Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ward Heneveld, Ed.D., who is retired in Enosburgh after a career in education as a teacher, administrator, planner and program officer in Vermont, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and throughout Africa where he first taught in Kenya. He has worked in Vermont as a professor of education, as executive director of a community action agency, and as director of the School for International Training. After more than 10 years at the World Bank he was program officer for the Quality of Education in Developing Countries joint initiative of the William and Flora Hewlett and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations.
[T]he Vermont Legislature’s Act 46 of 2015 is going to create larger school districts, and it will limit school budget increases. Three other reforms that are underway could improve student learning, a goal which Act 46 largely ignores.
First, teachers and administrators that I’ve talked to seem enthusiastic that the new proficiency standards based on the national Common Core guidelines will help them teach more effectively. Second, Act 77 of 2013, the Flexible Pathways Act, expands the range of settings and experiences that secondary school students can use to learn. It also requires that by 2017 each secondary school student’s education will be guided by a personal learning plan (PLP). Third, Vermont’s State Board Rule 2000 on Educational Quality Standards that was issued last year provides guidelines for what school districts need to do to maximize the opportunity for all students’ learning.
These changes that will influence how schools operate are expected to make the education of Vermont’s children more efficient and effective. However, since there are no statewide learning objectives and indicators other than test scores, how are voters, taxpayers and our legislators going to evaluate if learning improves over time and compared to other places? Vermont needs a “plain-language” description of what our youth should be able to do when they finish school.
In Vermont, educators and politicians currently talk about educational outcomes using general goal statements, the new learning proficiencies, and scores on standardized tests. For example, the State Board of Education’s vision statement is: “All children complete education with the knowledge and skills necessary for success (after school).” The first sentence of the Board’s Quality of Education standards (Rule 2000, 2014) states that “the purpose of these rules is to ensure that all students are afforded educational opportunities that are substantially equal in quality, and enable them to achieve or exceed standards approved by the State Board of Education.”
However, as far as I can tell the State Board has not defined what the standards are that students are expected to achieve. It may be that our leaders consider Vermont’s learning standards to be the Common Core proficiency standards which define very specific knowledge and skills by subject and grade. These standards already number in the hundreds for English language arts and mathematics, and they will multiply as proficiencies for additional subjects are added. Detailed proficiencies may be useful for teaching, but their quantity and specificity make it almost impossible for their aggregated results to be used to inform the public or to guide policy discussions. Finally, there are standardized test scores which purport to indicate how well proficiencies have been achieved. My town’s annual education report includes “target goals” that use annual percentage increases in subject test scores as the indicators of improved learning; and test scores are included in the town’s annual report.
Detailed proficiencies may be useful for teaching, but their quantity and specificity make it almost impossible for their aggregated results to be used to inform the public or to guide policy discussions.
I doubt that standardized test scores have ever been sanctioned as “standards approved by the State Board of Education.” In fact, state Agency of Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe has commented publicly that test scores are insufficient “standards” for the quality of a Vermont education. Recently, in a radio interview on Aug. 24, she explained the new Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) student tests in detail and commented that the Agency of Education wasn’t sure yet how it was going to use SBAC test results.
Just like investors in other enterprises, those of us who finance the education of Vermont’s young people deserve explicit on-going measures of the impact of our investment. In education these measures should be statements and indicators that describe the basic observable learning outcomes that all students who complete grades K-12 in Vermont are expected to demonstrate.
The Vermont Agency of Human Services’ (AHS) success at improving social welfare outcomes in the 1990s offers an example of how this could be done for Vermont education. With broad participation AHS developed “plain-language statements” that described the well-being of people and communities served by the state’s corrections, family welfare, and early childhood development programs. Vermonters from many walks of life used these outcomes and indicators to guide their work; and professionals and others involved collected and shared publicly the data on indicators for each outcome. The results were significant. Statements that guided this work included “all children ready for school,” “all babies are born healthy,” and “elders live with dignity in settings they prefer.” (To learn more you can download for free Outcomes: reframing responsibility for well-being by Con Hogan and David Murphey, Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2002).
The AHS outcomes approach started with a common purpose similar to the State Board’s vision statement that’s quoted above. Outcomes statements in education based on the board’s vision for K-12 education could, for example, include statements such as “all elementary school graduates want to learn on their own” and “all high school graduates are confident about their future.” Examples of indicators for these outcomes could be “all children who enter middle school read regularly on their own,” “all students who leave high school manage money comfortably,” and “all high school graduates are able to make a presentation to a group.”
Vermont should establish priority plain-language outcomes and indicators like these for our elementary and secondary students. The simplest way to get this started would be for someone in leadership to talk to Con Hogan and his former colleagues to understand how our state has already effectively used outcomes to drive improvement of social services. If a process to set outcomes is undertaken, the Center for Rural Development has extensive experience facilitating local and statewide dialogues. Most importantly, Act 46’s required process for school district unification provides an opportunity for the committees that are being established in each supervisory union to decide on the plain-language learning outcomes a unified district will work to achieve.
Wouldn’t it be helpful for deciding on changes if there were statements and indicators of desired learning outcomes in place before communities discussed how the schools in the district should be organized? As long as there aren’t explicit learner outcomes and indicators for the state and/or school districts, Vermont’s education system will continue to provide evidence for Yogi Berra’s observation that “if you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.”
