(with a quick addendum below)

Subtitle: My Head Hurts

(My emphasis of course)

“The transformation is based on the fact that even though we do fairly well on test scores, we still lose a lot of kids,” [Vermont state school board vice-chair] Stokes said. “We spent a year, we even went to prisons to talk to inmates and ask them what could have been done to help you? Where did the education system fail you? One of the things they said was, ‘We were lost in the shuffle. We never felt that we as individuals counted and how we learn and what could have been put in place to make us enthusiastic about learning, that just wasn’t there.‘”

(A vote for school consolidation, Barre/Montpelier Times Argus, 1/20/10)

So what did Ms. Stokes do with her new-found information? Why … she and her buddies voted to reduce the number of school districts and increase the size of schools!

All this while receiving guidance from a report that begins with this quote: “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and can naturally discover their true passions.”

I just love it when people in government tell me I’m stupid enough not to see through their smoke.

Meanwhile on the Times Argus page devoted to publicizing the latest from bullshit artist and Vermont education commissioner Vilaseca (such page formerly known as the opeds) …

We have school buildings, with their operational budget, staffing and transportation costs, that house fewer students altogether than would be in a single classroom at our larger schools.

Oh yeah, Vil the Bullshitter also likes to support his vacuous crap with a report that begins with “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and can naturally discover their true passions.”

Anybody paying attention? Oh, and can anybody tell me exactly what the import of the ratio regarding school board members to students is?