Editor’s note: This commentary is by Ben Heintz, a teacher who lives in Marshfield.
A thought experiment:
Imagine if driver’s licenses were granted not by the state, but by town governments.
In this system, when a Vermonter turns 16, she reports to her town clerk’s office, presents the particular documentation required by her town, and takes her town’s road test.
Each town has the discretion to develop a test consistent with their values, developed by the town’s Vehicle Licensure Committee. The new driver might be lucky and live in Roxbury — where the test is a quick spin around the fire station parking lot — or they might be less fortunate and live in Essex, where one mistake, like screwing up the “classic Vermont turnaround,” means disqualification.
We would never do it that way. Why not?
Take a moment to consider the problems with this system.
In some respects it’s a stretch to compare driver’s licenses and high school diplomas, but both are essential to most young Vermonters’ autonomy.
If you had to send your child into the world without one of these credentials, which would it be?
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ analysis of federal data from 2017, “full-time workers without a high school diploma had median weekly earnings of $515, compared with $718 for high school graduates (no college) and $1,189 for those with a bachelor’s degree.”
These economic benefits remind us: any system for high school graduation involves questions of distributive justice.
What does it take to earn a high school diploma in Vermont?
To what degree does the answer depend on the town where a student happens to live?
We don’t have a good answer.
There are powerful arguments for proficiency-based teaching and learning. The system has pushed Vermont’s schools to raise the bar for graduation, insisting that students demonstrate competency in a broad array of skills.
This could be a good thing, except that each district has come up with its own approach, with its own particular requirements.
At some Vermont high schools the standard for graduation is far more rigorous than it was five years ago. In others, a marginal student can still get by.
The result is something like the town-by-town system for driver’s licenses, but for high school diplomas.
No one should mourn the passing of the old “D for Diploma” system, in which students passed with the bare minimum. But the low threshold for graduation had an upside: at least students and their families could be held responsible, to a large degree, if they failed to earn a diploma. At schools across Vermont, a student’s failure to graduate was generally the result of truancy, or other serious barriers in a student’s life that made it impossible to perform the basic tasks asked of them at school.
Now that we’ve raised the bar, requiring proficiency and not just seat time, a student who attends consistently and makes a reasonable effort in their classes could still come up short (depending on which school they attend).
When we make high school diplomas harder to earn, we should also hold ourselves to a higher standard, ensuring something close to equal opportunity, not just within schools but across the state. We’ve failed in this regard.
Defenders of the proficiency system lean heavily on pedagogical theory. They cite “equity,” again and again, as one of the system’s guiding principles.
This commitment to equity should extend beyond the classroom, to include all of the school’s stakeholders. A system that is often incomprehensible to parents, especially those without training in the abstract language of bureaucracy, is inequitable.
The casual assertion that many students may need more than four years of high school is inequitable. This will mostly impact working class families, asking them to forgo a full year of the would-be graduate’s earnings in order to secure a diploma.
Many of Vermont’s wisest citizens and most productive taxpayers can’t solve equations in algebra or write organized essays. Insisting that students demonstrate mastery of a long list of academic standards for graduation (as is the case in some schools but not others) is inequitable.
Our public debate over the proficiency system is itself inequitable. Critics have largely focused on GPAs, transcripts and college admissions. It’s a serious problem if some of Vermont’s students have missed out on scholarship money, or haven’t gotten into their preferred colleges, where they might have under the old system. But these are the concerns of Vermont’s elites, the people with the loudest voices in the public sphere.
There is far more at stake for Vermont’s working class families and at risk youth. Entering adulthood without a high school diploma is more perilous than having fewer options for college. Vermont’s educational leaders and policymakers would benefit from a closer look at the system’s impact for the students with the fewest advocates.
A rich debate about teaching and learning in Vermont is necessary. We do need to update our approach, and proficiency-based assessment may yet prove to be the right choice.
And it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing debate: We can keep elements of the proficiency system without tying it to graduation per se. Some schools have done just that, using proficiency to guide curriculum, instruction and assessment without fundamentally changing their grading, reporting, or graduation requirements.
But right now all the theoretical discussions are beside the point. The inconsistency of the graduation system requires immediate action.
In four months, Vermonters in the class of 2020 — most of them, at least — will graduate. In schools where the proficiency model has been implemented with rigor, some C and D students of years past aren’t on track to receive a diploma.
Each of these students raises troubling questions for his teachers.
Would this student have graduated last year, or five years ago?
Would he graduate at another school?
Or in another state? (Remember our concern that students be prepared to compete in the “global economy”?)
What if Vermont relaxes its demand for comprehensive proficiency in a year or two? Would the student graduate then?
If we do deny this student a diploma, will he really return next year?
These questions aren’t just academic. They present moral dilemmas.
Motivated by sincere interest in the child’s wellbeing, many teachers and schools may choose to deem these students “proficient,” even though the student’s work in truth falls short of the standard.
These acts of clemency compromise the integrity of teachers, schools, and students, undermine the original purpose of the law by lowering our standards, and make the system still more inconsistent.
How can we sustain this system, when acting in the best interests of our students can feel like an act of civil disobedience?
Read the story on VTDigger here: Ben Heintz: The inequity of a proficiency-based system.
