Regarding the article State education ‘snapshot’ a mixed bag for Vermont schools:
I find your headline and key takeaway in the article about the state education snapshot to be a very misleading attempt to distract from the real story: that Vermont kids of all stripes are demonstrating shockingly low proficiency scores that have undergone a precipitous drop during the pandemic.
Why are math and English scores so low to begin with? And when will state officials and school administrators admit that their response to the pandemic was a gross overreaction that clearly had severe negative consequences on our children’s learning?
The Covid response was supposed to be “following the data” — well, you don’t even need to be 50% proficient in math to see the slope of the lines in those charts and know what this data is telling you. But your “most concerning” finding, according to the article, was the equity index findings? This is insulting to all Vermont kids and parents.
VTDigger needs to hold officials accountable and we need some serious corrective measures. Parents deserve substantive inquiries that identify and address the root cause of this lack of proficiency and why, as administrators keep reminding us, our kids are experiencing “social-emotional” well-being struggles.
As Desmond Tutu said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Tim Guiterman
Burlington
