Last year, a task force proposed a slate of changes in rules that would require schools to incorporate ethnic studies into pre-K-12 school curricula.
In recent months, the technical, often dry discussion of those proposals became unexpectedly controversial — because, as written, they would apply to both public and private schools.
“The purpose of these rules is to ensure that all students in Vermont public schools and approved independent schools are afforded educational opportunities that are substantially equal in quality, equitable, anti-racist, culturally responsive, anti-discriminatory, and inclusive,” the task force wrote in its proposed rules.
But on Wednesday, after months of deliberation, the State Board of Education ultimately decided that, under Vermont law, private schools likely could not be forced to follow those rules.
“The general consensus was that the (rule) changes don’t apply to independent schools,” said Jennifer Deck Samuelson, the board’s chair.
The process was set in motion by Act 1, a 2019 law that aimed to update school curriculums “to recognize fully the history, contributions, and perspectives of ethnic groups and social groups.”
The new standards are intended to improve students’ “cultural competency,” add curriculum material about “the history, contribution, and perspectives of ethnic groups and social groups,” and eliminate racial or ethnic bias in school materials, the law reads.
Much of the work to create those standards fell to a task force, usually referred to as the Act 1 Working Group, which was assigned to draft updated rules for Vermont schools.
Group members — including advocates, state officials and representatives of public and private schools — spent roughly two years drafting a set of proposed changes in rules that govern how Vermont schools teach their students. The group presented that draft to the board of education a year ago.
At a public meeting in November, the updated rules were met with near-unanimous approval from educators and advocates.
But one aspect of the proposed changes raised questions: As written, they would apply to both public schools and approved independent schools, meaning private schools that can receive public tuition money.
That language reignited a familiar battle between advocates for public schools and their private school counterparts. Public school organizations — including the state’s associations of principals, superintendents and school boards — urged the board to adopt those standards for both public and private schools.
“At this time when the public education system, the State Board of Education, the Working Group and many others are very necessarily and very appropriately focused on promoting, pursuing and achieving equity, inclusion and belonging in our shared society,” the organizations said in a November letter, “our Associations firmly believe it is imperative that all reasonably available measures should be taken to accomplish those ends for all students.”
But independent schools — whose representative on the working group opposed that language — said the new rules should not apply to them.
Mill Moore, executive director of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, pointed to the fact that Vermont has separate sets of educational rules: one that applies to public schools and another that applies to independent schools.
The Act 1 Working Group had drafted edits to only one set of those rules, called the Education Quality Standards, that apply specifically to public schools, he noted.
“Requiring that public school rules apply to independent schools would be like requiring someone to wear their left shoe on their right foot and right shoe on their left foot,” Moore wrote to the working group in March 2022.
Over the past months, as the rules percolated through state educational bureaucracy, members of the State Board of Education came to agree.
Last month, a state board committee considering the question recommended that language be rejected.
The committee agreed that “Act 1’s principles and goals should apply to schools that receive public funding, whether they are a public school or an approved independent school,” members wrote in an April 11 memo. But members determined that Vermont law likely did not permit the Education Quality Standards to apply to both public and private schools.
That would be “a significant change to the current regulatory framework for education in Vermont,” committee members wrote.
On Wednesday, the full State Board of Education voted unanimously to accept that recommendation.
“Act One didn’t give us that authority to put independent schools into the EQS,” Samuelson said in an interview prior to the meeting.
That, she said, was based on an extensive review of Vermont law. She noted that the board is planning to revisit a separate set of rules, one that does apply to independent schools, in the near future, and would consider requiring private schools to follow some of the working group’s recommendations.
Moore, of the Vermont Independent Schools Association, said he was relieved by the board’s decision.
The association “supported the goals of the group,” he said. “It was just that we could not support applying their recommendations through the public school standards to independent schools. That’s a square peg in a round hole problem.”
But the decision drew criticism from Vermont’s teachers union, which released a blistering press release after the meeting.
“Sadly, the board has effectively sanctioned a separate but unequal education system for a significant number of students outside our public schools,” Don Tinney, president of the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association, said in the release. “In doing so, it will expose these children to a higher risk of inequitable and discriminatory treatment and substandard curricular requirements and teaching practices.”
The working group’s proposals are not yet rules. They still must go through the state’s rulemaking process, which will likely take months and could involve yet more tweaks to the language.
Amanda Garcés, chair of the working group, said in an interview that she was disappointed in the decision not to extend the rules to private schools. But she hailed the board’s approval of the new standards for Vermont’s public schools.
“The fact that the state board voted unanimously to support students in an education that is anti-racist, that is equal and substantial in quality and that (means) that no school is going to say that they can discriminate,” she said, “is a big, big, big victory for all of us that have been working on this.”