Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rep. Randall Szott, D-Barnard, a member of the House Committee on General, Housing, and Military Affairs. He is a writer, educator and library director who has lectured around the U.S. and a former merchant mariner and chef.
[U]nfortunately, mandated school district consolidation in Vermont has demonstrated that we are losing the battle to preserve the unique community resource embodied in our small schools. A pernicious vocabulary is being imported from other parts of the country – performance, value, efficiency, choice, accountability. You even hear talk of “design thinking” which is more jargon from business school consultants that don’t have a clue what design actually entails. These words have their origin in a worldview that sees economic questions at the center of human society, rather than questions of ethics or democratic governance. The civic virtue of education conceived broadly is being sacrificed for the more narrow market-driven goal of improving individual student performance in the classroom.
Proponents of school consolidation in Vermont have followed a familiar path, one that seeks to centralize decision-making into fewer and fewer hands. They speak of modernizing, of expertise, of metrics, but they fail to acknowledge that a citizenry that can’t be trusted to make its own educational decisions is not comprised of citizens at all. The model of education the state is imposing might produce tremendous gains for a privileged few, but it will relegate many others to the margins.
School consolidation driven by a market mentality simply reproduces for students and communities the inequality that the market produces elsewhere. School consolidation in the name of increased administrative efficiencies has been instituted throughout the United States, yet economic inequality has skyrocketed and disparity of student outcomes continues. It should thus be clear that any talk of educational equity while being committed to market-like approaches is misguided.
Sadly, Vermont appears to have succumbed to the siren call of “educationism.” Educationism was recently described in The Atlantic by Nick Hanauer as the blind faith that better schools can solve a variety of social, economic and educational inequities. The reality, he says, is that a “well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.” To paraphrase Hanauer, proponents of Act 46 confuse the symptom, educational inequality, with the disease, income inequality. No amount of consolidation will make their soaring rhetoric about the merits of efficiency match the reality of deeply embedded economic inequality.
Education entails much more than what happens inside schools. As Vermonter John Dewey said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” Thus, the resistance in Vermont to school consolidation is educational. Communities standing up for their right of self-governance is educational. These are not mere philosophical disagreements, they are fundamental philosophical disagreements. It is an argument about whether education ought to be a vehicle for individual accomplishment, or a community asset. It is an argument about whether education is meant to train future participants in the global economy or to nurture civic life. Of course it can be all those things, but the worldview of economic rationality so permeates the discussion, that one is considered a fool to argue against such hallowed concepts as “increased choice,” “flexibility,” or “economies of scale.” Many of our democratic institutions have been eroded by this consumerist mentality that privileges convenience, standardization and cost efficiency over complexity, diversity and intrinsic value.
No one wants to deny Vermont students an excellent and equitable education. And no one wants to increase the financial strain on an already heavily taxed populace. However, human life and human values must always be at the center of the discussion, rather than the operational needs of administrators.
My fellow lawmakers and my fellow Vermonters have to look into their hearts to decide if the mere proposition of short-term savings was enough to sacrifice community schools and our independent spirit. I think it has been a series of tragic mistakes. Democracy is inherently connected to education, and education is inherently connected to community. If we take democracy, education, and community seriously, we owe it to ourselves to nurture the things that make Vermont special rather than defending the false promise of consolidation.
