Taxpayers and students are being ripped off, and no one is being held accountable.
by Rob Roper
The financial website Wallet Hub just came out with state rankings for public education, and Vermont came in overall 19th out of the fifty states. Pretty “meh” on the surface. But the overall score was based on components of outcomes and safety, and purely on the outcomes side, Vermont ranks 25th. That’s more like a “sheesh!” Just FYI, our neighbors in New Hampshire came in 5th overall, 4th on quality, and Massachusetts came in number one for both.
But Vermont’s education decline over the past couple of decades doesn’t stop at just “sheesh!” An in depth piece by former UVM and State’s Economist Art Woolf reveals that when we account for demographics an even bleaker picture emerges. According to NEAP testing (aka the Nation’s Report Card), Vermont’s fourth grade non-Hispanic White students come in 47th in the nation for math and 48th for reading. This is particularly a problem – one that brings us from “sheesh” to “WTF!!” – because 90 percent of the Vermont’s population is non-Hispanic White.
The reason non-Hispanic White students tend to perform better statistically on a national level is because that demographic has, statistically speaking, more financial affluence, fewer single parent households, and parents with higher levels of education – all factors that heavily influence educational outcomes. But is this race-based brush appropriate to apply to Vermont? Maybe our non-Hispanic White parents are just less educated, poorer, and worse at relationships than their peers elsewhere. Nope. This is not the case. Not at all.
As Woolf points out, Vermont has the third lowest child poverty rate in the nation at 9 percent and the seventh lowest percentage of students who qualify for the free and reduced lunch program. According to statista.com (citing US Census as the source), we are above the national average for household incomes (18th out of 50 states). So, crying poverty is not an excuse.
According to the US Census (as of 2021), Vermont has the fourth highest percentage of population with at least a bachelor’s degree, which assumes a more educated parent cohort. And, according to statista.com, Vermont has the second lowest percentage of single mother households with children under eighteen years old. So, parents and family situations are not to blame.
Vermont consistently ranks as one of the nation’s healthiest states, as well as one of the safest, two other factors affecting student outcomes that indicate our children should be doing, on average, better not worse than their peers in other states.
The suck factor is our schools.
Yes, we have problems and challenges, but not like states that have major issues with urban poverty, high crime rates, and/or large, diverse immigrant populations that speak a multitude of primary languages that are not English. On paper, given all of our input advantages, Vermont public schools should be kicking butt. They are not.
Oh, and how could I forget, in addition to this multitude of demographic and cultural head starts we spend more freakin’ money per student than every other state but one. Nearly $2.5 billion to educate about 80,000 kids. In other words, our public schools are born on third base — yet are somehow managing to strike out. Embarrassingly. Like corkscrewing yourself in the batter’s box, hitting yourself in the head with the backswing, and falling down on a slow pitch right down the middle kind of strike out.
It’s not just test scores. Getting back to Woolf’s article (which everyone should read in its entirety), Vermont’s high school graduation rate is just 83 percent, below the national average of 87 percent, and is lower than average for every demographic subgroup.
There is no excuse for this level of failure. The people in charge – the politicians and the educrats and the teachers – need to be held accountable. The “fired” kind of accountable. Not the “let’s put these demonstrably incompetent scam artists in charge of education finance and delivery reform” kind of accountable, which, of course, Vermont politics being Vermont politics, is what we’re doing.
We’ve been firehosing more and more money into this system for going on three decades and it clearly isn’t working. More spending is not the answer. It’s time to stop the money train. It’s time to acknowledge the real problem — not Covid lockdown fallout (which public school policies exacerbated), not poverty, not parents, not independent schools (they, by the way, are performing pretty well) – but the Vermont public school system itself. Generally speaking, it stinks. And Vermont’s students and taxpayers are paying the price.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com