Editor’s note: This commentary is by Pamela Fraser and Randall Szott. Fraser is an artist, writer and professor at the University of Vermont. Szott is a writer, educator and chef. He has lectured on education around the U.S. They live in Barnard with their 11-year-old son.

[F]or some of us, compliance with Act 46 is proving difficult. In our community, a ballot proposal has been devised by the Windsor Central Supervisory Union Act 46 Study Committee that involves immediate school restructuring that would diminish two schools — including Barnard’s — in order to finance increased programming at other schools. This is based on an undemonstrated belief — built into the goals of both the law and the local committee — that certain curricular developments will necessarily lead to academic performance improvements.

We issue a plea to state legislators to consider structural issues with the law, to amend it to not force every town to comply with merging, especially if they meet certain standards. Rep. Cynthia Browning, D-Arlington, is quoted in a VTDigger article as saying that “districts that see benefits to merging should do so, but the rest should not have to do so AT ALL if they are sustainable and have good performance. They should not have to BEG for permission to continue operating successfully as they are from an unelected State Board of Education.” There are promising signs that the standards for schools to operate in alternative structures may indeed become less onerous given the legislation proposed by Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais, and Sens. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, and Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington.

Barnard is the quintessential example of a school that should be allowed to seek approval as an alternative structure, possibly maintaining its current structure. We have a high-performing school and do not spend excessively relative to other schools in our current supervisory union. We would like to impress upon legislators how the law can pit town against town, and can subject smaller towns to the whims of larger ones. For Barnard, the proposed intra-district merger would mean our town school loses two grade levels and our principal becomes half time. With a half-time leader, we arguably lose school quality by merging even though a goal of the law is to increase quality. Additionally, our students must make two school transitions (having to transfer at grade 5 to another school and then again into middle school) while other students in the proposed new district do not. These are just two examples of proposed initiatives that lack equity, a major guiding principle of Act 46.

We also consider this writing a plea to our fellow town residents to consider a no vote on this local merger proposal in March. As mentioned, a major concern is the fact that the merger plan is built upon an unwavering and unsubstantiated belief in the efficacy of data-driven curricula. In part, it’s hard to blame the committee, when the law itself defines quality by “education quality guidelines” that share this bias. These guidelines were quietly transformed into “rules” without anyone seeming to note the lapse of democratic process in that action. Rules are not created through legislation, yet have the same binding status. Guidelines, with the implication of flexibility, make sense. Turning them into “rules” and therefore counting program hours as defining features of quality does not. In fact, that is the opposite of “quality,” that is “quantity.”

The law, and the merger proposal in our area would have us believe in a bureaucratic set of ideas which have only dubious studies to attest to their role in increases in achievement. If we look at different K-12 approaches around the world, we see that there are a variety of models that produce high academic achievement and other positive outcomes, and there are ways of looking at education goals in broader, more civic ways, than we do in Act 46 conversations and goal-setting. Finland, for example, has moved away from data-driven approaches and toward more human-scaled decision-making and personable approaches in the past 30 years. And their schools are routinely at the top of world rankings. The data-driven curricula that is peddled in the U.S. continues to fail (our proficiency rates are quite low compared with other industrialized countries), yet still drives administrative logic and planning. We now speak of “education delivery systems” as if education is an object, thing, or consumer-good, instead of the process and set of experiences that it is.

The study committee believes they are making difficult, necessary choices in their development of a plan aimed at having our district be in the top 5 percent of Vermont schools in academic performance. It’s a goal they set, and they seem to believe by stating this, they have achieved something. It means nothing to state this goal. Nor does the addition of a few program hours and an increase in the teacher-student ratio for some fifth- and sixth-graders necessarily have any relation to achieving this goal. Part of their plan also consists of “investing” more of the funds “saved” by eliminating teaching jobs and principal hours in Barnard and Reading to establish a centralized administrative position. At some point, after discovering how unpalatable this and other specific ideas for utilizing savings were to voters, they have since downplayed it and other previously stated ambitions. Essentially, in the Act 46 Study Committee process here, goals and conclusions were reached in a process in which the public was largely left out, especially at significant initial stages (in fact our town had no representation at almost a quarter of the first year’s meetings), and in which the actual educators of our children were barely consulted. Where the law sets goals of transparency and accountability, we wonder, transparency and accountability to whom?

Our objections to the committee’s decisions are not a simple unwillingness to accept “difficult choices,” it is an unhappiness with the process and the specific decisions that were made. The committee says they were guided by the principle that no school would give up anything it currently offered, yet inexplicably, they don’t count fifth- and sixth-grade instruction as an “offering.” And even though another stated goal of theirs includes increasing the teacher-student ratio, the committee chose to ignore that Barnard currently has one of the highest ratios while Woodstock has one of the lowest teacher-student ratios. Looking at it this way, perhaps Woodstock should have been chosen for staff reductions.

Our concern with this plan is not only loss of local control, not only possible eventual loss of our school, but the way our merger committee and Act 46 itself encourage a continued dalliance with quantification rather than the improved qualitative experience of students. School is a community, it is not just content delivery, and children are not simply programmable information receivers. We need to educate them for future challenges by fostering critical, imaginative and inventive thinking, as well as kindness, empathy and compassion. Act 46 stacks the deck against this, encouraging merger committees to treat schools like divisions in a corporate merger, which our local committee has, even peppering their plan with marketing buzzwords about innovation and excellence.

Great teachers are crucial to education, something not mentioned at all in Act 46 except in relation to budget reductions. Act 46 and the merger plan it has driven here — with rather paltry savings, mysterious money shuffling, and bland data-driven educational aspirations, doesn’t set its sights on truly admirable goals. It has instead sought to cannibalize two schools for a metrics — driven agenda that has yet to prove successful in any meaningful sense. We urge our town to vote no on the merger proposal they will see on the ballot in March, and our legislators to ensure that Act 46 lives up to its goal to avoid one size fits all solutions for independent minded Vermonters.