The Commission on the Future of Public Education in VT’s subcommittee on Finance Reform met on September 4th (going back a bit, but the Commission has not been too punctual about posting its meeting recordings). It was their first meeting so, in fairness, expectations for any real substance were low. Still, some initial observations are worth making.
First, it was rather discouraging that the group elected Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (D-Brattleboro) as its chair. Kornheiser is, you might recall, chair of the House Ways & Means Committee that did nothing in the last legislative session to fix – or attempt to fix – the underlying problems with this system. She famously said during the deliberations, “There’s no decision on no taxes here. That’s just not an option.”
She was quoted in an article in Seven Days as saying, “The path to making government work is that government has enough money.” The same article noting that,” She found her way to the now defunct Marlboro College in southern Vermont, where she… was soon captivated by sociology and Karl Marx,” which could be interpreted as meaning for government to have enough money it needs to have ALL the money.
Kornheiser was also a driving force behind Act 127, the debacle of a pupil weighting law that was in great part responsible for spiking up education spending and the property taxes that fund it.
During the September 4 meeting she said, “I honestly don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve.” A line she repeated a handful of times throughout.
Here’s a clue: Vermonters are being driven out of their homes by out of control property taxes you’ve created to fund an increasingly failing public school system with a rapidly declining student population. A story from VPR out of Putney, Kornheiser’s neighboring town, quoted one resident, “My wife and I, this Saturday, looked at a home in another state. I lived here, graduated from this very school 50 years ago, and it breaks my heart to think that I’m thinking that way, but it looks like I’m being priced out.”
That, Ms. Kornheiser, is the problem you are trying to solve.
Still, later in the meeting Kornheiser said, “I don’t know if we’re spending too much money or if we’re just spending it in the wrong places…. Every time folks talk about spending too much money I think of those districts in our state that are drastically underspending.” Uh, what? “So, I really want to keep an eagle eye on that piece of the puzzle to make sure that we’re not creating the wrong incentives.” Like incentives to control spending? Those are the incentives she doesn’t want to create.
All this is by way of saying, THIS is the person put in charge of leading the effort to get education spending and taxing under control? What the actual…. And good luck to us with this.
There was one bright spot in this meeting: Zoie Saunders, the controversial Secretary of Education appointed by Governor Scott. Saunders was focused, knows what the problem is (she defined it in a clear and succinct paragraph), tried to bring structure and an open minded, data-driven approach to how the group will proceed with its work. Unfortunately she has an uphill battle ahead.
I’ll end this with an enlightening exchange between Saunders and Kornheiser.
SAUNDERS: “A very important thing for us to consider is to put everything on the table…. I think it’s really important for us to be open minded and really create a very comprehensive menu of options even if some of those considerations have been looked at before. To really model what the impact would be so that we would be coming to some concrete recommendations….. There may be some ideas that simply do not work, but I would hope we don’t prejudge those ideas, and maybe one of our first deliverables is to create that comprehensive menu of options and identify what we would need to learn about those options in order for them to be viable for our system. Then a second phase would be to begin to model what that implementation would look like. And in that work, we have to be mindful of affordability and education quality, and make sure we’re making a balanced approach with that.”
KORNHEISER: “It’s really hard in a public meeting to be creative and generative and brainstorm, and even make a comprehensive list of past ideas because if you’re the person bringing up the past idea you must be the person who loves the past idea…. If this were an easy problem to solve it would have been solved already. We don’t even know what the problem is! So, any answer, any idea, is going to have consequences to it and a variety of stakeholders that are not interested in that solution.”
I’ll translate that last bit. Kornhieser is saying that the special interest groups that make up the government education Blob don’t like those past recommendations – like cutting back on staff — so we’re not going to consider them. As for the first bit, if it’s hard to be creative, to brainstorm, and generate ideas in public meeting, then what’s the freaking point of pinning all our hopes for education finance reform on a series of public meetings? Led by a Marxist who doesn’t even know what the problem is in the first place.
