Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ward Heneveld, who over the last 40 years has taught teachers, headed a community action agency, and run a college in three different corners of Vermont. With a doctorate in Educational Planning, he has also been a planning adviser and grant maker to improve education in India, Pakistan, Brazil, and East and West Africa while working for three foundations and the World Bank. He lives in Enosburg Falls.
So far, the media has only covered House Bill 883’s headline, the legislative proposal that will reduce the number of school districts from 228 districts to around 45. The process that the bill defines for deciding on the new districts offers much more than that, and we should take advantage of the opportunity that our legislators have offered to us.
There are at least three underlying reasons why we should support this bill. First, Vermont’s education system is already more centralized than we want to admit. Second, our sense of community and the means of communication have changed significantly since the current town-run system was itself created 120 years ago. And, third, the bill offers the new districts, not the state government, the chance to redesign how we want to locally deliver education for this century.
What evidence is there that Vermont’s 228 school districts do not have significant control over the education Vermont’s children receive. Over the 40 years I’ve participated in and observed Vermont education as a teacher trainer, administrator and parent, I’ve seen policies, programming and regulations shift bit by bit to the state.
Here’s where I think we are now: The State Education Board’s Rules and Practices has 344 pages. Curriculum and quality standards for school districts are set in some detail in the Vermont State Board of Education’s Education Quality Standards adopted last December. Teacher certification and contracting are driven by state government and the Vermont NEA, even though contracts are negotiated locally. The expected outcomes for learners are detailed by grade in the Common Core which was formulated nationally. Building requirements and the parameters for school calendars are largely set by the state. And, finally, we now have a complex but equitable statewide property tax rate that determines much of what each town has to provide for education.
Each town can influence this rate at the margin by its control of the town’s education budget. Recently, Burlington provided an example of who is in charge. The state had to straighten out Vermont’s largest town’s school board and administrators when they become confused as to whether the city’s own tax-rate estimate was accurate.
Societal changes in community and communication since 1900 have contributed to education control becoming less local. The identification with a community that existed when everyone in town knew everyone else has shifted from identifying mainly with our town to identifying ourselves more as Vermonters. Economic growth and the automobile have allowed Vermonters to spread out on purchased land away from where they grew up. Today many people work “away” from the town in which they live, and I think we pride ourselves on the state’s unique character more than on what makes the town we live in special.
The issue for me is really whether the Vermont Agency of Education will be able to provide the leadership, information, and support that will allow communities, not the state, to formulate local goals and plans for delivering effective education in this new century.
The changes in community have been accompanied by a change in parenting, and these days children bring a staggering variety of needs to school with them. Despite the sea-change in living patterns we are all used to the way schools have been organized and run. As we saw late last year most of us cannot seriously consider even changing the school calendar. With little control, no wonder that most communities’ participation in education is low except when there’s an attempt to change the status quo.
Also, the superintendents and principals turn over frequently, at least partly from frustration that they cannot lead effectively in response to what the world has become. Our communities have changed significantly, but how education is provided locally stays as it was over 100 years ago.
Communications have changed even more than community and have driven the shift from local to global. The information revolution is particularly important and both disquieting and full of opportunity. When I moved to Vermont in the 1970s we had to listen to the number of rings on our land-line to know if the call was for us. Now every week my wife and I see and talk on Skype with our granddaughters in Germany. Last year I met a student at Enosburg Falls High School who had created a blog on professional baseball that was getting hits from all over the country. Just last month our local ex-fire chief who’s been a volunteer fireman for 51 years recounted how, when he was in Florida, his son showed him the results of a recent fire live on a cell phone.
Besides these changes in communication making our communities less insulated, they provide opportunities for alternative ways to deliver education that could help preserve community schools. Even 25 years ago rural schools in the West were already using closed circuit television to teach advanced math to high school students scattered in twos and threes among many small high schools. I read recently that a “virtual school” movement has started in other parts of the country. Just think what we could do today to take advantage of communications technology if we revised our concept of “school” and thought creatively about how to deliver education among towns in our own larger but still local district.
The language in H.883 attempts to reference all of these changes as a basis for consolidating education districts. But it also offers much more. As I read the bill, it gives each group of towns the power to organize the local delivery of education in a network of services that builds on the existing infrastructure, on our past, and on the opportunities and challenges that the 21st century offers. There seems to be almost no restrictions on the changes that can be proposed, other than that the towns in a district must merge and work together.
According to the bill that’s now moved to the House Ways and Means Committee, designs should maximize the use of resources to support student outcomes, foster stable leadership, hire and support excellent personnel, and manage efficiently and effectively. Innovations in delivery are encouraged and there’s a provision allowing waiver requests from state requirements. In addition the bill will allow school choice for all children in a district, should the towns in a district want such choice. And it appears that the new districts can even assign a level of authority and responsibility to town committees that the district’s towns may agree upon.
All of these provisions convince me of the House Committee’s members’ sincerity that they want us to rethink locally the delivery of education for the 21st century.
The bill also outlines the time, funding and assistance that would be allocated to help communities through this process. Six years for communities to come together and formulate designs for their district seems ample, though the details of the timeline suggested in the legislation should probably be revised to accommodate the ambitious local reforms that have been invited. All of us have a lot of learning, reflection and discussion to do if we are to successfully take advantage of the chance for local change that’s been offered. Happily, the bill allocates funding and two new staff positions to support this process.
The issue for me is really whether the Vermont Agency of Education will be able to provide the leadership, information, and support that will allow communities, not the state, to formulate local goals and plans for delivering effective education in this new century. From my experience as an education planner outside Vermont, I know there are adaptable methodologies from other countries, mostly in Latin America and Africa, which have helped communities to analyze, plan, and implement reforms of this magnitude. Within the state, the Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD) has developed a methodology for statewide consultations on other topics which could support the planning process.
To summarize, I think the House Education Committee has offered us a rare opportunity to take authority and responsibility for the way we want to deliver education in a global world. And they are proposing that we do it at a scale that is respectful of our legacy of local control and appropriate to the requirements of a changed world. I doubt that we’ll get another or better chance to reclaim the erosion of local control of education that the last 40 years has allowed. If we care about Vermont’s future in a world that is no longer as local as many Vermonters would like it to be, we should grab this opportunity.
Correction: The author’s name has been corrected.
