Vermont’s New Secretary Of Education Is About To Take Office Surrounded By Controversy
from Forbes.com
It has been a year since Vermonth’s education secretary Dan French resigned to take a post with the Council of Chief State School Officers (perhaps best known as one of the groups that helped push the Common Core). The search to replace him struck many observers as both slow to launch, then “rushed and halfhearted.”
Governor Phil Scott did not instruct the state education board to search for a replacement until the end of July. He expressed a desire to have someone in place by January, but his pick is set to take office on April 15, and she moves into the position followed by controversy.
Zoie Saunders has barely any background in public education. She attended the Dana Hall School, a private girls school in Wellesley, MA. Her first jobs were in the pediatric health care field, then she went to work in strategy for Charter Schools USA, a charter chain that operates in Florida as a for-profit business, in particular profiting from taxpayer-funded real estate business. CSUSA was founded by Jonathan Hage, a former Green Beret who previously worked for the Heritage Foundation and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future.
After six and a half years with CSUSA, Saunders moved into the job of Chief Education Officer for the city of Fort Lauderdale, a job that involved expanding education opportunities, including non-public schools.
Saunders took her first job in public education, chief strategy and innovation officer got Broward County Public Schools, in January 2024; her job there was the head up the district’s work to “close and repurpose schools,” a source of controversy in the community.
Once Scott announced his hiring choice (on a Friday), pushback was swift and strong. One critic noted that the lack of qualifications for the job was not the bad part:
The bad part is that her experience as a school killer and her years in the charter school industry are in perfect alignment with the governor’s clear education agenda: spread the money around, tighten the screws on public education, watch performance indicators fall, claim that the public schools are failing, spread the money around some more, lather, rinse, repeat. Saunders may not qualify as an educational leader, but her experience is directly relevant to Scott’s policy.
Good Lawd! A terrible choice….
Like many Vermonters, I am an Independent who usually votes for Democrats or Progressives but has supported Phil Scott enthusiastically. While moderately conservative fiscally (and so a moderating force on our predominantly liberal state Congress), he is quite progressive socially. More than that, he’s been known as a a person of impeccable integrity. If this appointment is his back-door way of opening us to charters and weakening our public schools, I will be sorely disappointed, and this will be the beginning of the end for his governorship. This after his being elected/ re-elected 4 times so far, with increasingly wide margins, by this Bernie-loving citizenry. So please look further. Where are the direct answers to these questions from Scott himself? On what basis (besides this choice) are you seeing him as anti-public education?