214. The
Logical Tragedy Of Benson, Vermont: The Underground HIstory of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
The
Logical Tragedy Of Benson, Vermont
In 1995, just about one hundred years after the
inception of modern institutional schooling in America, the little town of
Benson in western Vermont set a national
record by voting down its proposed school budget for the twelfth time.
Charlie Usher, assistant superintendent in Benson, declared his bewilderment at
the town's irresponsibility. Mr. Usher suggested the task was to get "at
the root of why people would be willing to let their schools fall apart..."
I think Mr. Usher is right, so let's see what we
can turn up by using common sense. But first, to show how united in outrage
Benson school officials were,
Education Week, the bible of the teaching business, quoted Theresa
Mulholland, principal at the
Benson school (more on this shortly) as saying nobody in town had a good explanation for what they were
doing: "I think they just want to say 'No,' " she said, as if those townspeople were
ornery kids or retarded children. Benson just didn't get it. Schools need lots of money, or, as Usher
suggested, they fall apart.
The Education Week piece in which I read these
things covered every single inch of a
two-page tabloid spread, yet nowhere could I find a single word
indicating the problem might just
be that its taxpayers and voters didn't regard the Benson system as their
own.
Nor is there even a hint Benson may have abandoned
its belief that what goes on in
school is an essential enterprise worth a substantial part of its income
to promote. So I read this
newspaper account of a little town in Vermont and its defiance of the state school
institution pretty carefully because I sensed some important message buried
there.
On the third run-through I discovered what I was
looking for. Let's start with Assistant Superintendent Usher. His title implies
that hidden somewhere out of sight there is a Superintendent somebody, too.
If you don't find that odd it's because I haven't
told you that the entire school district of Benson has exactly one school with
137 kids in it. A brand-new school with a principal, too.
Apparently you can't have a principal without an assistant
superintendent giving orders to that lowly functionary and a
superintendent giving orders to
the assistant superintendent. Three high-ranking pedagogues whose collective
cost for services is about $250,000 — nearly $2,000 a kid. That's nice work if
you can get it.
The new Benson school itself is worth a closer
look. Its construction caused property taxes to go up 40 percent in one year, quite a shock to local homeowners just
hanging on by their fingernails. This school would have been rejected outright
by local taxpayers, who had (they thought) a perfectly good school already, but
the state condemned the old school
for not having wheelchair ramps and other features nobody ever considered
an essential part of education
before.
Costs of reaching code compliance in the old
structure were so close to the
cost of a new school that taxpayers surrendered. The bond issue was finally
voted. Even so, it passed only narrowly. What happened next will be no
surprise. Benson School turned out to cost a lot more than voters expected. I
am skeptical that it cost more than the State of Vermont expected, though.
I have some personal experience with Vermont's
condemnation of sound school structures from the little town of Walden, hardly
more than a speck on the map northeast of Benson in the most beautiful hill
country you can imagine.
A few years ago, four pretty one-room schools dating from the nineteenth century,
schools still serving 120 kids
with just four teachers and no administrators, were condemned by the
same crew from Montpelier that
gave Benson its current tax headache.
I was asked by a citizen group in Walden to drive
up and speak at a rally to save these remarkable community schools, beloved by
their clientele. If I tell you when I woke in the morning in Walden a moose was
rooting vegetables from the garden of my hostess' home you'll be able to
imagine them better.
The group I came to speak for, "The Road
Rats" as it called itself, had already defeated school consolidation the
previous year. Montpelier's goal was to close the little schools and bus kids to a new central location
miles from home. Now Montpelier took off the gloves. If persuasion and
seduction wouldn't work, coercion would.
Let's call what happened "The Benson Maneuver," passing building
code provisions with no connection
to normal reality. This accomplished, Vermont condemned the one-room
schools for violation of these provisions. All official estimates to reach new
code standards were very close to the price of consolidating the little schools
into a big new one.
Road Rat resistance would be unlikely to mobilize
a voting majority a second time; the
publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public
taste to believe it doesn't make
sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new. Our only hope lay in
getting a construction bid low enough that voters could see they had been
flim-flammed.
It seemed worth a try. The Walden group had been
unable to find a contractor willing to publicly oppose the will of Montpelier,
but by a lucky accident I knew a Vermont master architect. I called his home in
Montpelier.
Two hours later he was in Walden touring the
condemned buildings. Vital to understanding why the state wanted these places
closed so badly was that
everything in such places worked against professionalization and
standardization: parents were too
close to the classroom to allow smooth "professional" governance to
sneak by unnoticed.
It wasn't possible in such schools to float a
scientifically prepared curriculum
initiative without having it come under close and critical scrutiny.
That was intolerable to Montpelier, or rather to the larger octopus the
Montpelier tentacle wiggled for.
After inspection, my architect pronounced the
official estimates to reach code compliance cynical and dishonest. They were
three times higher than the work would cost allowing for a normal profit. My
architect knew the principals in the politically well-connected construction
firms which had submitted the inflated bids. He knew the game they were playing,
too.
"The purpose of this is to kill one-room
schools," he said. "All these guys will be paid off one way or another with state work for
forwarding the agenda whether they
get this state job or not." I asked if he would give us a counter-estimate
we might use to wake up voters. "No," he said. "If I did I
wouldn't get another building job in Vermont."
Let's get back to Benson, a classic illustration
how the political state and its licensed
allies feed like parasites on working men and women. Where Education
Week saw deep mystery over citizen disaffection, the facts put a different spin
on things.
In a
jurisdiction serving only 137
children, a number which would have been handled in the old and successful Walden schools with four
teachers — and no supervisors other than the town's traditions and the willing oversight loving parents would provide
because the students were, after
all, their own kids — taxpayers were being forced to sustain the expense of:
1 .
A nonteaching superintendent
2. A
nonteaching assistant superintendent
3. A nonteaching principal
4. A nonteaching assistant principal
5. A full time nurse
6. A full time guidance counselor
7. A full time librarian
8. Eleven full time schoolteachers
9. An unknown number of accessory personnel
10. Space, desks, supplies, technology for all of
these
One hundred thirty-seven schoolchildren? Is there
a soul who believes Benson's kids are better served in their new school with
this mercenary army than Walden's 120 were in four rooms with four teachers? If so, the customary ways we
measure educational success don't reflect this superiority.
What happened at Benson — the use of forced
schooling to impose career ladders
of unnecessary work on a poor community — has happened all over North America. School is a jobs project
for a large class of people it would be difficult to find employment for
otherwise in a frightening job market, one in which the majority of all employment in the nation is either
temporary or part-time.
Forcible redistribution of the income of others
to provide work for pedagogues and for a support staff larger than the actual
teaching corps is a pyramid scheme run at the expense of children.
The more "make -work" which has to be
found for school employees, the
worse for kids because their own enterprise is stifled by constant
professional tinkering in order to
justify this employment.
Suppose we eliminated the first seven positions
from the list of functionaries paid in Benson: the superintendent, assistant
superintendent, principal, assistant principal, nurse, guidance counselor, and
librarian, plus three of the
eleven teachers and all those accessory personnel.
We'd have the work those folks do absorbed by the
remaining eight teachers and whatever community volunteer assistance we could recruit. This would still
allow a class size of only seventeen kids per teacher, a ratio big-city
teachers would kill to get, and hardly more than half the load one-room Walden teachers carried.
Yet
it would save this little community over half a million dollars yearly. In our hypothetical example, we
left Benson with eight teachers, twice the number Walden enjoyed in its two hundred-year
experience with one-room schooling. Only a calculating machine could consider a
large, consolidated school to which children must commute long distances as a
real advance in human affairs. An advance in wasting time certainly.
Consider this angle now: who in your judgment has
a moral right to decide what size
weight can be fastened on the backs of the working citizens of Benson? Whose decision
should that be? From a chart
included in the Education Week article, I saw that Vermont school bureaucrats
extracted $6,500 in 1995 for each student who sat in their spanking new schools.
That computes at $162 a week per kid.
Is
it fair to ask how private schools
provided satisfactory service for a national average of only $3,000 a
kid, about $58 a week, the same
year? Or how parochial schools did it for $2,300, $44 a week? Or homeschools for a mere $500 or $1,000,
or about $10 or $20 a week? Do you believe public school kids were better served for the additional
money spent?
Those other places could do it because they
didn't support an anthill of political jobs, political purchases, and political
routines. These other types of schooling understood — some through tradition, some through analysis, some through
trusting inner voices — that transferring
educational responsibility from children, parents, and communities to certified agents of the state erodes
the value base of human life which is forever grounded in local and personal sovereignty.
Shortly after this twelfth defeat at the hands of
local citizens, the state stepped in to override the judgment of the voters. In
January 1996, the Vermont State
Senate passed a bill to forcibly "lend" the Benson School District
the full amount of its twelve-time citizen-rejected budget.
Benson voters would now pay the full amount
demanded by the school district plus interest!
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