Vermont: Improving Equity and Supporting Continuous Improvement of Learning in the Context of Test-Based Accountability

• In Event: 72.011 - The Atlantic Rim Collaboratory: An Emergent Movement for Global Educational Change

Abstract

Vermont is committed to providing high quality educational systems and supports for children, so that all of our children are healthy, happy, and able to thrive in civic and economic life. It is one of the U.S.’s highest educational performers on most indicators, in line with other New England states including Massachusetts (Hargreaves, Burns, & Wangia, 2015). That said, because of its small size and unique policy context, Vermont is a perfect case study for exploring:
• the tension between evaluation for the purposes of accountability and diagnostic evaluation to support continuous growth and improvement;
• the tension between the abundance of information in the public sector for the purposes of assigning sanctions, the absence of comparable evidence for private sector competitors, and growing evidence that communities that serve disproportionately high numbers of students in poverty will be disproportionately challenged in their efforts to support strong outcomes for children, even with great teaching;
• the tension between strong and deeply felt professional accountability for improving outcomes, particularly for our most vulnerable students, and the very real and practical challenges faced by our professionals in our schools that serve the highest proportion of students of color and students who live in poverty; and
• the tension between education as a private good (for the purpose of individual advancement) and education as a public good (for the purpose of serving shared public goals (including strong civic life and equitable and sustainable economic development).
Because Vermont refused to evaluate teachers based on test scores, it was unique in the U.S. for having to label every single school “low performing” for the purposes of federal accountability under NCLB, despite being a high scoring state with high levels of support for education (Holcombe, 2014). This freed Vermont and our State Board of Education to pivot to a broader vision of education than that prescribed by federal policy. It also freed Vermont to pilot qualitative field reviews of our school systems, which engage educators across systems in site visits to systematically gather dataon school practices and outcomes as they related to improvement efforts.
This session will explore how Vermont will use these integrated field reviews to engage our public and our practitioners in powerful conversations about school quality and school goals, and to support the sharing of effective practices across school systems. Moving forward, we expect these field reviews to be a powerful tool for sustaining and informing improvement efforts state wide.
Vermont was eager to join the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory (ARC) because it presents an opportunity to work with colleagues across contexts to develop new models that are in line with our core commitments to equity, quality, and sustainability. With our ARC colleagues, we hope to focus on creating a new narrative of strong schools that:
• honors the complexity of teaching in a diverse and innovative world;
• reflects our shared commitment to a broad and deep set of outcomes, equitably distributed; and
• reflects our belief that schools get better when they have strong internal capacity and accountability for learning.

Author

• Rebecca Holcombe, Vermont Agency of Education