I want to be careful here, and I want to be fair to Art Woolf, Vermont’s Loudest Economist (TM). But his latest screed on Vermont Tiger is irresponsible hackery at best, and race-baiting at worst.
In it, Woolf takes on the results of the US Education Department’s 8th Grade National Assessment of Educational Progress Science (NAEP) test. The results are pretty good; 43% of Vermont eighth-graders were proficient in science, compared to 31 percent nationally.
This is, of course, inconvenient news for Woolf and the other Tiggers who are constantly flaying Vermont’s public schools for high cost and low performance. So he goes hunting for explanations that don’t involve praising Vermont schools. And he finds a goddamn doozy.
To wit: Vermont scores well, not because of our schools or teachers, but because we have a monochromatic population.
In Vermont 93% of students are white. Only 55% of students in the U.S. are white while 21% are Hispanic and 15% are black. In Vermont, 2% are Hispanic and 1% are black.
He then notes that 45% of white students were proficient nationally and 46% in Vermont. And then he compares Vermont to Texas, which had a proficiency rate of only 32%.
But Texas is filled with low income minority students, with 63% Hispanic or black students and only 31% white students. In the Lone Star State, 53% of white students achieved a proficient or advanced score, a higher percent than Vermont’s 46%. So which state does a better job of educating students in science?
Oh, Art. I’m sure you didn’t mean to assert that the real measure of a school is how well it educates white students. And I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that minority students are naturally less proficient in science than white kids. But it certainly comes across that way.
After the jump: Show me the money!
Now for Woolf’s triumphant conclusion: Vermont’s per-pupil spending is much higher than Texas’, and we’re getting no better results (among white students). Therefore, ipso facto, Q.E.D., Vermont schools are lousy and costly.
I assume that Vermont Tiger is not a peer-reviewed journal with academic standards for research, because this is a really sloppy piece of work. And dangerous, because it leaves Woolf wide open to charges of racism. Personally, I don’t think he’s a racist, I just think he’s a lazy opportunist when it comes to political debate. Which is less than I’d expect from someone with a professorship at UVM.
So let’s lay out some of the questions that Art Woolf might have asked himself before he ejected this little P.O.S.
Is race the only variable between Vermont and Texas? Are there challenges facing Vermont that don’t face Texas — like, for instance, a small and scattered population? Does Vermont perhaps have a higher rate of poverty among white students? (Only 28% of poor students were proficient in science, compared to 51% in other income groups.) Does Texas, which really skimps on public education, do more “teaching to the test” than Vermont? How does Vermont compare to states with similar demographics, per-pupil spending, or geography?
Is Texas the best comparable to Vermont? Obviously not, in most respects. But it’s the state Art Woolf picked, because it props up his belief that Vermont schools, test results notwithstanding, are an expensive failure.
And in the process, he left himself wide open to racist interpretations of his argument.
I just don’t even understand his underlying “logic.”
Assistant Professor Woolf and all other critics of Vermont schools should check themselves against the students by completing the sample test items found here:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/s…
He cherry-picks his factoids to exclude anything that might disrupt his forgone conclusion.
Sometimes playing the race card is warranted. This is not one of those times. Without denying that Art Woolf sometimes writes some objectionable stuff, I’d suggest that this diary, not Woolf’s piece, is “irresponsible hackery.”
To start off saying you want to be fair to Woolf, and then write this patronizing paragraph, is just a dick move:
When you’re evaluating how well schools are performing, there are relevant differences between demographics that you have to take into account. Hispanic and black students tend to do worse on standardized tests than white students, so if you’re comparing states that have significant differences in the racial composition of their public school students, you need to also look at the demographic breakdown. The VPR and Free Press stories that Woolf quotes didn’t do that, and it’s fair for him to criticize them for it.
None of this suggests in any way that “the real measure of a school is how well it educates white students,” or that “minority students are naturally less proficient in science than white kids.” It’s just pointing out that there’s more to the story behind the statistics than the overall percentage of students judged to be proficient. I think there’s obvious systematic oppression (both current and past) in the US against minority groups, and that one way that this oppression manifests itself is black and hispanic students doing worse on standardized tests than white students. But this regrettable fact doesn’t mean we shouldn’t break down data by demographics when it clearly makes sense to do so.
Go ahead and make points about other variables that could affect the statistics. But don’t suggest that Woolf’s a racist when nothing he wrote in the post in question justifies that insinuation. And also, it’s just sleazy and cowardly to frame it as, “I’m not saying he’s a racist, but someone could interpret it that way.” If you’re gonna slander people like this, at least own up to it.