Vermont took home an F on an education policy report card released Monday by the national advocacy organization StudentsFirst, but the state’s education leaders aren’t feeling deflated.
StudentsFirst was formed in 2010 by the former chancellor of public schools in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. Rhee has been an advocate for education reform, calling for creating more charter schools, using students’ test scores to evaluate teachers, and determining tenure and salary on the basis of those evaluations.
Rhee explained the harsh scores (the highest score was a B minus and went to only two states) to New York Times reporter Mokoto Rich. “We wanted to show the progress that is being made, but in places where progress is slower to come, be very clear with leaders of that state what they could do to push the agenda forward and create a better environment in which educators, parents and kids can operate,” she said. Vermont was one of 11 states that received an F.
But the failing grade is unlikely to spur education policymakers to action in Vermont. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to the state’s key education stakeholders, who say StudentsFirst has a perverse ranking system and a set of reform plans that aren’t appropriate for Vermont.
Armando Vilaseca, Vermont’s commissioner-recently-turned-secretary of Education, said StudentsFirst “loses their credibility when they rate us so low and our outcomes are so high.”
The executive director of the Vermont School Board Association, Steve Dale, said, “This particular system is based on their own biases. … I don’t see it as a scale that should be of a lot of concern.” These biases, Dale added, don’t match up with the “areas that have driven Vermont’s focus.”
StudentsFirst doled out grades based on states’ policies; they did not factor test scores, graduation rates, and other outcome-based measurements into the evaluation. Vilaseca pointed out that Vermont consistently ranks among the highest in the nation for high school graduation rates and NAEP scores, a national assessment referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card.”
Vermont lost points right off the bat for the control it gives to local school districts. StudentsFirst wants control to shift from districts to the state level, which would allow the state to intervene to take over administration of low-performing districts.
The state also scored poorly because it hasn’t authorized a charter school system nor has it instituted a grading system (A-F) for schools that would enable parents to remove children from failing schools.
StudentsFirst’s predilection for grading is troubling, Vilaseca said. “They [A-F grades] are incomplete and inaccurate. StudentsFirst is making a very complex issues too simple.” Vermont’s education secretary contended that Vermont is in the midst of developing what he says is a more nuanced teacher evaluation model, which will be put in place in June. He pointed out that Vermont has a history of defying federal efforts to evaluate teachers based largely upon their students’ standardized test scores — the state opted out of the Race to the Top education grants and chose not to apply for a No Child Left Behind waiver for that reason.
Vermont received its highest ranking — a C — in the “Spend taxpayer dollars wisely” category, getting credit for having a law on the books that allows the State Board of Education to limit class sizes. The report goes on to chide the state, stating, “Vermont should provide greater staffing and spending flexibility to school districts by removing class-size limits past the third grade and other restrictions that limit districts’ ability to reallocate resources to their greatest needs.”
Vermont’s entire report card can be found here.
From StudentsFirst’s point of view, Vermont may be a lost cause. “Vermont has already chosen not to go the charter school route. … We have chosen to not take over low-performing districts. … There is a difference in the philosophical view of this report versus what we believe in this state,” Vilaseca said. Vilaseca said he does intend to contact the group (they did not contact him prior to the report) to “at least give them a different side of the story.”
Not surprisingly, a platform predicated on replacing collective bargaining with evaluation-based tenure and salary decisions does not sit well with Vermont’s teachers union. Darren Allen, spokesman for Vermont National Educators Association (Vermont-NEA), said they “discount anything that Michelle Rhee has to say out of hand.”
