Striving for excellence?

Yes, schools are a massive part of the state budget, but they produce results. Vermont's schools regularly score among the highest in the nation in the various tests and benchmarks produced to measure educational quality....If the rest of our state taxes were spent as wisely, perhaps we'd be driving on roads that are among the best in the nation, over bridges and culverts that have been carefully maintained for decades...

---Rutland Herald editorial

Percent of Vermont bridges in "very poor condition":  24%  (St. Albans Messenger)

Percent of Vermont students scoring less than proficient in reading on state NECAP test: 31%
....on state NECAP math test:  36%
....on state NECAP writing test:51%   (State Dept of Education)

Percent of Vermont 8th grade students performing less than proficient on US Department of Education NAEP Tests
Math:  59%
Reading:  58%
Science:  59%
Writing:  59%

If we can make the comparison, it looks like our bridges are in better shape than our students.

Comments

[George Cross]

Oh my! We are now subjected to compaisons that further out in "right field" than even the "apples to oranges" ones. Hopefully, Art was being a bit playful with this piece and not the least bit serious. It may be fun to make such silly comparisons, but it serves no intellectual purpose. Comparing students to bridges is crazy. So crazy that I will not even attempt to comment why.

[GreggB]

C'mon George tell us why. Some of us open minded conservatives are chomping at the bit to hear how crazy Art's comparison of resource allocation is.

[Anonymous]

Heck I can tell you why. I bet you could too Gregg if you thought about it. The four performance categories of the NAEP test are "below basic", "basic", "proficient" and "advanced". How do we relate those categories to bridges? Let's see an "advanced" bridge is probably better than adequate for travel, a "proficient" bridge is less adequate than "advanced" but still pretty darn good and a "basic" bridge should still support the weight and is likely cost effective too. Below basic? Well let's equate that to "very poor condition." Hmmm...by my reckoning and the scores posted on the NAEP website for Vermont students that are "below basic" the bridges are in worse condition than test scores. Look I read that wonderful little book "Lying With Statistics" too and the common way to fudge the stats is use a graph where you have fooled around with the scaling of the X and Y axes. Art did the same thing with his apples to oranges comparison. George just called him on it.

[GreggB]

To be fair to Art the original comparison was from the editorial writer and Art has a disclaimer about the feasibility of the comparison at the end of his post. 'If we can make the comparison, it looks like our bridges are in better shape than our students.' Seems valid enough for me, sure it isn't a direct comparison, but based on money spent vt schools are atrocious. We have other options so the state of vt schools really isn't a problem for us. Still an appalling waste of resources.

[Curtis Hier]

To keep the analogy going, bridges offer us choice. If we don't like the looks of one, we can turn around and go the other way. Schools don't offer such choice.