To hear the Douglas-Dubie Administration tell it, you’d think that Vermont’s public schools are wasting money on all sides. But you’d be as wrong as they are. Republicans love “tests” as a measure of “outcomes.” Well, you can’t get much better outcomes than these:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Vermont’s 8th-graders achieved the best scores in the country in reading. Fourth-graders came in second after Massachusetts.
Not to mention that results in math posted last fall showed Vermont’s 8th-graders getting the second-highest scores in the country, with 4th-graders ranking third.
Now how do you suppose a small state like Vermont managed to get those outstanding results?
“Vermonters invest in their local public schools, year after year, because they recognize the importance of hiring the best and brightest to teach their children,” [Vt NEA President Martha] Allen said. “It is gratifying – though not surprising – that Vermont’s students continue to achieve at such high levels.”
So much for undermining public education by using vouchers to funnel public money to private and religious schools, as has been proposed by the state’s current Republican administration.
Republicans somehow never allow facts to get in the way of their ideology.
being the product of a skewed political agenda rather than a reflection of reality.
Ms. Adams is the president of a labor union and her core motivation is to get her members the best deal possible. She can be forgiven for attempting to make an implied correlation between student performance and teacher salaries but the provided figures and state salary averages don’t seem to support that claim. The large bump in performance seen between 2000 and 2003 was preceded by several years of relatively modest salary increases, and the large average salary jump of 5.47% in 2003 did not result in a matching large bump in performance. It is more plausible to correlate the increased accountability resulting from NCLB to the improved performance.
Additionally the performance increases occurred while Vermont has 90 tuition towns and over 4,000 students attending private schools under the program. It is hardly an argument against school choice. At worst it shows that the limited existing options for school choice didn’t prevent public school improvement.