This commentary is by Daniel M. French, Vermont secretary of education.
For the last two years, we have endured an incredibly challenging time with the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has impacted all aspects of our society, including our pre-K-12 education system.
During the pandemic, Vermont’s education system was asked to do things it was never designed to do, like providing child care, using school buses to deliver student meals, toggling between in-person and remote learning, and managing complex public health mitigation strategies such as vaccination clinics and rapid testing programs.
And throughout the pandemic, our education system rose to the occasion and kept our schools open and safe. The work of our school employees has been heroic, inspiring, and in the highest tradition of public service. They deserve our gratitude and our respect for stepping up in a very challenging moment.
While the pandemic is not over, we are clearly moving closer to an endemic phase of living with the virus. We will no doubt continue to have new variants and see new cases of Covid-19 in our communities and in our schools, but the risks from the virus have been steadily decreasing as vaccination and new treatments have become available.
Our communities, and our schools, are now much safer than they were two years ago.
We are now in the position to move forward with recovery work in education.
We use the word “recovery” in an emergency management sense to describe the work we need to do to build back after an emergency is over. We can say the public health emergency of Covid-19 is over, but the memory of the emergency is still very fresh, and especially fresh as we contemplate the start of a new school year.
During Hurricane Irene, my family had to evacuate our house and we ended up with about 6 inches of water in our basement. Some of my neighbors had over 2 feet of water. Even though Irene was more than 10 years ago, we still think about that experience every time we get a lot of rain. The memory of that storm and the hard work of cleaning up remain fresh in our memories.
It is from this perspective of remembering the challenging work of the last two years that we are contemplating the next steps for our education system and the start of the new school year. After the first year of the pandemic, we talked a lot about “getting back to normal.” You don’t hear that so much anymore, which I believe is not a bad thing.
The truth of it is, “normal” was not good enough and should not be the basis of our aspirations for the future. We should not aspire to go back to a system that had persistent quality and equity issues. We should not aspire to maintain a system that was rightfully proud of having some of the best schools in the country while also tolerating, and ignoring to a certain extent, that many of our more rural schools were struggling to offer even a basic curriculum.
Like cleaning up after a hurricane, we need to have frank and honest conversations about the condition of our education system before we decide to rebuild on that shaky foundation of “normal.” Our students and our communities deserve better.
The pandemic did not necessarily cause the challenges we now face in our education system. It certainly exacerbated many of them, but our principal challenges — such as workforce shortages, affordability, unequal quality, and the disrepair of many of our school facilities — existed well before the pandemic even started.
The stress of the pandemic exposed these cracks in the foundation of our education system, but they were there all along and we knew it. A challenge before us now is to see if we can find the collective courage to address these longstanding deficiencies.
The good news is the pandemic helped us focus our education policymaking in the legislative process to work on many of these foundational issues. Before the pandemic, each year often brought new and disconnected policy ideas with little thought being given to measuring the success of those policies or understanding their cumulative impact on our education system.
I believe a lot of the current strain on our education system has been caused by piling on it, year after year, a series of disjointed policy initiatives that were not well conceived and not adequately resourced.
The pandemic has changed this pattern. Over the last two years, we have been able to partner with legislative leaders to not only develop a targeted program of recovery, but also to enact policies that will address structural issues in our education system.
These policies include improving the equity of our pupil weights and working toward revising our career technical education funding to eliminate the barriers and disincentives that are built into that system. We rewrote the school district merger statutes, and importantly, we set in motion a fundamental rewrite of our education quality standards, including new district quality standards and quality assurance regulations. And we also established a policy to start addressing our school facilities issues.
These are all foundational policies that will take time to implement and to yield results. Good education policy takes time, however, and I believe these policies plant the seeds that will allow us to create an education system that can better meet the needs of our students and our communities in the future.
I believe Vermont can have the best education system in the country. The pandemic has provided us with a significant opportunity to shore up and build a better foundation for our education system, but we need to stay focused and disciplined in our policymaking and not be so anxious to return to that inadequate, pre-pandemic normal.
