As the Scott administration’s school governance plan vanishes slowly into the Great Lost Swamp of ill-begotten ideas*, it’s time for a history lesson.

*You might think this premature, but Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth and the House Democratic caucus have said that universal school choice, a core feature of the Scott plan, is a non-starter.

Confession first: I didn’t remember this event. A reader reminded me of it.

Way back in 2019, then-education secretary Dan French let loose a trial balloon that sank quickly and without a trace. But in every important aspect, it was a precursor to this year’s plan — albeit an even more dramatic rethinking of how the public school system is organized and funded. What it tells me is that the Scott administration has been thinking along these lines for years. And now, likely emboldened by Republican gains in November, the admin is publicly promoting a modified version of the French plan.

As a reminder, the administration’s new proposal would eliminate local school districts and boards. The state would be carved into five much larger school districts. Each district would have an elected board, with each board member representing roughly one and a half counties. Local boards would be replaced by “advisory committees” with as much power as the term “advisory” implies. Every student in the state would be assigned to a public school and have access to at least one “school of choice” and probably more. Universal school choice, in other words, with the concomitant drain on the Education Fund. Also, rulemaking authority would be shifted from the state Board of Education to the Agency of Education.

French’s plan went even farther in centralizing school funding and governance. French floated the notion of one single statewide school district overseen by the Agency of Education. The Secretary of Education would have written the system’s budget, and school choice — public or private — would have been universal. The state Board of Education would have been not just neutered, but abolished entirely.

The Scott administration’s current plan is less radical, but its core concepts are right in line with the 2019 plan. There’s a clear throughline in administration thinking on public education, including a massive centralization of power and an opening of school choice to all public school students.

Now the French thing was never formally proposed. In fact, it wasn’t even meant to be revealed to the public. VTDigger reported on it after getting a leak of the document. When the Digger story came out, the administration quickly backed away: “The document was not a ‘policy paper’ but instead a ‘conversation fielder.'”

I have no idea what a “conversation fielder” is, but let’s finish this.

The French idea was never formulated as a policy proposal and the administration never tried to promote it. But it’s clear from the outlines of its current plan that this 2019 document continued to inform administration thinking on K-12 education. It was kind of a dry run for the effort we see today.

In unveiling the new proposal last week, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders repeatedly referred to transforming the public schools into a boundary-free “education ecosystem” including public and private schools and possibly charter schools as well. Nice word, that. It’s warm and fuzzy. It connotes naturalness. But in nature, “ecosystems” are arenas of Darwinian competition. Every living thing is battling for its own space, for its very survival. And I, for one, don’t want to turn our public schools into an “ecosystem” that includes parasites and predators as well as nurturers. Your mileage may vary.

Postscript. This is yet another example of something that’s a real puzzle to me. News organizations rarely, if ever, try to include historical context in their reporting. Maybe it’s a lack of time, but you’d think they would do at least a keyword search of their own institutional archive when publishing a story about an issue that’s been live for years if not decades. If Digger had taken the time to discover the 2019 article in its own database, its reporting on the new plan could have been richer and more informative.