Tag Archives: Zoie Saunders

Welcome to the Gubernatorial Spin Zone

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No, I didn’t expect Gov. Phil Scott to accept the Senate’s vote on Zoie Saunders with grace and equanimity. But he shouldn’t be allowed to rewrite the history of that lopsided rejection of his choice for education secretary.

In his press conference one day after Saunders was rejected, he called it “a partisan political hit job” in which Saunders was collateral damage in an attack aimed at himself:

I  think this was a partisan political hit job, so I would say once they get through that and they get their pound of flesh, which they did, it was all against me, that maybe they will come to their senses and see what I see and confirm her, if that’s the path they choose. 

Yeah, well, none of that is true.

A total of 19 senators voted against Saunders because of her scanty resumé. She’d barely served any time at all working in public schools — as a teacher, principal, district staffer, or janitor or lunch lady or bus driver for that matter. And she had little to no experience managing a sizable bureaucracy, which ought to be a prerequisite for being a cabinet secretary of any sort.

And if this was a case of “it was all against me,” then perhaps the governor could enlighten us about all the other times the Senate rejected a gubernatorial appointee. I can cut to the chase there: It’s never happened before.

As if that load of codswallop wasn’t insulting enough, the governor also accused the Senate of failing to perform due diligence:

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Well, At Least It Wasn’t the Most Violent Thing to Ever Happen in a Senate Chamber

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Wow. Not only did the state Senate reject Zoie Saunders’ nomination as education secretary, it did so on a lopsided 19-9 vote. That’s a damning indictment of how out of touch Gov. Phil Scott was in choosing her. I mean, it’s still unclear whether a Vermont Senate has ever rejected a cabinet appointee, much less by a better than two-to-one margin.

And of course the governor immediately appointed Saunders as interim secretary, effectively flipping the bird at the Senate. This won’t do anything to improve his turbulent relationship with the Legislature, but I doubt he really cares about that. If anything, this might presage a flurry of vengeful vetoes that would vault Scott’s all-time record into permanently unbreakable Cy Young territory. Hooray for Governor Nice Guy!

And, well, if condolences are ever in order for someone who just “won,” it’s for Zoie Saunders. She takes on a daunting challenge with an understaffed Education Agency and with the entire educational establishment wishing she would just go away and with two-thirds of the Senate rejecting her. I am convinced she was not the best choice for the job, but man, she’s sitting at the poker table with a deuce-seven off suit. Brutal.

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Team Scott Tries to Count to 15 and Comes Up Short

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Ruh-roh, Raggy. Something has gone off the rails in Montpelier.

After several days of lobbying the Senate and slamming its critics, the Scott administration has asked the Senate to, um, postpone its confirmation vote on Zoie Saunders, the governor’s choice for education secretary. (The development was first reported by VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein and later confirmed by Seven Days’ Alison Novak.)

You know what that means: They don’t have the votes. Which would be perhaps the most embarrassing failure in Scott’s seven-plus years in the corner office. He’s had vetoes overridden before, but that happens to every governor. These confirmation votes are usually perfunctory. Lower-level appointees have, on rare occasion, been rejected, but I haven’t seen any reference to the last time a cabinet nominee was sent packing. Certainly the administration didn’t foresee any trouble, considering that Saunders quit her job in Florida, moved her family to Vermont, and began working as education secretary, all before her confirmation was in the books.

Still, they should have seen it coming. What did they expect, when they nominated someone who’s patently unqualified for the job?

So of course the governor owned up to his mistake and BWAHAHAHAHAHA no he did not. He blamed the whole thing on “misinformation, false assumptions, and politicization” of her nomination by critics and opponents.

Which is a bunch of Grade-A Joe Biden malarkey. The criticism is focused on Saunders’ lack of experience in public schools, her long tenure at a for-profit charter school operator, and — at least from me — her nearly complete lack of any actual administrative experience.

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Why Is This Guy Chair of the Senate Education Committee? (With Correction)

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By all appearances, the Senate’s confirmation vote on Zoie Saunders (scheduled for Tuesday) is going down to the wire. The Scott administration sure seems to think so, if chief of staff Jason Gibbs’ obsession with Krista Huling is any indication. I’ve also been told that Gov. Phil Scott is making calls to key senators on behalf of his — Only in Journalism Word alert — embattled nominee for education secretary. That’s a level of personal attention he seldom gives to any matter before the Legislature.

If the Senate does reject Saunders, it will be a seismic (another Only in Journalism word) event in our politics. It’s extremely rare for the Senate to reject a gubernatorial nominee. Certainly the administration took that step for granted. (As did Vermont Public.) Otherwise they wouldn’t have let Saunders disrupt her life and career to take the job. One has to wonder if she was fully informed about the risk involved.

If the Senate does reject Saunders due to her stunning lack of experience as (1) a public educator and (2) an administrator overseeing a sizable bureaucracy, it will be in spite of, not because of, the Senate Education Committee’s failure to carry out its responsibility to vet Saunders’ nomination.

Which leads me to the man pictured above, committee chair Sen. Brian Campion, and the rather curious composition of his committee.

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Things Are Getting a Bit Tetchy In and Around the Saunders Nomination

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Sparks are flying in what is essentially a proxy battle over Zoie Saunders’ nomination as education secretary. Hours before she was approved on a 3-2 vote in the Senate Education Committee, former state board or education chair Krista Huling appeared before the House Education Committee dishing some dirt on the process that led to the hiring of Dan French in 2018 and asserting that Gov. Phil Scott “does not have a public vision for education,” and in fact, wants the public school “system to collapse.” The timing of her testimony, while Saunders’ fate lies in the balance, cannot possibly be a coincidence.

I wrote about that yesterday, but there have been developments. First of all, Gov. Phil Scott’s chief of staff Jason Gibbs apparently hightailed it to House Education as Huling was wrapping up, to complain to committee chair Rep. Peter Conlon about her testimony. This was reported, based on anonymous eyewitness accounts, by Seven Days’ Alison Novak*, and today I confirmed it with Conlon. He would not go into specifics; “It was a private conversation,” he told me, “but [admin spokesman] Jason Maulucci’s comments to Seven Days pretty much summed up the conversation.”

*But not, curiously, by the diligent Diggers at “Final Reading.“ To be fair, they had to save room in the column for the red-hot news about House Speaker Jill Krowinski’s new betta fish.

It must have been a hot little confab, considering that Maulucci characterized Huling’s testimony as “unsubstantiated lies from an individual with a demonstrated political agenda.” (Huling left the board in order to serve as campaign manager treasurer for former education secretary Rebecca Holcombe’s run for governor.) Which raises the question, why in Hell does Gibbs think he can barge into a legislative committee and upbraid the chair for calling a witness? He may run the executive branch, but committee chairs can call whatever witnesses they want. Even ones that might possibly have a bias. Which is, as near as I can tell, every last one of ’em.

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While Senate Education is Fluffing Pillows, House Education is Tossing Bombs

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I’m sure it was merely a coincidence. But one day after the Senate Education Committee went all Patty Hearst Syndrome in its confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Zoie Saunders, and on the same day the Senate panel voted 3-2 in favor of her, the House Education Committee scheduled a witness who excoriated the politicization of the Education Agency, questioned Gov. Phil Scott’s commitment to public schools, and revealed some backstage maneuverings around the selection of the last secretary, Dan French.

The witness was Krista Huling, former chair of the state board of education. Why was she called, seemingly out of nowhere, on Wednesday, April 24? Committee chair Rep. Peter Conlon invited her to testify in response to “a lot of discussion around the building” about how the education system has changed since Act 98 was passed in 2012. Act 98 made the state Board of Education much less powerful and gave the governor significantly more control over education policy.

And if you think that has nothing to do with Zoie Saunders, well, God bless.

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Senate Committee Conducts Pillowy Soft Job Interview

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Yeah, well, that was depressing.

The Senate Education Committee held its confirmation hearing this afternoon for Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s choice for education secretary. She was smiling broadly as the hearing commenced, and she had every reason to smile at the end. The committee failed to raise some very pertinent issues. When they did pose tough questions, they often carefully blunted the sharp edge. (Commitee chair Sen. Brian Campion led the league in “tell me a little bit about” questions, which is an open invitation for the interviewee to wander off in whatever direction they want.) They often asked about what she would do as education secretary or what policies she would pursue, which Saunders easily sidestepped in the familiar manner of Supreme Court nominees batting away hypotheticals.

The bulk of the hearing was a comfortable exchange of educational jargon, the wrapping of empty thought into multisyllabic cloth that obscures the emptiness of the dialogue. It’s familiar ground for Saunders, who’s been a professional educator for the better part of two decades, and it’s equally familiar for members of the Education Committee, who exist in the rarefied air of the profession’s bafflegab. It makes them feel smart, don’t you know.

What the committee failed to do is treat the hearing like a job interview with an applicant with questionable qualifications. The point should have been to explore Saunders’ background and clarify her rightness for the position. The committee accomplished little in that regard. At the end of the affair, there was no hint of any continuing opposition to her nomination. I will be stunned if the committee doesn’t recommend approval by the full Senate. Hell, they’ve set aside an entire… 15 minutes… for committee discussion of her nomination Wednesday afternoon.

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A Few Questions for Zoie Saunders

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Tuesday is the big day. Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s pick for education secretary, goes before the Senate Education Committee in the first step toward Senate confirmation of her selection. In advance of the occasion, here are some questions I would ask if I were, saints preserve us, a member of that committee.

In preparation for this post, I listened to Saunders’ interview last week on “Vermont Edition,” and I have some questions about that program as well. But first, let’s put Saunders in my entirely imaginary witness chair.

There are some obvious questions I wouldn’t bother to ask because others will. Questions about charter schools and school choice, for instance. Saunders is well practiced in answering those with a flurry of multisyllabic educationese. I’m assuming someone will ask her about her lack of experience in public schools and why she chose to spend her career almost entirely outside of public education.

I would ask Saunders about her unusual job search last year. She was the chief education officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale at the time. She applied for the Vermont position last fall and, at around the same time, she applied for an opening with the Broward County Public Schools. On November 15, the Vermont Board of Education forwarded three names to the governor; we now know that Saunders was one of the three. About a month later, she started work at BCPS as head of a consolidation process meant to address declining enrollment in the system.

And then, three months into a complicated, controversial process, she accepted the position in Vermont and left Florida on very short notice. (She was introduced by the governor on March 22 and started work in Vermont on April 15.) This raises a number of concerns.

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…On the Other Hand…

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It has been suggested to me that I’m dead wrong about Zoie Saunders’ prospects in the Senate. I would like nothing better, and I can see the argument although I’m not entirely convinced because, well, I have so little faith in Our Solons to do the right thing.

My take was that the Senate was likely to rubber-stamp Saunders’ nomination as education secretary after a brief, polite interrogatory. The latest piece of evidence: a press release from the Agency of Education touting Saunders’ first day on the job and blithely ignoring the Senate’s duty to ratify her selection.

I interpreted the press release as an expression of confidence. But it could also be seen as whistling past the graveyard. Like, maybe the administration is worried about the Senate process and trying to pretend it isn’t a real thing.

This would be of a piece with the Saunders rollout from the very beginning. She was introduced at a hastily-convened press conference on a Newsdump Day. Her nomination was announced a bit more than three weeks before her first day on the job, which is a very short time frame for an executive who has to exit an important position elsewhere and make a 1,500-mile relocation. The administration snapped back, perhaps too aggressively, at initial skepticism of the pick with overblown accusations of misogyny and anti-Florida prejudice. And then the administration asked the Senate Education Committee to hold off on a Saunders hearing until next week, giving her a faint aura of incumbency in advance of the Senate vote. Every step seems to line up.

Plus, I have a new piece of evidence that the administration isn’t feeling too secure right about now.

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A Few Words for Anyone Expecting Full Scrutiny of the Zoie Saunders Nomination

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Welp, the Scott administration has put out a press release trumpeting Zoie Saunders’ first day on the job as Vermont’s education secretary. Nowhere does it mention that her appointment is pending approval by the state Senate, which won’t even begin considering the matter until sometime next week.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The press release says that “Saunders will travel around the state in the coming weeks” and “In the months ahead, Secretary Saunders will kick off a formal listen and learn tour.”

Yeah, the fix is in. The Senate will put on a show of performing due diligence, but honestly, there’s no way in Hell they’re going to send her back to Florida.

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