Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
[S]hortly after she lands at the bottom of the rabbit hole, Alice begins to worry that she’s no longer herself. To determine if she’s become somebody else, she tests herself about things she used to know. Alarmingly, everything she says seems to come out wrong. When she tries to recite a charming poem about a busy bee, it turns into a verse about a crocodile that “welcomes little fishes in with gently smiling jaws.”
Speaking of wholesale madness and deceptive reptiles, school consolidation is again making headlines.
Consolidation boosters typically begin by appealing to taxpayers’ understandable concern about public education’s cost and how we pay for it. These concerns are entirely justified. Public schools are expensive, and student achievement over recent decades has oftentimes been unimpressive.
Most states rely on property taxes to fund schools. When more of us were farmers, the property we owned more accurately reflected our wealth and ability to pay. Today, however, when most people’s “property” consists of their family home, wealth is better reflected in our wages and salaries, especially given the volatile nature of the real estate market. That’s why it’s reasonable to consider shifting our source of school funding from property taxes to a broader tax on income.
It’s also reasonable to question how much we’re spending on public education. In many districts costs keep going up. It’s also increasingly common for school budgets to decrease while school taxes nonetheless rise, a phenomenon that perplexes the average taxpayer and ought to embarrass the average legislator, since they’re the ones who devise school funding formulas.
Politicians and school officials like to dress their proposals and mandates, including consolidation schemes, in claims that their bright ideas are all about “what’s good for kids.” Since most of these leaders and experts wouldn’t know a real classroom if they tripped into one, their grand assurances are largely speculation.
Consolidation advocates claim that combining schools and districts would ensure “equity” for students. Equity, which means fairness, is a good thing. It doesn’t, however, mean sameness or uniformity. Even if you and I are entitled to a meal of equal cost at McDonald’s, that doesn’t mean we both have to order the same food.
In modern education parlance, equity initially meant eliminating extreme variations in school spending from one district to another, and therefore between one community’s children and the children in a wealthier or poorer community. This is again a reasonable concern, and many states are currently revising their school funding systems.
When budgets are voted down, the sad result is that all the cuts come out of local programs, not state mandates and not supervisory union initiatives.
Consolidation, however, is irrelevant to achieving funding fairness. Instead, in the name of equity, boosters dwell on the capacity of merged systems to impose uniform programs, curricula, and instructional methods on their constituent schools and districts. That way, supporters contend, students will have access to the same education, no matter where they live.
The trouble is one community may not want the same education specifics as the next. Forcing uniformity and consolidation on parents, children, and communities is neither fair nor equitable.
While we should provide all students with the funding necessary for a decent public education, an objective that consolidation doesn’t achieve, the fact is nothing can ensure equity in the quality of their education. That’s because quality will always vary from classroom to classroom.
Some teachers will always be better than others, and some combinations of students will always be more cohesive and constructive than others. Those are advantages money can’t buy, and they’re far more significant in determining the quality of your child’s education.
Concentrating power in the hands of bureaucrats, superintendents, and minions operating ever farther from the schools and classrooms they govern doesn’t foster equity or quality. All it promotes is inappropriately uniform, one-size-fits-all regulations and policies.
Communities are and should be free to consolidate their schools if they choose to. The Vermont Legislature, however, is again considering legislation to eliminate local school boards and compel consolidation. Any legislature that by fiat abolishes a community’s school board on the grounds that its district is too small commits an unconscionable act of usurpation, morally akin to Congress eliminating that legislature on the grounds that its state is too small.
Local school boards and principals, like local town governments, struggle to save money. They have to because they live so close to the taxpayers who pay the bills.
When are we going to realize that schools have become so expensive because of the mandates and “initiatives” forced on them from above? Yet these are the same administrative officials and state bureaucracies in whom consolidation would vest even more power.
Consider the vast array of expenses over which local schools have no control. Consider the perpetually recycling, top down school improvement schemes, from No Child Left Behind to the Common Core, and whatever will be next. Add to that the cost of the latest “aligned” curricula and the less publicized packaged acronyms you’ve probably never heard of, like MTSS and PBIS.
Administrative ranks don’t shrink in consolidated districts. The first thing consolidated superintendents do is commission assistant superintendents. We’ve also created entirely new administrative positions, like “chief academic officer.” Last week we called these people “curriculum coordinators.” The week before that their jobs were done by principals and superintendents. Then there’s special education, the glut of mandated testing, compliance with reams of counterproductive regulations, and school-based social programs dealing with everything from sexual abuse and family counseling to obesity and dental exams.
When taxpayers reject their local school budgets, they’re rarely voting down their local school programs. They just don’t have any other way to say no to all the expenses imposed from above. And when budgets are voted down, the sad result is that all the cuts come out of local programs, not state mandates and not supervisory union initiatives. Meanwhile, consolidation boosters point to defeated school budgets, no matter how few there are, as evidence that we need to consolidate further.
There is no evidence that consolidation saves money or promotes quality. Instead we should be devolving power back to local communities. The last thing we should do is surrender more authority to remote officials who have proven the most inclined to inflate costs and the least competent to ensure the quality of our children’s education.
