1. Education Issues in Montpelier
2. State Board Votes No on Vermonters’ Opinions
3. DC Scholarship Plan Nixed

The legislature has yet to move on any significant education bills, but a few notable ones are either "sitting on the wall" or being discussed that could bring either harm or help, depending on one’s perspective. Here’s a quick look of what’s happening under and around the Golden Dome:

H.98: This bill, sponsored by Reps. Michael Obuchowski (D-Rockingham), Michael Mrowicki (D-Putney), and Carolyn Partridge (D-Windham), would not allow library employees to keep secret from parents or guardians the records of children under the age of 18. This bill is introduced in response to the commotion raised a year ago over a push to keep library records private—even the records of minors from their parents. So far, the only movement on the bill has been its introduction and referral to committee.

H.159: This bill, introduced by Reps. William Johnson (R-Canaan) and Ira Trombley (D-Grand Isle), would allow tuition towns --towns with no public school of their own, usually no public high school -- to "designate" a nearby public school as their school.  Here’s the problem – if towns designate a nearby public school as their school, tuitioning to other schools, including independent ones, could cease. Here’s some background on this bill:

• Currently, education statute allows tuition towns to tuition to public and nonreligious approved independent schools or to "designate" an approved nonreligious independent school as the public school of the district. When an independent school is thus designated, it can receive the same funding level as a public school in exchange for accepting all students.

• Public school advocates are asking that the "playing field be leveled" so that public schools can be designated as a tuition town’s school, just as independent schools can be.

• Such a change will tilt the playing field in favor of public schools. Public schools already have "captive" audiences – students in their own districts. Independent schools do not have that advantage. They must recruit students with no guarantees of a base enrollment. Giving public schools the "designation" possibility would give them yet one more advantage over independent schools. While only a tiny minority of tuition towns actually designate a school as their school, being able to designate a public school might increase that number. Town public school boards are likely to be far more comfortable designating public schools than independent ones. While school boards could still allow tuitioning to other schools, if a public school is designated, the reality is that will be the only school allowed as stated by law.

• This could limit the choice of the parents to choose a school that best fits the needs of their child.

Governor’s plans: Newspaper reports indicate the governor’s state personnel cuts include some in the department of education, and particularly in the homeschool monitoring department, shifting those responsibilities to local school districts. This can not be done without a statutory change and homeschooler concerns are on edge concerning their homeschooling freedoms. Many are concerned about consistency between the districts and a general lack of understand by the school districts of what homeschooling is. The methods and styles used by parents are as varied as the parents themselves.

STATE BOARD VOTES TO IGNORE VERMONTERS’ OPINIONS ON CHOICE

Last month, as noted in this newsletter, Vermonters for Better Education and the Friedman Foundation released a Strategic Vision poll on Vermonters’ attitudes about education in general and school choice in particular (the poll is available on the VBE website: vermontersforbettereducation.com). On the issue of vouchers, the poll merely confirmed what a Vermont Public Radio poll found ten years earlier: a sizable majority of respondents support school choice.

The survey was presented to the State Board of Education, which voted not to endorse it or consider it, relying on criticisms of the poll done by two public school advocacy organizations one of which has a board made up of state teacher union representatives. Here’s a March 4 Caledonian-Record editorial on that particular vote:

Crass ignorance is the refusal to know the reality because knowing will force a person to change his life in a way to which he does not want. It is willed ignorance, commonly expressed as, "Don't confuse me with the facts, because I've already made up my mind." If ever there was a clear example of crass ignorance, it is the rejection of school choice for parents by the Vermont State Board of Education and the state's new commissioner of education.

Armando Vilaseca, the new commissioner, has recommended that the education board reject, out-of-hand, the results of a Friedman Foundation survey of 1,200 Vermonters on school choice. An overwhelming number of those polled, upwards of 90 percent, favored parental choice. That apparently upset Vilaseca so much that he insisted that the board not only not pay attention to it, but also eliminate it as a document worth studying if and when parental choice comes up.

Vilaseca's panic and the board's sympathetic ear to his adamant rejection are so crass as to defy and deny reality. There are compelling reasons to study and include parental choice of schools in our whole educational scheme of things. Here are four of them.

• Virtually every poll of parents taken in the past 15 years everywhere in the country has been overwhelmingly in favor of school choice for all parents.

• Wherever parental choice is part of the school scene, the performance of the children of choice has risen dramatically, especially in places where minority populations, heretofore condemned to low achievement schools, have been able to choose.

• Where parental choice is allowed, it becomes an incentive for the local public schools to get better. It is the inevitable result of introducing the market function into what has been a socialistic monopoly, controlled by instincts for self-preservation of teachers' unions and dull administrative bureaucrats. This rising tide raises all ships.

• The cost of alternative schools created through school choice is almost always substantially lower than their wholly public counterparts.

Vermont has a very successful system of school choice that is as old as the establishment of public high schools. It is the dirty little secret of the public school establishment, that, when it is reported at all by them, it is reported to be elitist, expensive, and non-democratic.

Witness St. Johnsbury Academy, a school of choice for nearly a thousand public school parents and children. SJA is among the top 20 College Board schools in the nation to qualify students for college. It is number one in Vermont. That's a function of choice and private entrepreneurship. When was the last time you heard a public school figure praise the Academy, or L.I., or Riverside School, or Justin Morgan School, or Union Baptist School, or Good Shepherd School? You haven't, and you won't.

What you will hear is the denial of reality of the crassly ignorant, such as Commissioner Armando Vilaseca, those on the State Board of Education who wear blinders, Angelo Dorta, the head of NEA-VT., William Mathis, chief apologist for educational socialism, and their ilk. And as long as they sit in the seats of power, the desires of parents to choose their schools won't be heard. For parents, schools offering a product that parents and kids want at an affordable price is the key to success. That's what scares the crassly ignorant.

THE CHILDREN OF WASHINGTON, DC LOSE A LIFELINE

Congress and the President have been spending billions of dollars in the past several weeks, but the current budget bill actually contained language that TOOK AWAY EDUCATION MONEY FROM LOW-INCOME CHILDREN. Specifically, the budget bill contained a provision that let the DC Opportunity Scholarship program, a project that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for low-income children in the District of Columbia to attend the schools of their choice, to end next year. Despite a valiant effort by some Senators, the budget bill passed without any amendments to spare this valuable program.

Below this article, you will find a link to a YouTube video featuring students from the scholarship program speaking out, and an editorial about the program that appeared in the Washington Post.

If you want to let your congressman and senators know how disappointed you are that the DC Scholarship program is not allowed to continue, here are their Burlington offices contact information:

Rep. Peter Welch
30 Main Street
Third Floor, Suite 350
Burlington, VT 05401
Phone: (888) 605-7270 (toll free in Vermont)
(802) 652-2450
Contact page of web site: http://www.house.gov/formwelch/issue_subscribe.htm

Sen. Patrick Leahy
199 Main Street, Fourth Floor
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 863-2525
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov

Sen. Bernie Sanders
1 Church Street, Second Floor
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 354-8732
Contact page of web site: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/comments/

To hear the voices of actual DC Scholarship Students addressing President Obama, click on this link.

'Potential' Disruption?
Ending D.C. school vouchers would dash the best hopes of hundreds of children.
Monday, March 2, 2009; A16

REP. DAVID R. Obey (Wis.) and other congressional Democrats should spare us their phony concern about the children participating in the District's school voucher program. If they cared for the future of these students, they wouldn't be so quick as to try to kill the program that affords low-income, minority children a chance at a better education. Their refusal to even give the program a fair hearing makes it critical that D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) seek help from voucher supporters in the Senate and, if need be, President Obama.

Last week, the Democrat-controlled House passed a spending bill that spells the end, after the 2009-10 school year, of the federally funded program that enables poor students to attend private schools with scholarships of up to $7,500. A statement signed by Mr. Obey as Appropriations Committee chairman that accompanied the $410 billion spending package directs D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to "promptly take steps to minimize potential disruption and ensure smooth transition" for students forced back into the public schools.

We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible "disruption" with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. "The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me," Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities -- such as a trip to China for her son -- made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don't work, and she'll list her children's improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.

But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

This week, the Senate takes up the omnibus spending bill, and we hope that, with the help of supporters such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the program gets the reprieve it deserves. If it doesn't, someone needs to tell Ms. Parker why a bunch of elected officials who can send their children to any school they choose are taking that option from her.

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The VERMONT EDUCATION REPORT is published by Vermonters for Better Education PO Box 255, Woodbury, VT 05681 - 802-472-5491. The Vermont Education Report may be reprinted with the editor's permission. For more information contact: VBE@comcast.net or visit us on the web: http://www.schoolreport.com

VERMONTERS FOR BETTER EDUCATION is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to enlist parents and the public at large in achieving quality educational opportunities for all the children of Vermont by monitoring the state of education in Vermont; promoting the value of educational freedoms for all parents; and giving parents the evaluative tools with which to identify excellence.

Retta Dunlap, executive director
VBE@comcast.net