Art Woolf is a columnist for VTDigger. He recently retired as an associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.
The recent release of the U.S. Department of Education’s 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress allows us to compare test results for students in all 50 states. That’s why the Education Department calls it The Nation’s Report Card.
It is just about the only way we can compare how well Vermont students perform compared to students in all other states, which means how well our educational system serves Vermont’s students, parents, and taxpayers.
If I had to characterize how well Vermont students do in one word, it would be average. In two words, below average. That’s depressing, given that nationwide, states spend about $13,000 to educate each student. In Vermont, it’s closer to $20,000.
The NAEP test is given to a representative sample of students in every state, with the 2019 tests given to 4th and 8th grade students in reading and math.
Unfortunately, the NAEP tests cannot be used to compare students in specific schools. Vermont’s Smarter Balanced Assessment is given to all students in every school, so comparisons can be made among schools, but only 14 states use that exam, so it’s of limited use in telling us how well Vermont students perform compared to the rest of the U.S.
On the aggregate level, Vermont’s students did about as well as the U.S. average. Thirty-seven percent of Vermont’s students scored proficient or better in the 4th grade reading test, slightly better than the 35% for all U.S. students. As the Department of Education puts it, proficiency means the student demonstrate[s] solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. I interpret that as a grade of B or B-.
In 4th grade math, 39% of Vermont students scored at that level, slightly less than the 41% of U.S. students scoring proficient or better.
Among 8th graders, 40% of Vermont students scored proficient or better in the reading test, well above the 33% of all U.S. students. In the math test, Vermont 8th graders also scored better than their U.S. peers, outscoring them by 38% to 34%.
So, on balance, Vermont students did better than their peers nationally in reading; math was a mixed bag. The positive spin is that out of the four tests (two subjects in two grades) Vermont outperformed the national average in three.
Before going into more detail, those numbers also imply that more than half the students in the U.S. and Vermont are not mastering the subject matter in the basic skills — reading and math — that are essential for success in a modern economy. After all, fewer than half of students performed at a proficient level for any subject or grade level. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the U.S. — or Vermont — education system.
To get a more nuanced, and more accurate, picture of how Vermont’s students perform, it’s important to remember that Vermont is very different demographically from the rest of the U.S. Vermont has the least ethnically diverse student body in the nation. More than 90% of the state’s school children are white, and only 2% are black and 2% Hispanic. Nationally, fewer than half the nation’s school children are white, with 15% black and 26% Hispanic.
Black and Hispanic households have lower average incomes than whites, more children are raised in single-parent families, they drop out of high school at higher rates than white students and, in general, they perform worse than white students in schools, including on tests such as the NAEP tests. Because there are so many minority students in the U.S., and so few in Vermont, test results are skewed by the different underlying demographics.
Accounting for these racial and ethnic differences is important, and they dramatically change the NAEP comparisons between Vermont and the U.S. Take 4th grade math results, for example. In the aggregate, as I discussed above, Vermont does slightly worse than the U.S. average.
But if we look solely at white students, 40% of Vermont 4th graders score proficient or better compared to 45% for the U.S., a bigger gap between Vermont and the nation than when we compare the scores for all students. Because there are so few black and Hispanic students in Vermont, the Department of Education does not provide scores for those groups in Vermont. But nationally, only 18% of black students and 23% of Hispanic students score proficient or better.
The results are similar for 8th grade math. For all students, Vermont outperforms the nation. But for white students nationally, 44% score proficient or better compared to only 39% for Vermont. Accounting for Vermont’s different demographics means we go from being slightly better to worse than the U.S.
A similar result holds for reading. Although in the aggregate, Vermont students outperform the nation, in 4th grade, the U.S. outperforms Vermont 45% to 40% when we look only at white students. In 8th grade, Vermont goes from doing significantly better than the U.S. average for all students to underperforming the nation 40% to 42%. In both of those cases, without adjusting for racial and ethnic differences, it looks like Vermont’s students do better than their peers. But that’s only because of the different mix of students.
What about the impact of poverty on test results? The Department of Education breaks out the test results by students who are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (poor students) and those who are not eligible (middle- and upper-income students). Again, controlling for race and ethnicity, white Vermont students who come from low income families do worse than white U.S. students from low income families on nearly all the tests.
Only on the 8th grade reading test do low income white Vermont students do slightly better than low income white students nationally. And for white middle-class students, Vermont students underperform their white peers nationally on both tests in both grades.
Which states do well on these tests? Massachusetts, despite having a relatively large percentage of minority students, consistently ranks at or near the top of the states in performance.
The big surprise is the U.S. Department of Defense school system. The children of American troops stationed overseas attend schools run by the Defense Department. Those students’ demographic profile is similar to the U.S. student body — less than 50% are white, 12% are black and 20% are Hispanic.
Students in the Department of Defense school system perform better than any other state in the nation on three of the four tests — even without taking ethnic and racial differences into account — and rank 4th in the nation on the other. Whatever they are doing in those schools, it works very well for those students.
The bottom line is that Vermont’s schools do not do an excellent job at educating our children. At best we are an average state in educational performance and a good argument can be made that we’re below average.
Only three states spend more per pupil than Vermont to educate our students. Our per-pupil spending is more than 60% higher than the national average — which means about $600 million more than we would spend if we spent at the national average.
If $600 million doesn’t buy us exceptionally well-educated students, think of what else we could use that money for.
