Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ward Heneveld, Ed.D., who is retired in Enosburgh after a career in education as a teacher, administrator, planner and program officer in Vermont, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and throughout Africa where he first taught in Kenya. He has worked in Vermont as a professor of education, as executive director of a community action agency, and as director of the School for International Training. After more than 10 years at the World Bank he was program officer for the Quality of Education in Developing Countries joint initiative of the William and Flora Hewlett and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations.
[I]n the last few days the New York Times published two articles by David Leonhardt about the New Orleans schools’ improvements since Katrina forced the city to resurrect its failing education system under external control. A local school board has just taken over. He reports that the improvements in student learning since before Katrina are exceptional. He also reports that it’s neither the traditional school nor the school choice advocates that have the right model. In fact, he accuses both groups of “fact twisting” and is positive about the new board’s attempts to look at all the facts on both sides. Leonhardt ends his second article with this conclusion:
“I left New Orleans wishing that the national debate could be more like the debate here. It is full of strong opinions and disagreement, of course. But it also revolves more around facts than fixed beliefs. And isn’t that precisely how teachers tell students to approach a hard problem?”
Leonhardt’s first article mentions the research by Tulane’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. The alliance has produced external analyses of what has happened to the schools since Katrina, both the positive and the negative, and has offered independent policy ideas.
Nowhere in Vermont have I found work being done to provide grounded careful assessments of the changes that are going on in Vermont’s K-12 education system. The little I have found has been done by Lawrence O. Picus & Associates with funds provided by the state Legislature and with assistance from the Vermont Agency of Education. Beyond this meager disjointed approach to understand Vermont’s K-12 education system, what I read in VTDigger and elsewhere are continuing iterations of what Leonhardt calls “fixed beliefs.” If that’s all we get into the future the effects of Act 46, finance reform (when it comes), Education Quality Standards, Flexible Pathways, etc., will for sure be limited to new fixed beliefs about them.
Other education systems around the world that I have worked in have always had a few credible critical observers, usually academics, who find the time and resources to study the education system’s problems and innovations critically. In the best of these systems, like India’s and Indonesia’s, there are many universities and institutes that examine critically and publicize what the education problems are and what the government is doing about them. I’ve come to view Vermont as a wasteland when it comes to critical, objective analysis of what’s going on in K-12 education. Does anyone else share this view? If it is the case, why is that?
