Vermont’s educational system has received high marks for many years. It routinely ranks close to the top on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, came in third last year among states with a higher than 60 percent participation on the SAT test, and spends more per pupil than all but a few states as a percentage of per capita income.
Reinforcing its image, Gov, Peter Shumlin this week announced a $5 million federal technology grant to automate data collection. Two years ago the state’s application for the same funds was rejected. The new system will allow Vermont to track teachers, courses and student progress from kindergarten to 12th grade. Data collected in local school districts will go directly to the state and be immediately available for review.
In St. Albans, the Bellows Free Academy has meanwhile won a Next Generation Learning Challenges grant of $150,000 for Academy 21, a pilot program that focuses on mastering skills instead of memorizing content. The grant is part of $1.2 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for “blended learning” in high schools across the country. Academy 21 will use the money mainly for professional development and collaborative learning. For example, students will learn how to discuss concerns with their peers, and will even have the option of “firing” group members who don’t improve.
Despite the state’s reputation, however, it will not benefit from $5 billion in new federal “Race to the Top” funding to improve assessment, reward teacher excellence and help poorly performing schools. Last November Vermont was turned down for a $50 million early-childhood education grant, and has been unable to get a waiver from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.
A new report card from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meanwhile gives the state a “reform grade” of D+ and an F for “Identifying Effective Teachers.” Florida, which consistently ranks near the bottom in national assessments, received a B+ in the same report.
In early June Sen. Bernie Sanders complained to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the exclusion of Vermont and other rural states from Race to the Top funding. Sanders and Duncan also discussed the rejection of Vermont’s NCLB waiver request. Sanders argued that requirements of the Bush-era initiative are “fundamentally incompatible with the state’s educational model,” and described opposition to the law as “near unanimous.”
Dropping the waiver request
Vermont has been negotiating with federal officials to create measurement and accountability systems that rely less on standardized tests and punitive measures. But an April 17 letter from the U.S. Education Department, stating that Vermont’s proposed accountability system was not sufficiently detailed and failed to “ensure significant progress in improving student achievement,” was another setback.
Vermont’s submission combined what the Department of Education requested with an innovative spin on turnaround options for poorly performing schools that would avoid the dismissal of teachers or principals.
State Department of Education spokeswoman Jill Remick concluded that it had “become clear that the U.S. Education Department is interested in simply replacing one punitive, prescriptive model of accountability with another.”
“We cannot continue to expend energy requesting a detailed accountability system that looks less and less like what we want for Vermont,” she added.
Realizing that it would not be permitted to opt out of yearly standardized testing – even if a waiver was granted — the state Board of Education voted on May 15 to drop its waiver request.
Board of Education Chair Stephan Morse explained, “Our main interest was in being able to assess students in a more complete way and not have the arbitrary testing and all the repercussions from that, and that’s not what they meant by waiver.’’
The federal law states that all students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The waiver would drop that requirement as long as a state can demonstrate it is making some progress and provides an acceptable alternative.
Shumlin has argued that provisions of the federal law make it harder for schools to provide high-quality education. He has proposed instead that Vermont continue using benchmarks set in 2009 while developing a more appropriate assessment method.
Vermont’s waiver application specifically proposed biannual testing for grades 3 through 8. But that idea was not accepted at the federal level. After Vermont put annual testing back in its application, the next obstacle was a requirement that a significant portion of teacher effectiveness be measured by standardized tests. This did not appeal to Vermont officials.
Since the state dropped its waiver application Duncan has agreed to review the issue, promising that his department is “open for business” if Vermont wants to reapply.
Charter schools and the Common Core
One reason Florida received a higher grade than Vermont on the ALEC report card is charter schools. The sunshine state has more than a hundred while Vermont has none.
Some educational reformers claim that these schools – which receive public money, but do not have to follow all the rules and regulations that apply to other public education – foster innovation and competition. But most studies reveal no difference in tests, and some charter schools have scored high by excluding students such as English Language Learners (ELL) who tend to receive lower scores.
Recent debate in Burlington over achievement gaps has focused on such students, who object to being judged on the basis of New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) test results. But Vermont will drop NECAP within two years, replacing it with a new nationally designed test and related Common Core standards that will be used to compare year-by-year achievement in math and reading.
Vermont’s Board of Education adopted the Common Core standards in 2010, with the intention of using them by 2015. But the decision was not completely voluntary. The Obama administration has pushed the Common Core through Race to the Top and has made their adoption a requirement to compete for future federal education grants.
The standards, developed by groups representing governors and top school officials, set requirements not only for math and language but also for literacy in history, social studies, science, and technical subjects. They basically define what it means to be literate in the 21st century.
Once a new computerized test is designed, a process expected to cost $160 million, it will provide almost immediately results allowing teachers to make rapid adjustments. Schools currently wait months to see NECAP scores. The new test will be given from third to eighth grade, and again in the junior year of high school.
The rub, however, is that the Common Core standards have not yet been implemented or tested anyway, and could potentially increase the achievement gap between high and lower performing students, particularly anyone struggling with English.
Tom Loveless, a Brookings Institution analyst, predicts that the standards will have no impact on student achievement. After they were adopted in Vermont, critics described them as another top-down move that intrudes into local education.
Failing schools and national security
Both the Common Core and charter schools are a response to the contention that the public school system is failing. This is not a new theme. Reformers have called attention to teacher performance and low standards for two centuries. In 1983, a presidential commission made essentially the same case in its landmark report, “A Nation at Risk.”
The argument, then and now, is that the U.S. faces peril due to “a rising tide of mediocrity.” In the 1980s the prescriptions included higher graduation requirements, more time in school, and higher salaries for teachers. Nothing was said at the time about evaluating teachers and schools on the basis of student test scores, a method at the center of more recent reform proposals. In the past the basic goal was to improve public schooling.
Today’s reformers instead stress competition, technology and privatization, and often suggest that public schools themselves are the problem. The emerging argument is that the alleged failure of public education, a point often made without much supporting evidence, threatens not just the economy but even national security.
The report’s three reform recommendations are adoption of the Common Core standards, along with an expanded curriculum geared to national security that stresses science, technology and foreign languages; competition-based changes like charter schools and vouchers that let students and families choose which schools they attend; and a “national security readiness audit” that holds educators and policy makers responsible for meeting national expectations.
That message comes through loud and clear in “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations authored by a panel headed by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Joel Klein, chancellor of New York’s public schools. Klein has opened a hundred charter schools, in many cases ignoring community opposition.
“Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk,” the report states. While acknowledging the impacts of concentrated poverty, racial segregation, and unequal school funding, however, it offers no recommendations about those problems. Instead, it argues that the most serious shortcoming is that public schools are not preparing enough future diplomats, soldiers, and defense industry engineers “to ensure U.S. leadership in the 21st century.”
“Significant majorities of young Americans are unable to identify strategically or politically important countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, on a map of the world,” the report notes. “Enrollment in civics and government classes is declining.”
U.S. students spend fewer years studying a more limited range of foreign languages than students in most other wealthy countries, it also notes, and just 1.4 percent study abroad, mostly in Europe. Many students cannot pass military entrance exams.
The report’s three reform recommendations are adoption of the Common Core standards, along with an expanded curriculum geared to national security that stresses science, technology and foreign languages; competition-based changes like charter schools and vouchers that let students and families choose which schools they attend; and a “national security readiness audit” that holds educators and policy makers responsible for meeting national expectations.
In a dissenting opinion included at the end of the report, Stanford University professor Linda Darlington-Hammond challenged the assumption that competition and privatization are essential strategies. “It ignores the fact that the nations that have steeply improved achievement and equity and now rank at the top …. have invested in strong public education systems that serve virtually all students,” she writes. In education the highest performing countries are Finland, Singapore and South Korea, all allies that pose no threat to U.S. national security.
In contrast, she added, nations like Chile that have aggressively pursued privatization “have a huge and growing divide between rich and poor that has led to dangerous levels of social unrest.”
Another dissenting member of the report panel, Harvard’s Stephen M. Walt, pointed out that U.S. schools still rank among the top 10 percent of the world’s 193 nations. “There are good reasons to improve K-12 education, but an imminent threat to our national security is not among them,” he concluded.
Whether Vermont eventually moves toward a “national security readiness audit” may depend on whether that becomes part of expanded Common Core standards, and also whether it is linked to funding. But the state’s lack of charter schools is clearly a reason for its low score from ALEC, while its opposition to annual testing was a key factor in blocking the waiver from No Child Left Behind.
Instead, the state this year considered legislation to provide “flexible pathways to graduation.” They include dual enrollment, virtual learning and work-based education. The legislation did not pass, mainly due to disagreement about the funding source, but there was general support for the concept. The strategies include personalized learning plans, proficiency-based advancement, career and college readiness, 21st century skill development, and improved learning outcomes.
Another attempt to pass the proposal is expected during the next legislative session.
