Editor’s note: This commentary is by Scott Thompson, who lives in Calais, where he is a member of the school board. He is an individual plaintiff in Athens, et al. v. State Board. These views are his own.
[W]hen a government uses force against its own people, it puts its moral authority at risk.
At least 35 Vermont towns are engaged in three separate appeals challenging the State Board of Education’s order of Nov. 30, which forcibly consolidates their school districts.
How these actions will play out in court is anybody’s guess. The state typically has the advantage, all the more so given its headlong scramble to lock in forced mergers by creating new facts on the ground.
Legislators may wish to peruse the appeals in order to gain an appreciation for just how far and wide the landscape is littered with the wreckage of Act 46 implementation in its terminal phase. The practical problems are legion, and the legal issues run deep.
My aim here is to address a political puzzle: How could the state-level governing class — elected officials, senior civil servants, eminent journalists, directors of associations, etc. — have failed to see the train wreck coming?
Even at this late date a number of state leaders still cling to a view of the appeals as a dead-enders’ attempt to save moribund, dysfunctional local institutions from the inevitable march of progress.
This view could not be more mistaken. In much of Vermont our town institutions are intensely alive, vibrant and capable. Far from being outmoded and overdue for burial in the ash heap of history, they are “green shoots” that can redeem the creeping breakdown of federal and state government.
In order to clean up one’s mess, one must first be able to see it. This means overcoming certain characteristic forms of blindness.
Vertical blindness. Most of us are conditioned to think of political contests in horizontal terms: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal.
The collision over forced mergers is highly political but non-partisan to the core. Battle lines are vertical, not horizontal: state vs. towns, central authority vs. decentralized periphery, professional bureaucracy vs. citizens’ self-government. The stakes include and go far beyond the mechanics of how we oversee our children’s education.
State leaders look to their peers on the right and on the left, and they see something they think vaguely resembles a consensus. They cannot feel the ground seething beneath their feet.
Historical blindness. To someone who has lived a while and paid attention, our state government’s fixation on merger as compulsory cure-all is nothing short of bizarre.
In 1930 the number of school districts nationwide was on the order of 130,000. Today the Census Bureau estimates roughly 14,000 — an overall 90 percent reduction due to consolidations. Ninety-seven percent of this overall drop took place between 1930 and 1970.
An organizational reform that was cutting edge during the Hoover administration, mainstream by Eisenhower’s day, and old hat by the time of Richard Nixon seems an odd relic to elevate into a Supremely Best Structure for the whole of Vermont even when, surprise, it doesn’t work.
The fixation on merger may be weird, but it is hardly news. School district consolidation is the shambling zombie of education policy, as relentless as it is mindless. Merger has been a recurring ambition of state education officials at least since the 1912-15 Carnegie investigation. A 1977 research paper counted six such attempts in Vermont between 1960 and 1975. Today is no different, and tomorrow too, apparently. We are watching the reflexive twitch of a bureaucracy gone dead inside.
In-group blindness. Our political class has the defects of its virtues. On one hand, it’s a beautiful thing to witness the courtesy and affability of political opponents towards one another, along with their generally high-minded approach to bones of contention.
On the other hand, the tight web of personal relationships and mutual obligations that yields such admirable comity is not unlike that of a mafia. It’s a very nice mafia — none of us townies are sleeping with the fishes just yet. But it all too often mutes the kind of healthy institutional clash of ideas that keeps everybody honest.
During the State Board’s summer listening tour through Vermont, I lost count of all the times a state senator or representative testified in so many words: “I voted for Act 46, but this [forced merger] is not what I voted for.”
It is a startling admission, tantamount to saying, “I was duped.” Yet there is no dishonor in it. The fact is, we were all duped. In particular, anyone who had to take the alternative path in order to comply in good faith with the letter and spirit of Act 46 was duped.
Force and fraud: a mafia’s signature moves. Even a very nice mafia can revert to its archetypal pattern under certain circumstances.
The courts may or may not act as a guard rail. At this point it’s up to the Legislature to save our people from the state — and the state from itself.
