States’ Rights in Alabama and Vermont 
By Martin Harris 

The column-inches allotted for this essay are too few to permit a review of the history of the "States’ Rights" phrase and how its invention and use were deplored by Northern liberals; but most readers except maybe recent high school grads will perhaps appreciate the irony of those same folks now using the same doctrine to justify non-cooperation with the Feds on a different subject: public education and student test scores. Sometimes this deliberate non-cooperation goes to remarkable lengths: consider, for example, opening the annual National Digest of Educational Statistics from recent past years and finding some of Vermont students’ federal test scores missing; or, most recently, opening the latest US Department of Education’s study comparing federal test rigorousness with that of various State-preferred tests and finding, similarly, Vermont (and a handful of other States, including –sweet irony-- Alabama) results totally absent. A real historian, not an amateur like me, might observe that it took Vermont half a century to join with Alabama in discovering the self-governance virtues (and political advantages) of the States’ Rights principle, albeit for a somewhat different reason.

You can verify this discovery for yourself: the full name of the publication is "Mapping 2005 State Proficiency Scores Onto the NAEP Scales". It is Publication 2007-482 of the National Center for Educational Statistics, and is the result of grassroots political pressure: parents and taxpayers across the country asking why their children’s test scores seemed to be so much higher on State-preferred tests (in Vermont, there’s been a succession of them, most recently the NECAP diagnostic, which is currently popular for producing higher apparent test scores than its predecessors) than on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress tests for, typically, math and reading at various grade levels. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, for example, students showing 60-to-80 percent "proficient" on State-preferred tests show a much less impressive 30-to-40 percent on the Federal tests. You can see why Vermont edu-crats would embrace "States’ Rights" so as not to cooperate with a federal effort comparing NECAP (on which, the 2008 Addison Central Supervisory Union Annual Report proudly announces, its elementary school students are showing "proficient" percentages as high as 84 (4th grade math, Weybridge) with the State-wide NAEP tests (not mentioned in the Report) which show about 2/3 of all Vermont students non-proficient.

Its Montpelier edu-crats having discovered the political value of withholding State-preferred test information from the Feds so that Vermont couldn’t be included in a study comparing federal and State test rigorousness, it now seems that local-district edu-crats have chosen to do likewise, carefully excluding test scores from a State-mandated report on "cost-effectiveness". You can see for yourself in the last nine pages of the 2008 ACSU Annual Report how there’s lots of info on staffing and spending, but not a single number on the test score outputs –student achievement-- these inputs produced. So I used the NECAP test scores from the school-by-school findings in the front part of the Annual Report to construct my own little analysis of "cost-effectiveness". I averaged the 4th grade math and reading scores for each school and divided each number by the same school’s Current Spending per Pupil to get a Effectiveness Index based on percentage-point-of-proficiency-per-dollar . As the nearby chart shows, the results range from an EI of 100 for Weybridge, where $7961 per pupil produced an average 80 percent proficient-at-grade-level, down to Shoreham, where $9144 produced only 31 percent of 4th grade students proficient, for an EI of 34. The long division isn’t quite rocket science, but it does show an easy measurement of cost-effectiveness. The ACSU could have met its statutory obligation and included this basic arithmetic in the Annual Report but chose not to. Why not? You decide. While deciding, you might note that the higher-spending and/or smaller-class-size schools don’t post the best student achievement scores.
 

* Proficiency Percentage derives from the average of NECAP 4th grade math and reading scores for 2007 except for Ripton where 2006 data are used because 2007 data are not shown. "Proficiency" as used here equates to the "meeting or exceeding the standard" phrase in the ACSU Annual Report. Both approximate "ability to function at grade level" as used in the Federal NAEP test score data.

**Current per-pupil spending is a lower dollar amount than Education Spending per Pupil because of the line items not included, typically capital outlay and debt service, adult education, special education, etc.

***Efficiency Index is obtained through division of Proficiency Percentage by Current Spending per Pupil. Thus, for Ripton, 56/7779 = .0072 or, in whole numbers, 72.
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights