School Daze: Brattleboro Public Schools and Modern Education
School test results are in and again this year, not one of our five public schools made “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the federal definition of that term. To make matters worse, all five, including Oak Grove Elementary, which was only in the Improvement phase last year, are in some form of corrective action. For perspective, ours were among the 73% of other Vermont schools in the same boat, roughly the same as last year. What is going on?
In an effort to get a handle on both the Brattleboro public school system and public education generally, it was necessary to view the problem from all angles. It all starts with a change in federal education policy via the Bush-era education act, No Child Left Behind, which mandated frequent testing of school age children and something called “teacher accountability.” Obama’s Race To The Top program builds on No Child by adding incentives (some would call them bribes) to teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests. There’s also federal education funding at stake, in the form of grants, that are distributed through the program to winning applicants.
