Editor’s note: This commentary is by Wavell Cowan, of Montpelier, a research scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, businessman, social activist, and author.
[T]he Legislature, with Act 46, has once again revisited Vermont’s public education system. Again, in all probability, this will simply reshuffle the deck, producing yet another hand to be played out before it becomes deja vu all over again. There is an alternative. We could, finally, conclude that it is the deck of cards that is the problem and that no amount of reshuffling is going to yield a solution. It simply is not in the cards.
After my retirement, I spent six years on a local school board. Spurred on by a particularly innovative principal, I devoted large quantities of my time to investigating how the school could best deal with the various rules of the game. This meant fully understanding the impact of Act 60, and of special education legislation – no mean task, I can assure you.
This effort together with my perspective from some 40 years as a professional scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and businessman, led me to the following convictions.
First, the only educational system that makes any sense is one that has a built-in capability to continuously improve itself in respect to the two things which really matter – the quality of the educational experience received by its students, and the efficiency with which these services are provided.
To accomplish this requires three basic changes to the deck of cards. First, good teachers and good administrators (and surely everyone accepts that these exist) should have the freedom – and be encouraged to exercise that freedom – in experimenting on ways to achieve better quality of educational outcomes and more efficient ways to achieve those outcomes. Second, a scientifically sound feedback system should be introduced so that every school receives annually a reliable rating of both the quality of the educational performance of its students and its efficiency in delivering its educational services, compared to a statewide average of such ratings. Finally, there should be a delivery system in place so that all information concerning these ratings as well as information about innovative changes, become widely accessible.
Once such basic changes were in place, consider the consequences. Instead of one legislated ostensible solution emanating from an expensive and hugely time-wasting process of public and legislative hearings, all sorts of ideas could be tried out by any school with innovative interest and confidence that implementation of such ideas would be beneficial. The ratings system would become the fundamental arbiter of the success or failure of such experimentation. This system would not only identify clearly for local school boards the relative success of their teachers and administrators but also identify sources (better performing schools) where ideas for improvement could be sought. Once every school board and their townspeople accepted the rating system as a valid critique of their schools, a clear incentive would be in place for lower-rated schools to seek improvements, ensuring an end to the status quo, and promoting desirable changes in school board and/or school personnel.
Is such a system feasible? Based on the consequences of my activities over the six-year period in which I was intimately involved with these issues, I would conclude that technically the answer is “yes.” However, changing the deck (which would, among other things, require a fundamental makeover of the Agency of Education) strikes me as being politically improbable to a high degree.
I have moved on to other challenges of greater interest to me, leaving others to debate this seemingly irresolvable problem. Should any reader wish to explore in greater detail the ideas I have expressed here, I will be only too happy to send them a PDF file of a series of essays I wrote dealing more concretely and specifically with the changes needed to move toward the system I have briefly described here. (wcowan@wcvt.com)
