Amid the uproar over the dramatic spike in school taxes many communities experienced this year, the Legislature created the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont. It is charged with studying “the provision of education in Vermont and (making) recommendations for a statewide vision for Vermont’s public education system to ensure that all students are afforded substantially equal educational opportunities in an efficient, sustainable, and stable education system… .”
This mandate has been characterized as nothing less than re-imagining the state’s education system and how to pay for it. That’s not a task for the faint of heart, not least because so many factors shaping the future of education here and elsewhere are unimaginable: the velocity and impact of technological change; shifting demographics; federal mandates and funding; changing cultural and social attitudes, to name a few.
Fortunately, the commission does have some first principles available to shape its work. In 1997, the Vermont Supreme Court in the Brigham decision declared that all Vermont school children are constitutionally entitled to substantially equal educational opportunity and that it is the state’s duty to provide it.
The commission’s first job, in our view, is to clarify what equal educational opportunity looks like in practice, evaluate how well the current system has fulfilled the obligation to provide it and envision how the education system of the future will ensure that no matter where children live in Vermont, they have the same chance to thrive educationally — whether academically, artistically, vocationally or in some other way yet to be imagined.
The current system does not provide access to exactly the same educational services and expenditures from district to district, nor did the Supreme Court require that kind of absolute uniformity. So perhaps a working understanding of the mandate is that each child must be afforded an education that allows them to fulfill their potential as productive citizens of Vermont and the bigger world.
This does not mean that educational outcomes must be substantially equal. That will inevitably vary according to students’ motivation, aptitude, social support and their preparedness to learn when they enter school. If the idea underpinning equal educational opportunity is to create a level playing field for all, then the commission should pay special attention to how well the system prepares Vermont preschoolers to learn and what additional resources and initiatives might be required in the future.
Equal educational opportunity does not necessarily mean that the education provided must be of high quality, although probably most Vermonters would think that it’s implied. We do not envy commission members in trying to define what constitutes a high quality public school education now and envision what it might mean in the future. Standardized test assessments are one measure of student progress, but only one. And quality can hinge on such things as an individual student’s access to a gifted teacher.
In any case, it seems to us that a Vermont public school education ought to somehow cherish those characteristics that distinguish the state. For example, civics education at all levels ought to be a priority in a state where direct democracy in the pure form of Town Meeting still exists, at least in some communities. And obviously, the natural world and its beauty, and how to protect the environment, ought to play a central role in an educational future that exposes children to traditional settlement patterns and historical land use.
If all this has the aura of abstraction, the commission’s other mandate contains the cold reality of how to pay for the future it imagines without imposing an intolerable burden on taxpayers. We propose to return to that subject in this space another day.