Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
Vermont has good public schools.
Doesn’t it?
It should, considering that it spends more than $17,000 per pupil, the fourth highest rate in the country.
That comes to $4,400 in taxes per resident in fiscal year 2012, also fourth-highest in the nation.
Or something like that. These calculations all differ slightly depending on who is doing the calculating, and when. Another estimate finds Vermont’s per pupil spending in fifth place, not fourth.
No matter. By any calculation, Vermont spends a lot on public schools, and by the most common approach to assessing school quality, it gets what it pays for.
Or does it?
As the state keeps spending more money to teach fewer students, Vermont is reconsidering how it finances its public schools, and is looking for a way to hold down costs without sacrificing the quality of those schools.
At least that’s how the dilemma is commonly stated. Behind that common statement is the assumption that school quality is now high. With so much at stake – financially, socially, educationally, politically – that assumption should be examined.
The examination might reveal some uncomfortable truths.
Start with the fact that, like the rest of the country, Vermont assesses its schools by a standard which on its face is absurd.
An educated person is not a product, like a valve or a software program, that can be evaluated by one simple measurement. Education is a public good, a social activity, a complex process.
Apparently undeterred by reality, America – and that includes Vermont – has been evaluating its public schools by one simple measurement: standardized tests.
Nor is that the only contradiction. America – and that includes Vermont – has been telling itself for decades that its public schools are bad and getting worse.
Even though the test scores keep getting better.
The country has experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in our K-12 schools,” proclaimed a prestigious New York Times columnist. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has declared that American public schools are “basically at the bottom of the rich countries” in education performance, and he wants them “back at the top.”
But Americans were never the top scorers in international tests. Those tests began in the 1960s, and American students always ended up right about in the middle. If test scores are the standard, there never was a “Golden Age” of American education.
Nor are today’s test scores all that bad. Yes, in the most recent (2012) PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams, American students scored only 17th of 34 countries in reading, 26th in math, and 21st in science.
But American students also participate in the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), and on these tests they score better.
In fact, American white students – who come from more affluent, more stable families – got higher scores than did the students in top-performing countries such as Finland, raising an interesting question: is whatever ails American education a failing of the schools or a sign of social and economic inequality?
(Finland, for what it is worth, does not conduct standardized tests).
Meanwhile, back home, students are graded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, which calls itself “the nation’s report card,” and is often considered “the gold standard” of school assessment.
Not that it’s perfect. No one test can be. For one thing, some pupils don’t take the NAEP tests. But it’s probably the most accurate measurement around. Because the same tests are used all over the country, there is no incentive for local educators to “dumb down” the questions, or to cheat outright, as has happened in some places.
And throughout these “decades of embarrassing decline in our K-12 schools,” how have American students been doing?
Better and better, with steady improvement from the early 1970s through 2008, according to NAEP’s website. Since then, scores have risen more slowly, but the improvement is more impressive once the scores are disaggregated by ethnicity. Black and Hispanic students, who are more likely to live in low-income, single-parent households, have always had lower average scores than white students. Because they are now a higher percentage of the total, the aggregate scores of all children are dragged down.
But the scores of all three groups – white, black and Hispanic – have continued to rise, with the minority students actually showing greater gains than the white kids.
All of which at least raises the possibility that American public school teachers and administrators are doing a pretty good job.
That would include teachers and administrators in Vermont, where 75 percent of the students performed “at or above the NAEP Basic level … in 2013,” according to the Agency of Education.
Almost all Vermont students, of course, are white. So perhaps the high scores are simply a reflection of demographics. Perhaps even mediocre teachers and administrators could have achieved the same results.
Perhaps. But Vermont is an unusual state. It is almost all white and relatively wealthy. But a majority of children in the state live in low-income families defined as under 200 percent of the federal poverty line. More than 40 percent of Vermont pupils are eligible for the free or reduced cost National School Breakfast and Lunch program.
That’s not much higher than in Massachusetts, and only about 6 percentage points higher than Connecticut, two other states whose students get top grades in standardized tests. The difference is that in those other states, the lower-income pupils are disproportionately African-American or Hispanic, while in Vermont they are almost all white.
But the social pathologies are identical: teenage pregnancy, single-parent households, alcoholism and drug dependence, occasional incarceration, parents who can’t or won’t read to their kids, take them to library story hour, or even expose them to any but the most mindless television programs.
Reluctant though Vermonters may be to discuss it – or perhaps even acknowledge it – their state has a rather sizeable underclass, however unfashionable it has become to use that term. Because they are white, and because some even own their homes – often an inherited old farmhouse – they are less visible, hence easier to ignore, than their counterparts in other states.
But they are here. And they have been having children, perhaps more children than other Vermonters. Like affluent, educated, white people all over the country (if not the world), upper-income Vermont families have low birth rates. So the schools have more of the kids who are harder to teach.
Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe said she and other educators do not think this challenge excuses the fact that “we have not been as successful in engaging these students as we should have been.”
But neither have educators in the other 49 states.
Besides, measurements other than standardized tests also indicate that Vermont schools are good. Adding in factors such as graduation and dropout rates, the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s “Kids Count” report ranked Vermont schools third best in the country. So did a financial research firm called WalletHub (which also ranked Vermont the sixth worst state to be a taxpayer, partly because school taxes are so high).
By any objective standard, then, Vermont has good schools, at least in relation to American schools in general. But it also has very expensive schools. The question is whether there is some way to hold down those expenses while keeping the schools good.
The answer is yes. But many Vermonters might not like the consequences.
