On April 26, 2023

Vermont’s education system is a mess

 

Dear Editor,

The new Career and Technical Education report from outside consultants strengthens the argument that Vermont’s education system is a mess. 

After over 40 years teaching and helping to plan education reforms around the world, I believe that Vermont’s continuing commitment to fixing what’s broken in different silos of the system and within those silos will not produce the educated people Vermont needs, no matter which proposals are adopted. The same is true for preschool childhood development, K-12 schooling, and the higher education system. 

In every one of these subsystems, we continue to behave like hill farmers with a broken tractor. The challenge for them was to get the tractor going again. It didn’t matter that they might have the wrong tractor for their farm’s terrain or for the crops they were growing. 

For Vermont’s preschool children, the discussions and legislation mostly address how to pay staff better and to babysit them. I don’t know of any discussions among the plethora of early childhood organizations about the overall development of children before their schooling starts, or of creating a statewide structure that pursues the objectives for childhood development. 

I’ve watched the K-12 system’s enrollments decline every year while per-pupil costs increase, and the continually changing tests that measure learning outcomes have obfuscated what I believe is a decline in students’ learning. 

This decline started well before the Covid excuse came along. The Vermont Dept. of Education’s embargo on releasing the 2020 or 2022 test results may be because of the results, not all of which can be explained by Covid.

At the tertiary level, we have watched the multiple reconfigurations of the state college system over the last few years and UVM’s continuing upheavals over enrollment levels, housing, and the leadership’s conflicts with students, the faculty, and staff. 

Can anyone doubt that changing college names, their organizational relations, what books they have, and the failure of dialogues on different campuses collectively suggest that the system needs a careful long-term consideration?

Ward Heneveld

Enosburg Falls

Do you want to submit feedback to the editor?

Send Us An Email!

Related Posts

Closing schools doesn’t fix Vermont’s education affordibility problems

October 30, 2024
By Margaret MacLean Editor’s note: Margaret MacLean, of Peacham, is a retired Vermont teacher and award-winning principal. She is the founding executive director of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative, a past employee of the Rural School and Community Trust, and served on the Vermont State Board of Education.  Roxbury parents can meet most of the…

Making Vermont a place working families want to call home

October 30, 2024
By Rebecca Holcombe Editor’s note: Rebecca Holcombe is a Vermont Representative from Windsor-Orange 2 who served as the Vermont Secretary of Education from 2014 to 2018. Vermonters suffer from unsustainable increases in the cost of everything from property taxes to healthcare. Too many people are working hard and stretching Social Security checks but still worry…

Don’t be fooled by false promises

October 30, 2024
Dear Editor,  There is no simple solution to the challenges that Vermonters face. There needs to be a delicate balance between what, on the surface, seems like appealing short-term solutions to the cost of living for all Vermonters versus the vision for long-term planning that creates financial stability and growth into the future.  Do not…

Context matters

October 30, 2024
Dear Editor, In an October 23 letter to the Mountain Times, Steve Berry wrote, “John Kerry stated at a World Economic Forum panel, ‘Our First Amendment stands as a major block (to getting things done).’”  You may wonder why Mr. Berry uses such odd syntax, placing part of the quote in parentheses. Maybe it’s because…