Editor’s note: This commentary is by Scott Thompson, who lives in Calais and serves as a non-voting member of the Washington Central Act 46 merger study committee. The views expressed in this commentary are entirely his.
[T]he next time you run into members of your school district merger study committee around town, please give them a hug.
If they are anything like the members of our study committee in the Washington Central Supervisory Union (Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester), each will have already spent some 80 hours of his or her all-too-short lifespan in meetings, not to mention untold more hours in reading, thinking and preparing for meetings.
Altogether in Vermont members of study committees will have invested many thousands of volunteer hours, a precious and non-renewable social resource, into working out the best plan they can come up with for governing your and our schools.
And now, it turns out, none of it matters.
Remember “no one size fits all” Or “hard and focused conversations” Or “what can we do to make this work for us?”
Just kidding!
Of course, no one directly said this. But “when considered globally,” draft guidance adopted by the State Board of Education on July 29 “cumulatively suggests” it most convincingly.
Such phrases as “when considered globally” and “cumulatively suggest” illustrate the magic of government, whereby behind-the-scenes administrative rule-making can reshape major legislation even as we sway lazy and carefree in our hammocks.
The strategic Schwerpunkt of the piece is here, “Throughout Act 46, the law identifies an ‘alternative structure’ as an exception to a preferred, unified system, which is the default.”
The draft guidance erects a series of high hurdles that any non-“preferred” governance plan must clear in a display of supreme data-collating athleticism and endurance.
The claim is debatable, of course, but the sleight of hand is without a doubt magnificent. It uses the right word (“default,” a term taken from computing for what you get if you don’t choose an option), gives it the wrong meaning (a set standard that must be complied with — something more like a norm), and then in the general confusion of sense secures this wrong meaning as the basis for a bureaucratic coup. My inner Machiavelli loves it.
The better angels of my nature love it not, however. The draft guidance erects a series of high hurdles that any non-“preferred” governance plan must clear in a display of supreme data-collating athleticism and endurance. Combined, the hurdles resemble a wall. What’s more, clearing them could require costly additional work by superintendents and their staffs, who often have (let’s be honest) a vested interest in the “preferred structure” and the expanded powers and lightened load many believe it gives them — and therefore a vested interest in the failure of any competition, no matter how neutral and objective they might strive to be in their work.
Meanwhile, any old “preferred structure,” however flawed, would be allowed to limp untested and unimpeded down the procedural track.
So the draft guidance amounts to a practical nullification of Act 46 Sections 5(c) and 9, while tilting the field sharply in favor of Section 5(b).
And therein lies the real problem with it: not that alternatives must justify themselves against thoughtful, pertinent, and rigorous criteria — of this I’m totally in favor — but that the “preferred structure” is practically exempted from such criteria.
There is danger in complacency and in trusting too much in abstractions. Under certain real-life conditions, a preferred unified structure may deliver brutal shocks and dysfunction to an otherwise viable system. I would suggest in all modesty that both the Agency of Education and the State Board of Education have a responsibility to be on the lookout for harmful conformity as much as for harmful “deviance.”
A well-designed alternative structure should not have to hand over the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West in order to win the state board’s approval.
Nor should a preferred structure be able to skate by it with scarcely a passing glance.
A proper rule will apply the same thoughtful, pertinent and rigorous criteria across the board. A rule that doesn’t apply these criteria across the board is neither proper nor any good.
So to our friends at the Agency of Education and the State Board of Education: I will gladly accept new draft guidance, properly revised, in lieu of hugs.
