by H. Jay Eshelman, republished from Granite Grok
The Brattleboro Reformer reported Dec. 1:
“Bellows Falls Union High School Principal Kelly O’Ryan told the school’s budget committee this week that seven freshmen out of a classroom of 14 students were reading at a first-grade or elementary school level.”
It’s not that only half of the high school students can read to grade level. It’s that half of them can only read to a first-grade level.
Also please note that this academic warning was raised by the school principal at a BFUHS ‘budget’ meeting. In other words, it’s a precursor to justify Gov. Scott’s recent warning that the State education budget, which is already at a $23,856 per student cost, will increase 18.5% for next year and equal $28,270 per student.
The Reformer story also indicated: “BFUHS Director Deborah Wright of Rockingham said the news from O’Ryan about the reading levels was “very upsetting” and the first time the school board had heard about lagging reading scores.”
Either school board member Wright can’t read either, or she’s lying.
“Apparently, there’s a lot we don’t know,” said Wright.
She said she had questions on whether those seven freshmen with the low reading abilities came from the local schools or somewhere else.
Wright and Terry said the low reading scores come at a pivotal time in negotiations, as the unionized teachers have asked for what was termed “a substantial increase.”
If this dystopia isn’t halted now, the only remedy will be a major socio-economic disaster… sooner rather than later.
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Categories: Commentary
Maybe we should inquire as to the reading and comprehension level of Deborah Wright and Kelly O’Ryan.
There is some information lacking in the Reformer article, but just maybe O’Ryan, in her first year as principal of that school comprehends that there is a problem and is attempting to do something positive about said problem.
Perhaps, previous faculty and staff have been using Vermont’s newly accepted code of conduct- Pretending- to ignore this unacceptable problem to occur.
Mr. Bammo,
Sorry for the late reply. I agree with you that there is a great deal of information lacking from this article. And maybe O’Ryan is attempting to correct things. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a hard look at these two individuals or indeed the entire school and educators.
Respectfully,
Pam Baker
The obvious questions are whether or not this is due to the children’s homes(parents), do they have cognitive disabilities that impact their ability to read, have they been attending school here in VT all along and then how are they being taught? While I have many issues with our schools which seem to believe their primary focus should be indoctrination into leftist ideology and not reading, writing and math, I know it’s not just the schools. I could read before I ever went to school; I learned to read at such a young age I have no memory of doing so. That clearly came from both growing up with parents who taught me this and intelligence. Unpacking what is going on at this school will require an unbiased look at all the potential factors.
I would also like to know if the “seven freshmen with the low reading abilities came from the local schools or somewhere else”. Maybe the school board should have known that or do now but this article does not tell me.
Retta, would you also like to know about the freshman test scores last year, and the year before that? It’s not that these kids don’t meet grade level. Half the kids in our schools haven’t met grade level for years.
I want my tax dollars refunded so I can put that money into homeschooling my own kids.
Exactly. If that’s the best they can do, it’s time to fix the root cause or pull the plug. Throwing more money at a broken system doesn’t fix it.
Retta, VT Independent, et al:
That everyone is pretending to be surprised by this report, is surprising. I served on our local school board more than 20 years ago. I was a member of the Workforce Investment Board – liaison between local businesses and our schools. I helped establish myriad apprenticeships and internships. And not only did my children go through this public education process, for more than forty years I’ve employed these kids.
In fact, my first employee, in 1976, a graduate of the BFUHS and the Brattleboro Tech Center Carpentry program, couldn’t read fractions on a tape measure or read an advertisement on a matchbook cover. I’ve been talking to anyone who would listen about this circumstance since then.
I’ve been saving test score reports of our students for more than 20 years, and have documentation from more than 20 years ago showing that a State audit of the WNESU special education department found that children were being inappropriately identified as learning disabled, when, in fact, they simply weren’t being taught to read in lower grades. I’ve discussed the circumstance at some length and spoken at annual school meetings – while being denied the opportunity to elaborate.
This entire fiasco didn’t just all-of-a-sudden happen. And yes, parents and the Vermont electorate must accept much of the blame. But in their defense, not only are they products of this flawed system, they tended to believe ‘the experts’, or suffer intimidation. As a school board director, I and my children were subject to significant intimidation by school officials. So, it’s difficult for me to blame anyone or anything other than the public-school monopoly and the legislators that enable it.
Please stop with the self-righteous indignation. It is ‘obvious’. This is ‘our’ problem. It’s been our problem and no one else’s for a long time. And, as I’ve been explaining to people for more than 20 years, there is only one way to correct it. Yes… I know you know what I’m going to say. But here it is again.
School Choice for all Vermont parents and their children.
We need more money! That’s why they can’t read. lol,
It also explains how it’s so easy for people to believe lies, they have no reading comprehension.
You wouldn’t want to destroy a high schoolers self esteem by actually expecting them to read at grade level now, would you? This is typical of our schools today. A combination of teachers who don’t know how to teach reading and a system which allows or even encourages grade promotion despite not meeting grade level requirement. Simply put, kids are pushed on to the next grade whether they are ready or not and, as a result, fall further behind each year because they can’t do grade level work.
That being said, where are the parents of these kids. I’m guessing they didn’t read to their kids when they were young and done have the time or desire to help educate their kids. That is not the school’s fault.
Don’t worry, though. They will receive their worthless high school diploma no matter how far behind they are. Just look at how proud Vermont schools are of their graduation rates. About the only way you can’t graduate is to drop out.
Vermont students have the same reading comprehension as those in states that spend HALF as much money. States that are often made fun of as being poor and “backward.”
Where is all our money going? What is being taught to our teachers, and who is teaching them to teach?
I could read at first grade level at age 4. Knew how before I ever set foot in a classroom. Taught by parents with high-school diplomas and zero instruction in educational theory, but a great deal of common sense.
Re: “Where is all our money going? ”
In the last 20 years:
The cost per student has more than doubled.
Student academic performance has cratered.
Student enrollments have declined 25%.
And the Agency of Education has as many employees as there are students.
That should be the focus of the next debate.
This is an example of how cronyism is the brother of communism and marxism. Everybody gets in on the FREE MONEY…..also known as taxpayer’s wallet.
Driven by Chittenden county, Burlington, which somehow has still not caught up to the taxes we pay across the state, conveniently “forgot” to reassess the town for what, an entire generation. And then there was a charter document that prevented them from raising it more than 25%??????
There is a fox in the hen house, he’s not after just the eggs.
You do realize Jay; Indoctrination doesn’t come cheap. It’s not easy to confuse an entire populace about something as basic as their sexuality, it’s not difficult but it does take money to make sure our children are oversexualized and trained to be given over to lust in the name of love……that too takes money.
Twenty years ago was 2003. No child left behind enacted in 2001, then came Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. From President 43 to President 44 with their admistrations, the financial shenigans, wars, esculating crime, and countless calamities therein, it really isn’t hard to figure out why Johnny and Jane can’t read, do simple math, or think outside the boxes they are shoved in. Yet, I’m sure the children know what color they are, but not sure what gender. The adults in the room are responsible for being woefully stupid, complicit, and complacent. Society does not descend into dystopia by accident. Culture is not our friend and neither are those fake, installed, authority figures.
Melissa: Nothing is ever cut an dry, i.e., black and white, baby and bathwater, etc., etc..
If it weren’t for the No Child Left Behind Act, for example, our schools would not have done the aggregate testing of students (so-called ‘high stakes testing’) in the first place. We would have never learned how dysfunctional the public school system actually is – even though we suspected it.
As Milton Friedman pointed out: government should be a referee, not make the rules nor play in the game.
My point was the Federal policies implemented over 20 years ago didn’t seem to do any good in places such as Vermont. I was held to “basic competency” standards – very simple common sense markers to meet before graduation. Those seem to have gone out the window as well. Whether it be Vermont or an inner-city school in NYC, there are no standards considering the results. What happened? No accountability and no one held to account. Perhaps remove and bar any and all politcal unions inside the walls and remove federal involvement all together – both factions were never intended to be involved in education in the first place.
Re: “My point was the Federal policies implemented over 20 years ago didn’t seem to do any good in places such as Vermont.”
And my point, Melissa, is that some of the Federal Policies did do some good. NCLB aggregate academic assessments being one of them.
But what I’m also saying isn’t that what you, or anyone else, think or does is necessarily wrong… or right. What I’m saying is, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. No two people will ever agree 100% on what constitutes a good and proper education.
What matters, in everything we do, is that each of us does (and be allowed to do) what each of us believes is the right thing to do… whatever that happens to be. And this, in a nutshell, is what most of us fail to understand.
Individual liberty and freedom is based on autonomous behavior in whatever it is we choose to do. Some people choose to take total control of their lives, while others join convents, abandon all worldly goods, and give themselves to one cause or the other. It’s their personal choice. And the fact that they choose one path doesn’t make what they choose to be the right path for anyone else.
The novel approach to this paradox of human nature has been discussed from the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, if not before. The Pilgrims figured it out too, after nearly half of them starved to death. And the U.S. Constitution is based on this one principle. If we don’t figure it out today – well, history has a habit of repeating itself.
So, what is ‘it’?
Free enterprise. Period. As clunky and chaotic as it may seem, and as Milton Friedman so eloquently described it – “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself…. A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
All I require is that you be allowed to do whatever it is you choose to do (so long as you don’t harm someone else in the process), and that you allow me the same courtesy. Again, the wisdom of Friedman:
“The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
Godspeed.
I have seen some private Montessori schools that consistently beat the public schools on standardized aptitude tests with one-tenth of the state’s per-pupil budget. The public school system is just a protection racket that guarantees income to mediocre teachers & bureaucrats who could not compete in a free market.
I don’t know if all public-school teachers are mediocre, or that all public-school bureaucrats can’t compete in a free market. I prefer to let the free market demonstrate what and who works best.
But your observation that these people are running, or operating within, a tyrannical ‘protection racket’ is a spot-on reflection. That they continue to operate in this way is a mirror image of their personal character, not to mention our failure to demonstrate to them the ultimate demise inherent in their tyranny.
I suppose, as they continue to force their tyranny and harm on us, we will have no choice but to defend ourselves. Our constitution defines our options in that regard, within the rule of law. But when a tyrant is lawless, what other options do the rest of us have?
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis
What goes around, comes around.
I will bet they all know what their pronouns are and the meaning of inclusive and that the USA is racist.
The district’s and state’s answer will be to change the proficiency scale. If tax payers cant compare linear data, the education industrial complex cannot be held accountable. I guarantee it.
Who needs Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic to have a good education, all you need
for a good education in this day and age, is important to know what pronoun to use, and don’t misgender anyone, and follow the LGBTQIA2S+ agenda, and you’ll flow right through to graduation………………..
We allow all this liberal nonsense to happen, and we have for years, I am appalled with my tax dollars at $23k a year already for indoctrination, and the state education budget committee dares to ask for an 18% increase !!
If we let this happen, we deserve what we get, overpaid so-called teachers pushing indoctrination, and a pack of uneducated kids………………….wake up people.
Of course having a first grade reading level, means these students can’t or won’t likely attempt to read or comprehend the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, existing or newly passed laws/statutes, legal contracts etc, all of which of course creates a new upcoming uneducated, easily duped generation…the very thing that the marxists currently in power dream of.
Johnathan Johnson, exactly.
Absolutely Jonathan hits the nail right on the head. The Commiecrats are happy that these kids can’t read or write cursive.
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them”. – George Orwell
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic” – Carl Sagan
Just over 40 years ago an acquaintance asked me to sit in on a course that she taught at the local college in Pomona, N.J. Most of the students were White from upper working class or middle class backgrounds. She taught as an adjunct. The students took minutes to read short paragraphs. They struggled with pronouncing short words and names. After a few sessions, I quit attending. It was simply too difficult for me.
But really why is this a shock to anyone. The first thing I was taught taking Psychology 101 was the B.F. Skinner theory that all behavior learned. So is it any wonder why the result of our children’s learning is so poor. Look at who’s running our institutions of higher learning on down. This filth and immorality is trickling down to our kids and grandkids thru exactly these kinds of people.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/university-presidents-antisemitism-congress-testimony
“The enemy is already here”. – Dan Bongino
B.F. Skinner’s utopian missive, Walden Two, is a perfect example of the oversimplified socio-economic collectivist notion to which today’s socialists cling in a desperate attempt to rationalize their ongoing failures. In practice, Skinner’s socio-economic models have never been sustainable.
Those are the achievers. The trouble is in what is not said. The other half is at kindergarten level.
Keep those tax dollars coming in and watch the spiral continue on.