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Statewide scores drop despite record-high school spending and record-low school enrollment
By Michael Bielawski
Data from the Vermont Department of Education indicates that students’ English, math, and science scores are declining or just low. This is despite double-digit percent cost hikes in education property taxes this year and likely again next year.
The data is from the preliminary 2023-24 Vermont Comprehensive Assessment Program results. In mathematics, the numbers are not great. For each of grades 3-8, scores dropped from last year. Fewer students are considered proficient.
The “Average Scaled Score” for grade 3 dropped by four points, grade 4 dropped by ten points, grade 5 by seven, and the other grades similarly dropped except for grade 9 went up five points. It is not clarified what a “scaled score” means.
The data for English was a mix, with four grades dropping a combined eight points and three grades improving by a combined 15, and just over about half the students are considered proficient. Science was also a mix with scores generally the same as last year and overall more than half of all students are non-proficient.
Interim Secretary of Education Zoie Saunders said having this data, just two years now for the new test, is a great resource.
“The Agency is committed to accelerating this process to ensure schools and School Boards have the data they need to support timely decision-making. At the same time, we will continue focusing on improving student outcomes in reading, math, and science,” she said.
She continues, “Our educators are dedicated to promoting academic achievement, and the Agency remains an active partner. We recognize that our work isn’t done until we ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to succeed.”
Half or fewer students proficient
Be it math, English, or science, about half or more of all Vermont students are not considered “proficient” in the subject. For English, proficiency ranges from 48% to 58%. For math, those numbers dip to between 30% and 48%. And for science, the range is 41% to 46%.
“Equity Results”
There is a separate section of data category for “equity results”. For example, there are the “2024 Statewide English Language Arts Equity Results” and the “2024 Statewide Mathematics Equity Results” and so on.
“The tables below show a comparison between students from historically marginalized backgrounds (HM) and students not from HM backgrounds. The HM group includes students from racial and ethnic minorities, students living in poverty, students on IEPs, English learners and migrant students, students experiencing homelessness or living in foster care, and students from military-affiliated families.”
So for English for example, it shows that the HM group scored at least 70 points lower for all grade levels and a similar result for mathematics.
The report concludes, “Large achievement gaps are evident, with differences in average percent proficient between the two groups ranging from 25% to 35% depending on grade and subject. Specifically, average percent proficient for students from HM backgrounds range from 19% to 43%, while the same percents range from 47% to 76% for students not from HM backgrounds.”
Record spending, declining enrollment
This past year property taxes that fund education were up about 14% statewide and it could have been higher were it not bought down via one-time funds. It’s widely expected that education costs will continue to rise next year as well.
Political analyst Rob Roper has written numerous commentaries on the matter of high education spending. He recently noted that Vermont pays the second highest per student in the nation.
He wrote, “Well, one could argue that the $2 billion the state already collects from us every year to the tune of nearly $25,000 per student – second highest spending levels in the nation – already amounts to having found the ‘necessary revenues’ for schools.”
The Agency of Education oversees a $ 2.7 billion education system with an operating budget of just over $ 55.7 million and 176 positions. Vermont public school enrollment K-12 is 72,093 students, down 650 from 72,747.
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle
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Categories: Education
Defund the schools. They are merely tools of leftist indoctrination anyways.
At this point they are basically using our children as a strong arm tactic to seperate you from your hard earned money.
A majority of Vermont kids are flunking basic competency exams yet 𝙣𝙤 one is held accountable despite record spending on “education” of your tax money.
It’s worse than criminal.
And it gets worse.
Vermont – the state that claims to be disproportionately inclusive and caring about minority students – pays lip service to the kids who are suffering the most from the lack of a proper education.
Why would these numbers surprise anyone, public schools are not in the business of education, they are in the business of indoctrination…………………
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, not LGBTQIA2S+ nonsense, it starts when you remove all the rainbow and blm flags from our schools !!
I read a comment on another web site article that if the school systems were given 10 trillion dollars, they would spend it and demand more. All funding via the tax payer is basically uncounted for. This is well known. School administrators know how to milk the taxpayer mainly by town hall meeting voting on their budgets. If you watch videos of the town hall meetings, many are elderly and take naps and don’t hear what’s happening. Townshend especially. The school people know how to bully the town to maintain their empire and it’s obviously NOT for the kids. The RRR’s are not on the agenda.
It seems like the “crack babies” are no longer infants, but school aged children now.
Indoctrinate and social work is what public schools do now. Education takes a back seat to “equity”.
The downfall of the US education system began with the advent of public-sector unions back in the JFK administration, and continued with the creation of a massive federal bureaucracy called the Department of Education under Jimmy Carter. In short, the democrat party holds all blame for the sorry state of our youth. The democrat party and marxism/liberalism has been allowed to flourish because of ignorant voters who respond to promises of free stuff from the public treasury, and this election is a perfect example.
Going back a bit further in history:
https://archive.org/details/coleman-john-the-tavistock-institute-of-human-relations
“The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations has had a profound effect on the moral, spiritual, cultural, political and economic policies of the United States of America and Great Britain. It has been in the front line of the attack on the U.S. Constitution and State constitutions. No group did more to propagandize the U.S. to participate in WWI at a time when the majority of the American people were opposed to it.
Much of the same tactics were used by the Social Science scientists at Tavistock to get the United States into WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Serbia and both wars against Iraq. Tavistock began as a propaganda creating and disseminating organization at Wellington House in London in the run-up to WWI, what Toynbee called that black hole of disinformation, a lie factory. In 1821, operations that were to shape the destinies of Germany, Russia, Britain and the United States were transferred to the Tavistock Institute. The people of these nations were unaware that they were being brainwashed. Tavistock’s mind control, inner directional conditioning and mass brainwashing methods, still very much in use today, are explained in this easy to understand book written with great authority. The fall of dynasties, the Bolshevik Revolution, WWI and WWII saw the destruction of old alliances and boundaries, the convulsions in religion, morals, family life, economic and political conduct and the decadence in music and art that can all be traced back to mass indoctrination (mass brainwashing) practiced by the Tavistock Institute Social Science scientists. Prominent among Tavistocks faculty was Edward Bernays, the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. It is said that Herr Goebbels, Propaganda Minister in the German Third Reich used methodology devised by Bernays as well as that of Willy Munzenberg.
This is a book about the past, present and future. Without Tavistock, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution and no WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Serbia and Iraq wars. But for Tavistock, the United States would not be rushing down the road to dissolution and collapse.”
The NEA is a cancer upon society. Tie teacher raises to performance tests.
Shovel six more loads of money for pay increases and maybe the teachers will do better. Better yet, why not pay those so-called professionals by track record and results and weed out the bad ones.
I agree with pretty much all of the comments here, so I will comment about the Dept. of Ed. I have been aware that the number of employees in that Dept. is a lot, BUT 176!! I would love to see justification for that number.
I know, let’s spend MORE per pupil in our schools! Look how great it’s working!!!!!
The real measure of school success is how many kids they got to switch sex without their parents permission