After the School District Redistricting Task Force* recommended a voluntary plan instead of new district maps, Gov. Phil Scott responded with guns a-blazin’. And as is often the case when you go guns a-blazin’, there was a bit of an accuracy problem.
*Seriously, who named this thing?
Then again, one couldn’t really expect him to identify the real culprit: the governor himself.
For those just joining us, Scott said that the Task Force “didn’t fulfill its obligation” under Act 73. “They were supposed to put forward three maps for consideration, and they failed,” he said on Thursday. (Not true, actually; more later.) And he blasted Task Force members for being “OK with the ever-increasing property taxes, cost of education, and they don’t want to see change.”
I understand his dismay but he’s being a bit harsh on a group of Vermonters who know more about public education than he ever will, and who gave of their time, sweat and tears to try to meet an unreasonable deadline. He could have at least thanked them for their service. Even if he didn’t mean it.
Especially since the real author of this failure isn’t anyone on the Task Force. It’s the governor himself.
Well, the panel tasked with drawing new school district maps for the entire state has essentially turned down the assignment and tossed the whole mess back into the laps of Our Political Betters.
Instead of completing the assignment contained in Act 73, which was to draw up to three different maps for the Legislature to choose from or ignore), the School District Redistricting Task Force* instead proposed a plan to incentivize voluntary mergers among school districts.
This week’s media roundup focuses on a single subject, which was almost inescapable as I made may weekly tour of Vermont news outlets. That subject is education reform, specifically the process outlined in Act 73, the wide-ranging measure railroaded through the Legislature by Gov. Phil Scott with the active connivance of Senate Democratic leadership. It’s now in the early stages of implementation, and wouldn’t you know, everybody seems to hate the thing.
But first. I took a brief trip to Cornwall, Ontario last week. It’s a smallish (by any standard other than Vermont’s; its population is bigger than Burlington’s) city known to Americans, if it’s known at all, as the Canadian side of an international bridge over the St. Lawrence River. While I was there, I did a little reading about Cornwall and came across the story of the Lost Villages.
I’d been through Cornwall many times while driving to and from my home state of Michigan, but I’d never heard of the Lost Villages. They were ten communities in the Cornwall area that were evacuated and deliberately submerged in the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958. Roughly 6,500 people were displaced.
When I was back home and scanning Vermont media for this column, I found a common theme: stories across the state about local reaction to the rollout of Act 73. Reactions that include confusion, budding outrage, school officials trying to forestall the worst effects of the process, and universal dismay from those who work in public education. The closest thing to a positive view was, “Oh well, I guess we have to learn to live with this.”
Which made me realize, this is very much a large-scale, top-down, St. Lawrence Seaway approach to education reform. You know, the kind of thing Phil Scott spent his nonpolitical life doing — big, mechanized projects that might do a great deal of good in the aggregate while doing damage at the granular level. But it’s one thing when you conduct such a project for a large-scale benefit like improving long-haul travel. It’s a whole different thing when you deploy the heavy equipment to try to improve the educational experience of public school students.
Which is the goal of Act 73, right? Right?????
Well, I’m seven paragraphs deep into this piece, so I’d better get to the actual subject, don’t you think?
My weekly roundup of the best of Vermont journalism will again be posted late, most likely Wednesday. The delay in posting is because of the Legislature holding its final vote on H.454, the education reform bill, on Monday. Had to leave the decks cleared for that. And before I can get to the best of Vermont journalism, I have to begin with a massive media fail that reflects our sadly depleted news ecosystem.
Last week, a House-Senate conference committee was meeting to try to hash out a compromise education reform bill. The six conferees (three Senate, three House) met multiple times. Every meeting was warned in advance and was open to the public. And we got virtually no coverage at all of their highly impactful deliberations.
Now, I know legislative hearings can be a big fat drag. You can spend hours on an uncomfortable chair, sharing a tiny room with too many people, and wind up with nothing at all to report.
But this wasn’t your average legislative hearing, not at all.
First of all, “Declare victory and go home” is apparently one of many “famous quotes” that were never said at all, or never said by the person credited with saying them. (Usually Winston Churchill. Or Albert Einstein. Or Yogi Berra. Peas in a pod.) Details below, if you want to stick around.
Second of all, the “handshakes across the table” picture is not nearly as dramatic or satisfying when it’s taken from the viewpoint of the center-table cameras used to transmit legislative hearings. But I wasn’t there for the Big Moment, so I had to make do.
Now to the business at hand. After weeks of wrangling and repeated brushes with failure, legislative leaders and the governor reached a grand bargain of sorts on reforming public education finance and governance. Sounds impressive, right? But maaaan, the articles about this achievement are chock full of caveats and red flags. The more you read, the less monumental it seems. Really, it looks like a way for all concerned to engage in the Statehouse’s favorite participatory sport, kicking the can down the road.
If you think that’s overly cynical, I give you the words of none other than Gov. Phil Scott, who endorsed the bill and promised to twist Republican arms to try to get it past the entire House and Senate, an outcome that’s far from assured. Here’s how the governor described what this bill would do:
I believe it will put us on a path to stabilize property tax pressure for working Vermonters, while also putting us on a path to much needed governance reform that will unlock more opportunities for our kids.
The Phrase That Pays is “on a path.” This isn’t the actual transformation of our education system. This puts us “on a path” to transformation.
In other words, this bill is never going to take effect in its present form — even if it does pass the Legislature on Monday. Scott also predicted a return to the education reform issue next year, and he doesn’t think it will be any easier than this year.
Need more evidence that Our Betters just wrote themselves a “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Start with the fact that the bill wouldn’t take effect until 2028, a full year later than the governor had wanted. That’s plenty of time for second thoughts and rewrites.
Besides that, the bill is loaded with escape hatches, “off ramps” (Vermont Public’s Lola Duffort), and “is replete with unknowns and contingencies, and requires years of phase-ins and -outs before it takes full effect” (VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein).
Now, that’s lawmaking.
But to even get to the point where those off ramps and contingencies can be deployed, this bill has to survive a vote of the full House and Senate. The governor himself predicted that some Republicans and some Democrats would vote “no.” (Almost certainly some Progressives will as well, but I think Scott sees the Progs as a rounding error or something.) Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, who played a crucial role on the Committee of Conference that produced this bill, plans to spend the weekend urging his fellow Republicans to vote “yes,” and predicted plenty of uncomfortable and difficult conversations. “The conversation will definitely start with a lot of ‘no’s,” he said.
Which makes all the sense in the world. This bill would impose significant tax increases on some districts, mainly Republican ones, and force significant spending cuts in other districts, mainly Democratic ones. It would also lead to widespread school closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Honestly, if I were a Republican lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because it would clearly NOT be beneficial to my constituents. And if I were a Democratic lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because the bill would almost certainly force cuts in the public education system.
You and I won’t be privy to those arm-twistings, but I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that one of the key arguments will be “Don’t worry, this bill will never take effect. We’ll fix it next year.”
Speaking of which, you know what would come in real handy? A fully-empowered Commission on the Future of Public Education, the august body created by the Legislature last year and tasked with presenting a reform plan by the end of 2025. Given the obvious fact that this bill is deeply flawed and probably designed to never take effect, it sure would be nice to have a robust report from the Commission on how to fix this mess.
But wait, the governor and Legislature sidelined the Commission in their rush to Get Something Done This Year, even if it’s not the Right Thing. It still exists, but it’s in a limbo state, with no clear vision of what it’s supposed to accomplish and no institutional backing. Or as VTDigger’s Corey McDonald put it this week:
Now, as education reform proceeds, with only minor input from the body, the future of the commission tasked with studying the future of public education in Vermont is, itself, uncertain.
Well, that’s unfortunate.
For all the wrangling and the weeks of overtime, for all the struggles that split the House and Senate and will certainly divide the Democratic and Republican caucuses on Monday, we are nowhere near consensus on education reform. The governor himself predicted that next year’s debate on education reform will be “just as challenging, if not more” than this year’s. Great.
But hey, the Committee of Conference got its magical handshake moment, and that’s the best they could have hoped for.
Postscript. “Declare victory and go home,” or some variation on that theme, is universally credited to Vermont U.S. Sen. George Aiken. The phrase was a half-serious attempt to bring an end to the Vietnam War.
Except that, well, apparently he never said it. That’s according to Vermont historical journalist Mark Bushnell, who found that Aiken’s actual words were far more circuitous than the punchy, pithy version that now adorns many a QuoteFancy image. Here’s Busnell’s quotation of Aiken from the Congressional Record:
“(T)he United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam war is over — that we have ‘won’ in the sense that our Armed Forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam.”
That thing about “in control of most of the field” was a damn lie, and I suspect Aiken knew it. At best, we controlled the big cities and our military outposts.
But that’s not all. Aiken didn’t actually want us to “go home.” He wanted us to take a step back from aggressive military engagement in favor of “intensive reconnaissance,” whatever the hell that means. One of the causes of our defeat in Vietnam was a lack of reliable intelligence: We were incapable of doing effective reconnaissance because of language and cultural barriers, and South Vietnam was a corrupt basket case incapable of much of anything. According to Bushnell, Aiken did not believe the U.S. could or should leave Vietnam.
So much for our favorite wise man. But hey, you know, he’d probably feel right at home in our current education reform debate.
The Vermont Political Observer. 