The governor of the Green Mountain State, Vermont’s Howard Dean, bumbled into Albany last week. Addled with a fever to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, he decided to follow the Democratic playbook and take a swipe at school vouchers in front of a union organization, New York State United Teachers. In Mr. Dean’s opinion, vouchers are “harebrained ideas.” Such a position has come to be expected from voucher detractors, but what caught our attention — in a dispatch from Mike Antonucci’s Education Intelligence Agency — was this assertion: “Here’s what a voucher system does,” Mr. Dean said. “It puts the white folks here, the black folks here, the Hispanics there, the Jews over here, the Catholics there, the Protestants there, the rich people here, the poor people there and the last people left behind are the special ed kids because nobody wants them.”

This claim comes from the governor of one of the most racially and religiously homogenous states in the union. What does Mr. Dean consider divided by race? The Great Antonucci ticks off the list. In 1998, the average American public school was 63% white, 17% black, 15% Hispanic, and 5% made up of the assorted other ethnicities that make up our great nation. Vermont? The public schools were 97% white, 1% black, 0.5% Hispanic, and 1.5% “other.” How about religion? Vermont is a pretty diverse state in this category, so long as your are talking about different streams of Christianity. Non-Christians in the state make up only about 4.4% of the state’s population.

This all said, we think the diversity game is a silly one. Vermont is a fine state, if you like cows and communism. More seriously, it has had a proto-voucher program in place since 1869 — though it discriminates against religious schools — and Mr. Dean and his Vermont cronies seem to be doing just fine. We don’t think a state’s or a school system’s value is determined by the kinds of factors the governor worried about at Albany. There are basically no data to support Mr. Dean’s assertions about vouchers. But if he really believes what he says, perhaps Vermont’s diversity deprived students should be shipped off to diverse New York. Or, perhaps he could bring students from New York’s richly diverse schools to Vermont to enrich the locals.