Well, well. After taking almost an entire year to find a new education secretary, Gov. Phil Scott sprang his choice on us with very little notice on a Friday, when news organizations are ramping down for the weekend and have no time for a deep dive on the new hire’s background.

That wasn’t a coincidence, not at all, because Zoie Saunders not only hails from Florida, the state on the forefront of smothering public education, not only comes from a position where her primary responsibility was to close public schools, but also fails to meet the legal standard for her new job. The relevant passage:

At the time of appointment, the Secretary shall have expertise in education management and policy and demonstrated leadership and management abilities.

I suppose the governor would argue that Saunders has “expertise in education management and policy” dating primarily from her five years as an executive for Charter Schools USA, a for-profit underminer of public education. But c’mon, she has never taught, she has never managed a school building let alone a district, and she has racked up a mere three months actually working in a public school system. That shouldn’t strike anyone who cares as “expertise in education management.”

Saunders had been hired in December as chief strategy and innovation officer for the Broward County Public Schools and, per the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “was tasked with leading a closely watched effort called ‘Redefining Broward schools,’ which focuses on closing or finding new uses for underenrolled schools in the district.”

Her maiden voyage in that effort turned into a sizeable PR gaffe. At a public meeting related to the “redefining” process, those in attendance were asked the following question: “When the District decides to close or combine schools, what should we think about the most. What considerations are most important and why?”

That first word signaled to those in attendance the decision to “close or combine schools” had already been made and that their input would be ignored. Saunders had to apologize for the question, explaining that it had been edited down and lost some “clarity” in the process. “We’ll try to wordsmith that question for the future,” she said, verbing a noun.

If that’s an example of her “expertise in education management” at work, well, count me unimpressed.

It gets worse. At her introductory presser, Saunders floated the educational equivalent of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

[In Broward County,] we’ve come to the recognition that many of our underenrolled schools are not able to offer the variety of electives and special programs and things like that. …We need to make sure that every student in every school in every classroom has the opportunity to a broad set of educational experiences and electives.

Just try to ignore the grammatical clumsiness “and things like that,” because after all, doesn’t everyone want our kids to have “the opportunity to a broad set of… experiences”?

However, as my headline states, her lack of expertise (and wordsmithing prowess) is not the bad part. The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.

That, my friends, is the bad part.

From Seven Days’ story about Saunders’ appointment:

Schools in Vermont are at a major inflection point, with aging school buildings in need of billions of dollars of repair, soaring education costs and a complex funding system that many feel is irrevocably broken.

Add to that the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on equal treatment of religious schools, which (as VTDigger recently reported ) has fueled a “more than six-fold” increase in state dollars going to “explicitly religious schools” since 2021. It’s still a relatively small piece of the pie, but one has to think it will grow as private school operators smell chum in the water.

And what will it do to traditionally strong taxpayer support for public schools if we see more and more of our dollars going to religious institutions, including those with openly discriminatory policies?

Meanwhile, the sacred cows doing business as Approved Independent Schools are taking an ever-larger share of tax revenue. The AIS’s, although under-regulated compared to public schools, seem to be politically bulletproof.

These two kinds of institutions are tied together. The tuitioning system which allows public school districts to send kids to AIS’s is what opens the state to liability under the Supreme Court ruling. If we send Education Fund dollars to AIS’s, then we have to support private religious schools as well. It’s an equity issue. Ending (or perhaps dramatically reforming) the tuitioning system would give us an out.

But that would take political courage of a kind seldom seen in these parts.

The problem is, we’re entering a feedback loop. Public schools are under great pressure. More money is being diverted away from them. There’s a lot of talk among Our Political Betters that we need to close a bunch of schools. (There’s where Saunders’ three entire months of “expertise in education management” comes into play.) I see the reasoning, but the fewer public schools there are, the more students will be diverted to AIS’s or other private institutions, which would drain even more money from public schools, lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s the slow-motion strangulation of public education as we know it. And it’s going to continue as long as Phil Scott is governor. The hiring of an unqualified “educator” whose experience is in (a) private education and (b) closing public schools is in perfect alignment with his goals.

So tell me, when are Democrats who claim to care about public schools going to start voting against this guy? And by the time he retires, how much more damage will have been done to public education in Vermont?