Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Rama Schneider of Williamstown.
I am extremely concerned about recent legislative efforts that have come from the state and federal governments relating to local school districts. My concern is heightened by an acute awareness of the political, social and historical context of today’s political discourse. We live under a constant top down barrage of claims that bigger will be better and less expensive regardless the actual numbers or reality. At the same time I am informed by the experiences of many people in and out of the education professions as well as contemporary literature that students need individualized teaching. I have also been told by every Vermont school board member I have talked with who has gone through or is going through consolidation efforts that one should not be looking to save money – the savings are not there by virtue of bigger.
My primary interest in advocating against forced consolidations in general is focused on maintaining and improving our public education system as defined by a “Free and Appropriate Education” that is without charge at the door. I believe two things happen if political governance of our schools is moved away from the neighborhood: the parents and other interested community members become disenchanted and less involved as their input is watered down by a larger group and the dynamics of consolidated control; and the students lose the individualized teaching attention that everyday experience and modern day educational scholarship has found so important. In other words, consolidation will lead to a lessening of public support and a degradation of outcomes.
All policy decisions we make about our public education system have to achieve at a minimum two goals: the policies have to be general enough to cover the entire student body; and the policies have to be able to be applied to each student on an individual basis.
The farther away from a student and her or his family and immediate community a decision is made means that the individual application will lose more often to the demands of centralized bureaucracy. On the other hand, allowing for local control over how the policies are applied does nothing to impede the ability of the state and federal government to make broad reaching policy demands as evidenced by Title 16 of Vermont statutes and the numerous federal laws and regulations currently in force.
I am not arguing that consolidation is by definition bad. There are times and places where combining disparate efforts will have a beneficial effect operationally or economically – even at times both. I am also not arguing the tools contained within Act 153 of 2010 should become unavailable to those who wish to make use of them. For example, I see no difference between Orange and Washington receiving small school grants as begun under Act 60 and other districts that move to consolidate receiving cash grants, state construction aid forgiveness and direct property tax breaks as provided for in Act 153.
I have found the Orange North Supervisory Union to be an example of some of the best that can happen when school districts cooperate and consolidate programs while maintaining the individual school district’s basic control over policy making. Over the last decade or more the member schools of this supervisory union have made use of combined purchasing, shared coordination of curriculum and special educational services, ONSU wide staff master agreements and even the loaning of transportation assets between school districts.
Along side these efforts relating to smart consolidation remains the dedication to the local student population and residents of the individual towns. Williamstown has pursued its pre-K through 12 district, and Orange and Washington have kept their elementary schools while maintaining high school choice.
Make no mistake – these are the decisions made by the involved communities. Two recent admittedly non-scientific surveys in Williamstown, my own conversations with Williamstown residents and previous town meeting votes have made it clear: The people of Williamstown want to maintain their local school district with its local control, decision making and accountability. The towns of Orange and Washington have in recent history twice looked at consolidations and both towns have rejected these efforts whether formally or informally.
The Orange North Supervisory Union is thriving not despite the above, but because of it. We have had the time to build our own inter-district relationships and moved forward with the ones that work for us as a union while being able to reject the ones that don’t and leave those decisions to the individual towns.
The ONSU is right now consolidated to the point that makes sense and has the support of the various town residents.
What I hear the school administration and staff urging is a relaxing of the mandates relating to consolidation and instead a breaking down of inter-district barriers. We need our school administrators and staff to be nimble and able to take advantage of immediate opportunities without the added expense of money and time to comply with paperwork and other regulatory hurdles that do not directly impact an individual student’s learning and curriculum.
The top down managed factory model of schooling did have its place at one time. Throughout the first half of the 20th century we as a nation were able to move millions of children and young adults who previously would have finished no more than what we now call middle school into a system that provided a rudimentary high school education. But that system was put in place to provide a small well-educated set of elite leaders and a much larger set of workers for our country’s factories, roads projects and offices. Literacy for the masses beyond the needs of the assembly line, construction site or secretarial desk was not considered important.
In this factory model large groups of children were moved through assembly line like grades with the expectation that educators could bolt on identical teaching that could be tested in identical ways resulting in identical skill and knowledge sets coming off the end point.
As we entered the second part of the 1900s and the growing information age the needs changed and expanded. Now in the first decades of the 21st century we as a nation are aiming to provide a high quality “leaders” education across the board: we are no longer differentiating between the elites and masses.
The demands of modern society and economics require literacy levels that go far beyond what the curriculum of the 1950s provided. Today’s minimum requirements also reach into areas that were not even imagined 60 years ago: new age communications, understanding of atomic and sub-atomic physics, knowledge of international politics and social pressures, understanding our only source of food, water, air and shelter (aka the physical environment) as well us as parents being able to help our local school districts teach these same understandings to our children.
Bigger and better factories may build bigger and better cars, but it will take direct human touch on an individual scale to meet the modern day educational needs of our nation’s youth. In this case smaller will be more efficacious and arguably even less expensive.
Recently a gentleman informed me he considered it strange that districts such as the ONSU that have found areas of successful collaboration and consolidation would complain about a law that makes those very same items a mandate on other schools. This should not seem strange at all to folks who are used to working within cooperative or committee processes – relationships, mutual understanding and trust take time and effort to build; and without those relationships, understandings and trusts good works cannot develop and be sustained.
The decisions we make in the next few years will indelibly mark our public education system for decades to come. The current trend in lawmaking is clear: consolidation at all costs. I am asking that you help to change this trend to one of consolidation where it works and decentralized decision making where that works.
