services. Finally, he must see the connection between the quality of Vermont’s schools and the closeness of those schools to their communities.
Education is the only state service that is mentioned in the Vermont Constitution. No other governmental service is singled out as a mandatory state responsibility. This is no accident. Vermont’s founders knew, and each succeeding generation has been called upon to remember, the essential role that education plays in preserving our state’s economic and civic well being.
As in every state in the country save one—Hawaii—Vermont has chosen to provide education for its youth through the formation of a partnership between local and state entities. The critical fact of the matter is that delivering on the Constitutional promise necessitates that each partner understands and executes its role in supporting quality public schools. There is, and has always been, a tension in the relationship between the state and local school districts. It might best be characterized as a question of which partner is in the best position to make funding and programmatic decisions on behalf of individual schools.
The answer is found in the product of the partnership itself—Vermont’s community based schools. By any measure, Vermont’s students succeed at a level found in few states in the nation. We recently learned that Vermont’s high school dropout rate, for example, is the second best in the country. And we have known for years—since before the federal No Child Left Behind Act required broad-based standardize testing—that Vermont students score in the top tier on tests of basic skills.
The reasons for this success are several, but certainly one reason has to be that Vermont benefits from the closeness of its schools to the families and communities they serve. In recent years, state leaders have too often looked at our system of local governance and, without thinking about its advantages, have made assumptions about its “inefficiencies.” Surely, they say, we could be more efficient, and thereby be more cost-effective, if we just reduce the number of small schools and small school districts in our state.
This is an assumption the Shumlin administration must not make. The formula is simple. Greater “efficiencies” produce less democratic participation, and reduced local participation weakens accountability for results. Under our “inefficient” system of local school governance we gain something important to success—people who know about their local schools and who feel able to affect what happens in those schools.
While accountability for results is best left to individual communities, the state has its own vitally important partnership role. The state assures that the resources to support quality education are available to communities on an equitable basis. As the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in its landmark school funding decision of 1996, “the distribution of a resource as precious as educational opportunity may not have as its determining force the mere fortuity of a child’s residence.” Only the state can provide for the equitable distribution of resources among school districts with widely varying abilities to raise funds.
If the Shumlin administration appreciates what makes Vermont schools successful, it will be positioned to lead in areas that can produce even better results. Working together with local school districts, the Shumlin administration can re-invigorate the local-state partnership and thereby ensure that the current generation of Vermont students will be prepared for work in the 21st century and ready to contribute to the preservation of our democratic institutions.
