Home | Who We Are | Opportunities for Educators | Advice for Parents | Support for Kids
Vermont’s Powerful Anti-Public Schools Network
By Angelo J. Dorta, Vermont-NEA President
I’m not paranoid, and I’m not prone to believe conspiracy theories. Yet, a clear picture emerges from solid facts and leads to this conclusion: In the past 10 years, a growing national anti-public schools network has reached deeply into Vermont culture and now into the highest circles of Vermont political and communications power.
The network strongly espouses school vouchers, charter schools, and preK-12 education tax credits. It generally opposes taxes and labor unions, but favors for-profit privatization of education services. The roots of the anti-public schools network primarily are in the conservative wing of the Republican Party, but they also extend to some misguided national “New Democrats” infatuated with charter schools.
Select national and state corporate business interests and wealthy individuals -- including owners and chief executive officers associated with Wal-Mart, Amway, Yankee Candle, Circuit City, and Mellon Bank -- contribute financial support to the network. Prosperous conservative foundations and policy think tanks provide analytical information, ideological precepts, and preferred terminology (“government schools,” “monopoly,” etc.). Some elected officials help cultivate a favorable legislative climate.
The network foments anti-public school sentiments with a concurrent dual strategy. It stimulates citizen demand for voucher/charter school/tax credit alternatives and also seeks to establish an advantageous political context for the alternatives.
Public demand for vouchers, charter schools, and education tax credits is created by underwriting academic research to highlight poor student performance and public school problems and by subsidizing pro-school “choice” polling and public relations activities. Establishment of privately funded voucher “scholarships” is a tactic, too, as typified by the Vermont Student Opportunity Scholarships Program (Vermont SOS) started in 1998, whose staff and board include high profile GOP conservatives. An anti-public school political context is cultivated by assisting pro-school “choice” candidates and attacking the Association.
The anti-public schools network always includes in its criticisms NEA and its state and local affiliates. Why? Because the Association strives to strengthen and defend public education. The network views NEA as the primary roadblock obstructing its efforts to devalue, de-fund, and derail public education and the unions that represent organized school employees.
In Vermont, the twin pillars of the anti-public schools network are John McClaughry’s Ethan Allen Institute and Libby Sternberg’s Vermonters for Better Education. Have you ever heard or read anything positive from them about Vermont public schools? They seldom praise or even acknowledge our teachers and ESP for their good, hard work. They always portray Vermont student testing and school performance results in the harshest way, despite our students’ consistently superior scores in state-by-state comparisons.
Media Assets for Anti-Public Schools Network
McClaughry and Sternberg also are public relations spokespersons with extensive Vermont media contacts. They are prominent, long-time commentators on Vermont Public Radio. They also frequently appear on the opinion/editorial pages of virtually all daily and weekly Vermont newspapers.
Conservative editors and publishers of newspapers such as the Burlington Free Press — the only newspaper circulated throughout Vermont — and the Northeast Kingdom’s Caledonian-Record especially provide readers with easy access to McClaughry’s and Sternberg’s writings. Free Press Editorial Page Editor David Awbrey now even gives McClaughry unprecedented opportunities for second-chance, 600-word rebuttals of responses submitted to oppose McClaughry’s original commentaries. Print reporters often solicit Sternberg’s viewpoints for news stories on a wide range of education topics.
WCAX-TV also is a major asset for the anti-public schools network. It is Vermont’s sole statewide television station. Station owner Stuart “Red” Martin is a stalwart Republican Party contributor. The content and tenor of education news often critical of public schools, teachers, and Vermont-NEA — and the sometimes smirky delivery of lead news anchor Marselis Parsons — have rankled Association members for years. Parsons has hosted McClaughry and Sternberg as guests on his Sunday morning “You Can Quote Me” interview program.
They Lead Highly Partisan Advocacy Groups
McClaughry and Sternberg each claim to head “non-partisan” organizations. In reality, they lead highly partisan advocacy groups committed to the aforementioned anti-public education goals. They permit their websites to be linked with Republican ideologue James Dwinell, author of the weekly Dwinell Political Report electronic newsletter.
Unabashed conservatives mostly comprise their organizations’ boards of directors and advisory councils, including unsuccessful former GOP state officer and legislative candidates Jack McMullen and J. Paul Giuliani, Rutland Republican House Representative Virginia Duffy and former Rutland Republican Mayor Jeffrey Wennberg, original anti-Act 60ite Jeff Pascoe, UVM political, economics, and finance academics Frank Bryan, Art Woolf, and James Gatti, and several well-heeled businessmen and investors.
McClaughry and Sternberg are experienced, influential, state GOP insiders with impeccable party credentials. They are key strategists on conservative Republican issues and have sometimes advised and supported like-minded Republican candidates, including Ruth Dwyer. Moderate Republicans with views similar to U.S. Senator Jim Jeffords, now an Independent, have been marginalized and defeated at the Republican Party primary polls by the GOP’s conservative wing in recent years.
Prior to founding Ethan Allen Institute ten years ago, McClaughry was a White House Senior Policy Analyst for the Reagan Administration. He also served as a Northeast Kingdom House Representative, State Senator, and Vice-Chair of the Senate Education Committee. McClaughry ran unsuccessfully for Governor in 1992 against incumbent Howard Dean.
Sternberg worked closely with Mayor Jeffrey Wennberg and county Republicans to lead Rutland City’s school voucher movement in the mid-90’s. Failing to muster sufficient State House support, she helped recruit Washington, D.C.’s Institute for Justice — the nation’s self-described “premier libertarian legal firm” — to assist the Chittenden Town School Board’s pro-school vouchers lawsuit. Soon after, Sternberg became a strident, leading critic of 1997’s Equal Educational Opportunity Act (Act 60) and launched Vermonters for Educational Choice. Apparently, a less forthright name — Vermonters for Better Education — seemed politically wiser soon afterwards.
National Resources Leverage Anti-Public School Activities in Vermont
McClaughry and Sternberg tap national fiscal and information resources to leverage their anti-public school activities. Ethan Allen Institute, for example, is one of over 40 state-level conservative or “free-market” think-tanks in 37 states — more than triple since 1989 and centrally organized through the State Policy Network (SPN) — and draws important funding from privately endowed, out-of-state conservative foundations.
For instance, in 1999-2000, McClaughry’s Institute received $5,000 from the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation. Economist Friedman, now 90, is considered to have founded the school vouchers movement in the 1950s. The Institute also obtained $2,500 from the Roe Foundation and additional unspecified assistance from the State Policy Network. McClaughry was busy at that time promoting state-funded “educational freedom districts” formed from town public schools in competition for tax dollars against private and religious schools and subject to conversion into charter schools.
These conservative state-based policy think-tanks are informal, electronically linked network partners of better known and powerful national counterparts, such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hudson Institute, Center for Education Reform, American Enterprise Institute, Fordham Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, and Education Policy Institute. Although their advocacy websites sport benign, value-laden phrases such as “competitive free enterprise,” “ individual freedom,” “frugal government,” and “traditional American values” to sweeten their mission and belief statements, they share the same education goal: Taxpayer-funded tuition for use in private and religious schools and a competitive marketplace of providers of education services.
The alliance of state and national think-tanks creates and distributes anti-public education advocacy research. In a two-way fashion, it readily shares studies, reports, and commentaries that repeatedly disparage public schools’ performance, levy blame at teacher unions, question the value of teacher licensure and advanced certification, and raise doubts whether teachers generally are underpaid or whether taxpayers are receiving their money’s worth from the schools. The Institute for Justice’s “U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitutionality of Vouchers” presentation, for instance, is available on Sternberg’s website. Sternberg’s examination of the 132-year “tuition town” phenomenon in Vermont is published and disseminated through the Cato Institute.
The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) plays a similar role specifically for state legislators, national policymakers, and Big Business leaders. ALEC sponsors conferences, briefings, and consultations on education public policy and other issues, and is a straightforward proponent of school vouchers, charter schools, and education tax credits. It offers generic, ready-to-go model legislation to help state legislators win support for these proposals back home. State Representative Frank Mazur (R-South Burlington) is a regional ALEC leader. He recruits Vermont Republican colleagues for ALEC conferences, disseminates ALEC documents at the State House, and introduces ALEC anti-public schools model legislation.
Think-tank and ALEC information is purposely easy to customize for quick use by news staff or lawmakers. It can become the convenient basis for “expert” testimony and legislative findings. Indeed, both McClaughry and Sternberg occasionally appear in State House committee rooms to present self-assured oral and written statements for the official committee record based on their network’s advocacy goals and persuasion research.
McClaughry and Sternberg are particularly active in locating, importing, adapting, and deploying the network’s up-to-date news and investigations via print and electronic media. They select information that highlights and underscores negative depictions of public schools and the Association. Their insider connections with sympathetic newspaper editorialists and the network’s hot-linked websites amplify their capacity to be omnipresent opinion-purveyors.
Appointments to State Board Confirm Political Power
Vermont Republican Governor Jim Douglas’s recent four appointments to the State Board of Education stunningly confirm the current political power wielded by McClaughry and Sternberg and consummate the deep entrenchment of the anti-public schools network in our state. These appointments comprise half of a State Board entrusted with selecting a new Commissioner of Education in September. Governor Douglas must approve the State Board’s recommendation.
Who did the Governor appoint? New appointees Chris Robbins and Bill Corrow are board directors for Sternberg’s Vermonters for Better Education. Despite accepting State Board responsibilities for the welfare of Vermont students and public schools, they still serve an organization that proudly provides its “How to Privatize Your Public School” guidebook. A direct link from Sternberg’s website to the School Choice Now Political Action Committee, a group that only recommends legislative and state officer candidates fully committed to public, private, and religious school choice, further conflicts with their roles on the State Board.
Robbins has been a vocal proponent of taxpayer-funded private and religious schools for over a decade. He publicly desired to privatize Danville School even during his several years on Danville’s school board and on the Vermont School Boards Association Board of Directors. He remains a current member of the Advisory Council of McClaughry’s Ethan Allen Institute.
In 2002, then Orange County Republican State Senator Corrow forced a private and religious school vouchers bill onto the Senate Chamber floor over the strenuous objection of his Senate Education Committee chairwoman. Until now, however, he was best known as the school board member who became an unpaid “volunteer teacher” at his own Williamstown High School and then resisted Association demands that he renew his teaching license and obtain the proper academic subject endorsement.
Gov. Douglas’s other two State Board of Education appointees also may stir some questions about their education policy intentions. Susan Schill is a new Board member and parent who homeschools her children. Although a veteran selectman and school board chair in Essex Town, Republican Tom James was reported to have made some public statements about his newfound belief in expanded school choice when his appointment was announced last spring.
Finally, although not appointed to a State Board slot, whom did the Governor choose to fulfill the unexpired term of Republican Caledonia County State Senator Robert Ide? None other than Bernier Mayo. Mayo is the former headmaster at St. Johnsbury Academy who also happens to serve on the Advisory Council of McClaughry’s Ethan Allen Institute and whose pro-school vouchers and negative NEA writings are available on Sternberg’s website. An
Anti-Public Schools Network of National Scope
Vermont’s smallness and our great familiarity with the same high profile critics condition us to hear and see them only as individuals. Rather, next time, think again of the extensive system of think-tank persuasion research, political partisanship, media broadcast power, and funding that fuels their attacks.
It is an anti-public schools network of national scope — and with a strong, fervent Vermont component — that constantly denigrates our schools, profession, and Association and ultimately seeks to drain funding from public education to finance private and religious school vouchers and for-profit education services. z
Special thanks to NEA’s Heidi Steffens and Page Melton of Source Group, LLC for their conceptual analysis and information regarding the national scope of anti- public school network activities.