Opinion — Jay Stroud: The right to an excellent education (2025)

This commentary is by Jay Stroud of Quechee. He spent more than 50 years as a teacher and school administrator. He served as president of the board of trustees of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges and as the director of the NEASC commission on independent schools. He has lived in Vermont, on and off, for 47 years.

The Vermont Legislature would be wise to distinguish between the elements of education that can be legislated and those that cannot. Foremost among the latter are the qualities of understanding, dedication, care, integrity, imagination and intellect that have always distinguished great teachers and the schools that support them. That is a truth in education to hold self-evident and it applies equally to public and independent schools.

Legislation ignoring this reality may be full of sound and fury but it will signify nothing but predictable failure. Ultimately disappointing initiatives like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core Curriculum share the mutual illusion that rigid abstract standards — which can, in fact, be legislated — will produce desired outcomes.

The stubborn fact remains that only human beings inspire other human beings. When good teachers are given the latitude of deserved trust, kids in their care can thrive. There is never a substitute for generosity of spirit, an ability to transcend the paradoxical realities of human development and the capacity to make the infinitely nuanced decisions effective education requires.

And these people do exist. It should be the central purpose of legislation to attract, develop and support them with the clear understanding that what they actually accomplish with kids will always go far beyond the reach of legislated solutions.

It is further painfully obvious that the socioeconomic reality of American communities, including those in Vermont, correlates with student achievement with virtually 100% predictability.

Despite the National Merit Scholarship Corporation’s avowed disclaimer that comparing schools on their semifinalist lists will produce erroneous conclusions, such comparisons do reveal with stunning consistency the simple fact that schools in communities with little education, low incomes and high racial imbalances rarely appear on the list. Schools in communities on the opposite side are nearly the only ones who do.

Achievement in education is profoundly embedded in the economic and social realities of our culture. Legislatures in Vermont may decide — as such groups have attempted in dozens of other states — to determine class and district sizes and set abstract testing goals. Such activity begs the questions genuine improvement requires.

Until the only realities that make a true difference to kids — the people they encounter every day in their classrooms and the economic and human realities in their homes — stand at the forefront, such legislation will make changes without improvement.

Obviously, these are — at best — vastly difficult goals to achieve. But unless legislators accurately identify the real objectives of their work, they will spin their collective wheels, arguing over illusions rather than working to create the society we want our kids to inherit.

What is perhaps most curious is that every parent with children in school — including, one might presume, those in the Vermont Legislature — recognizes this simple fact. Your kid’s teacher makes all the difference. When kids are genuinely cared for, when teachers know how to balance their compassion for individuals with their understanding of genuine accomplishment, when educators understand that education is both received and achieved, then great schools can be created.

A great school promotes a constant, open-ended discussion and often debate about what helps kids grow up. A great school imbues its teachers with a passion to ask questions, creates constantly innovative approaches, and provides the resources to do so.

No educational research will ever “prove” that a class of 25 is consistently better than one of 10 or 15. But it will show that where kids are known, individually and personally, and where teachers have the time and resources to attend to the vast differences of ability and motivation in every classroom, kids stand a better chance to learn.

I have observed teachers with the capacity to do this work in a larger class and teachers who struggled to do so in tiny ones. Every competent school leader knows, painfully well, that a great teacher given the “same” curriculum can transform the material into something magnetic while another creates something as empty as a sap can on a fence post.

If Vermont aims to establish itself as a community demonstrating preeminent faith in and support for excellent teachers rather than the state that equated quality with class or district size, the state could be that beacon of change we all hope to champion. That commitment might create a true standard for an education that ought to be our kids’ inalienable right.