Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rick Gordon, of Westminster, the director of the Compass School who is on the Westminster School Board and has a doctorate in education. He has been a consultant to public schools and colleges throughout New York and New England, dedicating his work to serving kids who are marginalized in traditional school settings.
[T]he State Board of Education (SBE) proposed rules for independent schools, being promulgated against the wishes of both Gov. Peter Shumlin and Gov.-elect Phil Scott, feels like a classic blind men and the elephant story where the SBE is acting based on their limited vision of only a tiny part of the elephant. The SBE seems to view all independent schools as fitting their narrow image of elite prep schools (which, admittedly, help the Vermont economy in drawing students and families to the state).
The vast majority of independent schools in Vermont are much smaller and serve a diverse population of students with a wide variety of special needs. Many times, these needs fall under the legally defined (albeit constrained) categories for an IEP, but oftentimes a family seeks out an alternative to the public school because their child is not finding success in their local public school.
For many students, the reasons they leave their public school is to change a struggling educational trajectory. By the time a child is in middle or high school, they may have determined the public school is not working for them. Sometimes this is a misfit in learning style or an overwhelming social environment. Often it is something much more specific, such as persistent bullying by a group of peers, or having severe anxiety that is exacerbated by the high pressure culture of traditional comprehensive high schools or, maybe most alarmingly, internalizing messages from a teacher that they are a failure. While the public school model can work for many kids, it clearly doesn’t work for every child and asking public schools to be all things to all people reduces their quality and increases their costs.
While the public school model can work for many kids, it clearly doesn’t work for every child and asking public schools to be all things to all people reduces their quality and increases their costs.
These SBE rules would devastate the many idealistic, financially constrained schools that work hard to give struggling kids from low-income families access to a choice that can change the child’s educational trajectory. While many of these schools might want to serve all special education needs, this is much more complicated than appears at first glance, which is precisely why public schools don’t serve every special education need either and send the most needy cases to out-of-district placements (exactly the kind of independent schools that will likely be decimated by these new rules). Presuming public districts would pay for the special education services (as required by law but sometimes not followed by the school district), serving a student in any single disability category may be achievable. The more challenging situation is a student with multiple disabilities that may require a full-time nurse, a full-time classroom aide and multiple outside services. An independent school could provide this with proper funding, but it’s likely a bigger school with some of these resources in place could provide these services at a much lower expense to taxpayers.
Proponents of these SBE rules couch them under the guise of “fairness.” While a noble ideal, fairness for some can be discrimination to others. Eliminating choices for low-income students suffering in their local public school is not fair. Forcing a child to attend a large public high school with peers who have put acetone in your milk at lunch or with teachers who said you are “uneducatable” or where you have done nothing but failed for years is not fair (sadly these are all true stories).
The philosopher John Rawls proposed a standard for fairness that can accommodate the compromises inevitable in the real world — if something can make one person better off without making anyone else worse off, this is a more optimal state of affairs. Our current rules regarding school choice fit this condition well. The proposed SBE rules do the exact opposite — making many worse off without making anyone better off. These rules won’t hurt the more selective “prep” schools much at all but they will destroy all the smaller schools striving to serve a diverse population in terms of income and educational needs and, thereby, hurt kids and families most in need of different educational opportunities.
