Category Archives: Education

Here’s a Funny Way to Express Confidence in a Cabinet Nominee

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Rather devastating piece has been posted in an unlikely spot, Forbes Magazine, about Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s pick for education secretary. It’s written by Peter Greene, a longtime schoolteacher turned education commentator. We’ll go through some specifics, including a lengthy quote from an unidentified writer at something called The Vermont Political Observer*, but this must be addressed right off the top.

*Hey Peter, next time check the “About” page.

Governor Scott’s office, which did not yet respond to a request for
comment for this article, has said that Saunders will not be doing any
more interviews until she’s in office.

Hoo boy. Batten down the ramparts, boys. Pull up the drawbridge. Sound red alert. Someone go below decks and look for a hull breach, because I think we’re taking on water.

The administration’s refusal to make Saunders available for interviews can only be taken one of two ways: They don’t trust her to speak contemporaneously, or they’re very, very nervous about her prospects for Senate approval. Neither is what you’d call a good look.

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Somebody Made Phil Scott Really Mad, and It Might Have Been Me

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Ruh-roh. Governor Nice Guy is putting his hard-won reputation at risk.

This morning his office put out a press release slamming critics of Zoie Saunders, his unqualified choice for education secretary. It’s a real piece of work, and I’d like to think I had a hand in inspiring this outpouring of wrath.

Not just me, of course. There are plenty of people who’ve questioned the Saunders nod. But you know, hope springs eternal.

Saunders’ nomination is subject to Senate ratification, and there are signs it might be in some trouble. A sizeable number of senators are raising questions about her selection. It’s unclear how many will sign on, but Saunders isn’t going to get a quick rubber-stamping. The governor’s people clearly see this, which is why he is striking back so aggressively.

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The Great Broward County Public Schools Land Grab, Starring Your New Education Secretary

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More information has emerged regarding Zoie Saunders’ brief stint as Chief School Executioner (Ed. Note: Actual title may vary) for the Broward County Public Schools. It’s not exactly flattering, and it raises questions about the timing of Gov. Phil Scott’s hiring process.

Reminder that in December, a mere three months ago, Saunders was hired specifically to manage a consolidation effort in Broward County’s schools, many of which are underenrolled. The plan has been awash in controversy as school officials have dropped unsubtle hints that it’s a done deal even before a series of public forums was held, and many fear the closures will disproportionately hit students of color. There are also massive questions about the scale of the effort; as few as five schools or as many as several dozen could be targeted.

And a March 9 article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that the plan “could turn into a major land grab for local cities and developers,” including operators of charter schools. “The district owns about 38 million square feet worth of property in a county where open land is scarce,” according to the Sun Sentinel, so you can see how this unschooling plan could touch off a feeding frenzy.

This casts the plan in a different light, as a way for system administrators to ease budgetary pressure by cashing in some prime real estate. Might work in the short run, but it’s not a strategy for sustainability.

And managing this process, which she is abandoning well before her job is done, is the sum total of Zoie Saunders’ experience in public school management.

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The New Education Secretary Is Literally Unqualified for the Job, and That’s Not the Bad Part

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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.”

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What the Hell is Going On with the Agency of Education?

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It’s been kind of a rough year for the Agency of Education, which would have likely warranted the Only In Journalism term “embattled” by now if there was a healthy Vermont political media ecosystem, which there is decidedly not. The Agency occasionally pops up in the press, and the news is always bad, puzzling, or both. But I have yet to see anything like an answer to the question posed in my headline.

It should have, by now. And here’s why.

The search process for a new education secretary has been going on for close to a full year. It was mid-March 2023 when Dan French, dubbed by Yours Truly “the Inspector Clouseau of the Scott Cabinet,” abruptly skedaddled. Gee, I hope it wasn’t something I said.

Specifically, it was March 17, 2023 (you needn’t ask, but yes, it was a Friday newsdump) “state officials” announced that he would, per VTDigger, “take an unspecified ‘senior leadership role’ at the Council of Chief State School Officers, an organization of state education officials.” His first day at the new gig was April 10, a little more than three weeks after the announcement of his departure from AOE. That’s an awfully quick turnaround for someone in the spheres of upper management. (The “unspecified role” turned out to be Chief Operating Officer, which sounds impressive enough. Doubtless working for a D.C.-based nonprofit is a more tee-time-friendly gig than running a short-staffed agency operating in a political minefield.)

Since then, things have meandered in a way reminiscent of a roadside DUI test. It almost makes you pine for the days when French’s hand was on the tiller.

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Here She Comes Again, Again

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The good people of Milton, whether they want it or not, are getting a third chance to snap back at the extremism of Allison Duquette, who seems intent on entering the fabled territory of such luminaries as H. Brooke Paige, Cris Ericson, and Emily Peyton — fringe candidates who simply won’t take “Hell, No” for an answer.

Duquette, last seen in early 2023 running for school board in MIlton, and before that in 2022 running for State House, has tossed her battered fedora into the ring once again, making her second consecutive bid for school board. She announced her third candidacy with one heck of a letter to the editor of the MIlton Independent in which she tried to paint herself as a down-the-middle, “listening to all sides” sort of person who just wants good schools at a reasonable cost. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving along.

Too bad there are people like me to fill in the details.

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Our Sincere Best Wishes to the New Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges

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From a quick look at her background, Elizabeth Mauch seems an odd choice to fill one of the hottest seats in all of Vermont. But fill it she will, as the new chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges.

It’s one hell of a big job, and she’ll have to hit the ground running.

Mauch’s first priority will be to continue cutting budgets. Mike Smith got things off to a strong start, but he almost certainly picked all the low-hanging fruit. It’s only going to get tougher from here.

Mauch will arrive in Vermont from perhaps the unlikeliest outpost of academia you could imagine: a small private college in a tiny town dead in the middle of Kansas, 200 miles west of Kansas City.

How small? Bethany College has a student body of… 800. That compares to a total enrollment of more than 11,000 in the VSC system. Bethany’s location, Lindsborg, has a population of… less than 4,000, most of Swedish descent. The hottest ticket in Lindsborg is the every-other-year Svensk Hyllningsfest, a two-day extravaganza that honors the community’s heritage with Swedish dancing, music, arts, crafts, a beer garden, and a big ol’ smorgasbord.

More culture shock? VSC is a public entity answerable to the people and political leaders of Vermont, while Bethany is a Christian institution owned and operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

To sum up, Mauch leads a small college on a campus that covers about six square blocks and fits into a neat org chart. In Vermont she’ll take charge of a sprawling, multi-campus empire whose constituent parts were recently forced to merge.

And her tenure at Bethany goes back a whole entire [checks notes] three years.

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Bookshelf: Much More Than a Dark Chapter

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Not to overstate the case, but this is one of the most important Vermont history books ever written. Vermont for the Vermonters by Mercedes de Guardiola tells a sweeping tale of eugenics in our state, and makes it clear that the story is much longer and deeper than we’d like to think. She also reveals that much of the story has yet to be told and may never be, thanks to poor record keeping and lax oversight. (The newly established Truth and Reconciliation Commission has a hell of a job on its hands.)

The back cover blurb refers to eugenics as “one of Vermont’s darkest chapters.” That’s a massive undersell of the book. We might like to think of it as a single chapter at some remove from the rest of our history, but it’s more like the dark underbelly of Vermont’s character, always lurking about and always influencing our politics and policies.

Two big takeaways from the book. One, we have always “othered” the less fortunate, portraying them as somehow alien to solid, hardworking “real Vermonters.” Two, we have a long and horrible history of failing the people we’ve chosen to institutionalize. Both points were true long before Gov. John Mead brought eugenics into the center of Vermont politics or Henry Perkins became head of the Eugenics Survey, and both still resonate in the present day. (On the former, see our reaction to homelessness and substance use. On the second, see Joe Sexton’s exposé of abuses at the laughably named and now mercifully defunct Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Facility.)

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Adventures in Serial Journalism, Dirt Cheap Job Search Edition

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This post is about three very different attempts to cover the same story. But before we pick over the bones, let’s address the meat of the matter. For whatever reason, the Scott administration is not only rushing its search for a new education secretary, it’s spent a shockingly small amount of money on the task.

Seven Days’ Alison Novak got the goods, revealing that the administration has spent a measly $495 on a search now scheduled to close, um, tomorrow. By comparison, she noted, school districts routinely invest 20 times that much on a basic search for a superintendent, and often spend far more.

The only flaw in Novak’s story was the headline, written in the form of a question: Is Vermont Doing Enough to Find the Right Leader for Its Education Agency? Remarkably timid header for a story that clearly identifies the answer as “Fuck, no!”

I mean, they posted the opening on professional job sites and that’s about it. Maybe they also taped a photocopied listing to the agency’s front door (complete with little “Contact Us” tabs at the bottom), but whatever, it’s simply pathetic.

Okay, there’s the substance. Now let’s take a somewhat speculative walk down the Memory Lane of journalism.

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Is There ANY Good News About Vermont State University?

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I don’t want to be overly alarmist about this, so I used a smiley happy dumpster fire illustration instead of the out-of-control inferno kind. But good grief, where exactly is Vermont State University headed?

The latest is the announced departure of system chancellor Sophie Zdatny, who will leave VSU at the end of this year. Don’t forget that interim VSU President Mike Smith, who took the job in April, has promised to stay on for only six months. He’s now in month number five, so time’s running out. Smith replaced Parwinder Grewal, who resigned even before VSU was officially launched because he’d squandered all his political capital on an ill-considered decision to close the system’s libraries.

Zdatny, you may recall, replaced Jeb Spaulding, who resigned as chancellor in 2020 after floating a universally unpopular — but absolutely sensible — plan to consolidate the system by closing the Johnson, Lyndon and Randolph campuses.

It’s been bad times, and we haven’t even gotten to the finances or the precipitous 19% drop in 2023-4 enrollment or the looming demographic crisis staring the system right in the face. And now we’re looking at a leadership vacuum that will see VSU saddled with interim leadership for, what’s that? Two more years?

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