The House Education Committee has set aside a fair bit of time this week for discussion of H.454, which sets out Gov. Phil Scott’s education reform plan in a brisk 194 pages. It is to be hoped that the committee’s deliberations will be centered first and foremost on what’s best for Vermont’s public school system. Because nobody else seems to be doing so.

Take the governor, for instance. (Please, says Henny.) He pays lip service to improving education, but his focus is clearly on cost containment. Radically centralizing the system is no guarantee of better quality. (It’s no guarantee of savings, either; the move to statewide negotiation of health insurance for public school personnel hasn’t prevented its cost from skyrocketing.) Doing away with local school districts in favor of five massive regional districts is clearly aimed at cutting administrative costs. And don’t get me started on the provision of H.454 setting minimum class sizes at 15 for grades K-4 and 25 for grades 5-12.

Those are minimums, mind you. What would the average class sizes be? 20 in the lower grades, or 25? 30 in the upper? 35? Cautious administrators will want a margin of error above the state-mandated minimums. And what happens when a school dips below the minimum? Does it close down? Put some crash test dummies in desks and hope no one notices?

Frankly, I wonder why any Republican who represents a rural district — which is the vast majority of Republican lawmakers — could support this plan as written. The class size provision alone would trigger a massive wave of consolidation that would hit rural Vermont especially hard. (Maybe that’s why H.454 has a mere five sponsors while H.16, the Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Heat Act, has 55 and H.62, to repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act, has 29. There hasn’t exactly been a stampede among legislative Republicans to sign on to the governor’s plan.)

Then there’s Education Secretary Zoie Saunders and her talk of creating an “education ecosystem” which sounds nice and green, but ecosystems are Darwinian places full of predators and parasites. And then we have former senator (and former Democrat?) Brian Campion, Scott’s latest appointee to the state Board of Education, who told VTDigger his top priority is “to improve public education,” which is not necessarily the same as improving the public school system. “Public education” can include any state-funded schooling like the approved independent schools and any other entity that might now, or in the future, receive state funds for educating our schoolchildren.

Now consider Campion’s successor as chair of the Senate Education Committee, Sen. Seth Bongartz, a 19-year member of the Burr and Burton Academy board. For those just tuning in, that’s one of those approved independent schools. Bongartz recently issued a map outlining his vision for streamlined school governance. The boundaries are drawn, and the governing bodies defined, in a way that would allow school choice where it already exists and deny it elsewhere. It seems to have been designed to protect the interests of the AIS’s without expanding choice beyond its current limits. Not the ideal first principle for reforming the public school system.

Now let’s double back to the Scott plan. In its final form, it seemed to pull back from a massive expansion of school choice by the dubious mechanism of limiting choice to (1) public schools and (2) any other school whose student body includes at least 50% state-paid students as of this summer.

In other words, the approved independent schools.

Now, why in hell do the administration and the Senate’s top education policymaker put so much emphasis on protecting the approved independent schools? Could it be because the AIS’s spend heavily on Statehouse lobbying? It sure can’t hurt. But whatever the motivation, prioritizing the AIS’s is a distraction from the real goal of this enterprise: to improve the public school system.

There’s another aspect of Scott’s plan with no apparent connection to that goal: The transfer of rulemaking power from the state Board of Education to the Agency of Education. One might wonder why Scott would promote such a move considering that every member of the Board was appointed by himself (and many of its members have ties to the approved independent schools). I mean, can’t he count on the Board for policymaking pliancy?

Well, yes he can. But the Board must do its business in public meetings. A state agency can conduct its deliberations and make its decisions behind closed doors. (As it did when it came up with this whiz-banger of an education overhaul plan with no public involvement.)

Okay, here’s another fly in the school reform ointment. That clunky provision in the Scott plan that would limit private schools’ access to public dollars? What are the chances it would survive the inevitable lawsuit from a deep-pocketed conservative law firm? Especially in the wake of a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that says if a state gives taxpayer-funded scholarships to private school students, it cannot exclude religious schools from such a program. That decision has already forced Vermont to provide tuition dollars to religious schools as long as those dollars do not directly fund religious education. The Scott plan is practically an open invitation to another lawsuit with potentially worse implications.

One big thing that’s ignored in all of this talk of centralization and consolidation is that public schools are not just education factories, they are community resources. Lots of good things happen in public schools that aren’t directly related to educating kids. Just as a for-instance, the February 26 edition of Eva Sollberger’s “Stuck in Vermont” video series is about an afterschool program at the Newark Street School where a group of kids learn culinary skills while preparing meals for local seniors.

Maybe instead of seeing how many schools we can shut down through arbitrary class size minimums and top-down decision-making, we should view them as valuable community resources and focus our efforts on preserving them at reasonable cost. Maybe we localize the early grades and do more consolidation at upper levels. Maybe we relieve schools of the burden of providing social services and integrate those programs into the Agency of Human Services. I don’t know if those notions are workable; I offer them as evidence that there are possibilities beyond Phil Scott’s dismal menu of cutting and centralizing.

So. Here’s hoping the House Education Committee holds a rational, thorough discussion of H.454, and then says “Thanks, but no thanks.” Leave the property tax issue for the House Ways & Means Committee to handle. As for the rest, let the Vermont Commission on the Future of Public Education do the work it was chosen to do, and come back with a set of recommendations in time for the 2026 legislative session. Public education governance and financing is in need of serious reform. We should try to get it right instead of rushing through a belatedly-presented bill with massive implications for one of our most important and beloved public institutions.