Woolf: Vermont's student test results aren't worth the money

On the surface, Vermont’s students performed well on the recently released 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. That is the only test given to students — albeit not all students — in every state in the nation, so it’s one of the only ways to gauge how well Vermont students perform compared to students in other states.

On the two subject area tests, math and reading, and in the two grade levels tested, 4th and 8th grades, the U.S. Department of Education’s test found that Vermont students did somewhat better than the national average in the aggregate results.

For example, in the fourth grade math test, 42 percent of Vermont’s students achieved a score of proficient or better, which means they have mastered the skills appropriate for fourth grade math. Nationally, only 40 percent did that well, so Vermont’s performance was a little better than the nation. For the other tests and grade levels, Vermont’s students did even better than their peers nationally.

But dig below the surface and Vermont student performance was not nearly as good. That’s because the profile of Vermont’s students does not look like the nation as a whole. In the U.S., half of all students are white. In Vermont, it’s 91 percent white. Sixteen percent of the nation’s students are black, one-quarter are Hispanic, and five percent are Asian. In Vermont each of those groups account for only about 2 percent of the student population.

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Fifty-two percent of the nation’s students are low income — their income makes them eligible for free or reduced price lunches at school — compared to 39 percent in Vermont. Vermont’s schools clearly serve a different population ethnically, racially, and by income than the average school nationwide. Racial and ethnic minorities and low-income students do not do as well as non-minority and middle income students.

Those factors have to be considered when we compare Vermont to other states. When we look at the performance of Vermont white students to white students nationally, rather than simply looking at all students aggregated together, Vermont students perform worse than their peers nationally on three out of the four tests. The only one they do better on is 8th grade reading, where 46 percent of Vermont students scored a proficient rating compared to 45 percent nationally, which is not much of an edge.

Similarly, on the surface, Vermont schools seem to do a better job at educating low-income students. More Vermont low income students scored proficient than their low income peers nationally, by as little as one percentage point on the 4th grade math test and as much as eight percentage points on the 4th grade reading test.

However, a large number of low-income students nationally are minority students and most low-income students in Vermont are white so it is more appropriate to compare white low-income Vermont students to white low-income students nationally. Again we find that in three out of the four tests Vermont students do worse than their peers. Only in 8th grade reading do Vermont low-income white students do better than the national average.

Vermont’s students, then, do slightly worse than average in most dimensions of these tests. Since these are the only means we have of comparing the performance of Vermont students to other states, Vermont citizens should be disappointed in these results. Vermont taxpayers should be even more disappointed when we consider that Vermont spends $19,000 to educate each student compared to an average of $12,000 per student nationally. We spent 60 percent more per student to achieve slightly worse than average results. That’s not an indication of success, efficiency, or quality. We should be doing a lot better, or spending a lot less.

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Art Woolf is associate professor of economics at UVM.