Florida’s Path to Educational Excellence | Vince Verges

On this episode of Anchored, CLT’s Chief Strategy Officer Noah Tyler is joined by Vince Verges, who recently retired from the Florida Department of Education after 31 years in Florida public schools. They discuss how Florida emerged as a national leader in classical education. Vince shares his journey from classroom teacher to serving as the head of Accountability and Assessment at the Florida Department of Education, including his choice to steer away from Common Core standardized testing. They explore the role of virtue in education, particularly in connection to the rise of AI. 

Transcript

Noah Tyler (00:01.211)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast. This is Noah Tyler, CLT's Chief Strategy Officer, and we have a special guest today. It's Vince Burgess, recently retired from the Florida Department of Education after 31 years of service in all areas of Florida public schools. Before entering the field of education, he served as a crewman aboard the EA-6B Prowler, an aircraft carrier-based electronic warfare aircraft. He served during the first Gulf War and left the service in 1993.

Vince has served as a classroom teacher of high school mathematics and elementary school assistant principal and worked on large scale assessments for more than 20 years. His wife, Laura, also recently retired from education and served as a preschool teacher and school principal for more than 20 years. They have $2, who also are products of the Florida public education school system, and both have successful careers of their own. Vince Burgess, thank you for being a guest on Anchored Podcast.

Vince Verges (00:55.712)
Thank you for having me, Noah.

Noah Tyler (00:57.935)
Let's start where we often start on the podcast with the educational background of our guest. So how was school growing up? At what point did you have some kind of awakening into the wider world of education and how would you describe those early years of education?

Vince Verges (01:13.358)
Yeah, good question. I was born and raised in the New Orleans area. My mom was a school teacher. That's kind of where I got my first love. And when I first joined the service, my wife and I now married 34 years. When we first got married, I said, you know, when I retire from the Navy in about 20 years or so, I'd love to go back and teach school. then you mentioned I left in 93. That was after an ejection I suffered during a crash. was 1992 over the Olympic National Forest.

on a training mission. I lost my hand during the injection was medically retired and that day laying in hospital bed, my wife came in and I was just very happy to be alive. And I said, well, it like we're gonna put plan B of, educational teaching, in the, in the play now. decided to move back home to Florida. Her parents were dead retired from the Navy and they lived in Jacksonville, came back and got my teacher's certificate. And then, ended up in a small town about 50 miles Southeast of Tallahassee and.

I teaching there and then I had the opportunity to get into educational measurement field, which we can talk about later. always kind of been a passion for teaching and I could have loved history, avid reader of history, love English and those kinds of things. And I thought mathematics was the surest way to kind of help put food on the table after we left the service and actually served me well in the field of educational measurement.

Noah Tyler (02:41.031)
Great. Speak more to your interest in teaching. mean, there's a lot of love we have for teaching and the profession of education. What was it that led you from a military career to education? And I understand why Florida, but why teaching?

Vince Verges (02:58.535)
I'd really love to be able to kind of share things in a way, explain things so that students could understand love. For the most part, all the kids that we work with over all the years just have a joy of learning and they want to know things. And then to be able to have a deep enough understanding of those subjects, to be able to teach others and see the lights go on in their eyes, to see the understanding take place and to see students from all kinds of different backgrounds.

go on and do things, whether they're academically inclined or in some other field. That was absolutely fantastic. And then also learning more about the students and kind of serving as we could for role models for them. Some of them had fantastic role models, some somewhere in between, some were not so many. And so just working with students on giving them a little bit more experience, especially in the small town of Perry, Florida, where I taught.

A lot of students that I taught at the high school had not been out of the county in their entire lives. And so to take them on trips and, and, know, explain to them how, what life was like in the Navy, you know, what's Hawaii look like, what's it like to be in an airplane. so that I found a lot of great satisfaction in sharing, you know, those experiences with kids and see them and see them grow out of learning new things.

Noah Tyler (04:14.001)
That's incredible. Yeah, I think the idea of awakening is pretty common to a lot of people's educational experiences and helping others have that kind of an awakening is incredible. Let's talk about Florida a little bit, since that's where you landed and that's turned out to be a place that's excelled in education. They were number one in education freedom, number one in many, categories of higher education, secondary education. What do you think Florida has done?

to succeed where other states have either fallen behind or stagnated, Florida seems like they've set themselves to be a leader. Where do you see that leadership genius working its effect?

Vince Verges (04:51.539)
Well, a couple of places where I think Florida is really emphasized and one of the first things that we saw when I first joined was this idea of holding schools accountable and I think just making sure that the schools that serve rural, suburban, urban communities are actually doing what it is that the taxpayer dollars are paying to have them done. So it's really egalitarian. Are your taxpayer dollars doing what they're supposed to be doing?

Are schools that serve traditionally underserved students, are they doing their job? So an idea of having a number of measures out there and tell folks that are sending their students to these schools how well the schools are actually doing and not so much as a carrot and a stick, but to make sure that we're rewarding the schools that are doing well and for the schools that are struggling, that you're providing the resources and help to make sure that you're.

going to have those schools turn around, make sure that you're serving all the students across all of the states. that accountability for schools and teachers, I think it was an important cornerstone. And then you see Florida's really emphasized, as you've seen a lot of other states, the idea of choice, right? So we've got these public schools and that students can, our families can take their education and go to a local charter, go to a private school so that students have options, you know, where taxpayer dollars can be used where

Noah Tyler (06:05.287)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (06:18.472)
where folks think they're going to be most effective.

Noah Tyler (06:22.043)
That's amazing. Those are two solid reasons that I see Florida leading. You, of course, did a lot with the accountability side. And we've gotten to work with you in communicating about assessments and accountability there. Not every teacher in a Florida public school ends up the head of accountability and assessment in the Department of Education. How did you, with your certain level of genius or ambition, or how did you rise through the ranks and end up in the position?

that you've led so strongly for so many years.

Vince Verges (06:54.658)
That's a great question. And I think this comes back into the curiosity, know, the enlightenment. You know, we've all taken tests throughout our careers. I remember a school, they put a book in front of you and you'd bubble it in and, you know, I never really gave much thought. I figured some people just put some questions on a piece of paper. And then once I started teaching in Florida, it was just the beginning of the time of having standardized testing or early in the time of having standardized tests that were used for accountability purposes in the state of Florida.

And I naturally wrote away to the department and I said, so who makes these tests? And it wasn't a critique. was just all the things that we got. And I had no idea how, how, you know, how the things were done. And my response back was, well, funny, you should ask. actually need educators to come in and this is how we do it. have, you know, Florida public school educators that look at the test questions that are being proposed, determine if they're any good. And even after students have seen the questions, we get a chance to go back in and.

You bring in educators to make sure that the responses that the students are giving make sense. And then sometimes some of the things that you see in the response patterns tell you, this question that everybody thought was great is really not measuring the skill you thought you were measuring. And it's just was such a fascinating process that, again, having been invited to serve and eventually one person that is in the, actually the area that I just retired from.

was leaving and she said, you should apply for my job. And I did. for about 20 years, I've worked on large scale assessments from the state of Florida, all born out of who makes these tests. And it's just, it's a fascinating, very incredibly intricate process that involves lots of steps and lots of Florida educators to help make decisions about what the tests look like.

Noah Tyler (08:42.023)
It's incredible. There's a lot of echoes in what you're sharing and even our own experience at CLT of, know, our founder, Jeremy, just thinks, hey, who makes these tests? Maybe we could make one and thinking it might be as easy as putting questions on a paper and coming to the awareness over time that there's a lot that goes into this, a lot of development. So I think we parallel your story in some ways in that. I wonder for our audience, we often in this podcast have guests from classical schools and they're sharing education.

in a very kind of a qualitative, beautiful way. On the psychometric side, on the test statistics side, they don't often get as much technical prowess as you could offer. So without going too deep, I wonder if you could define psychometrics and give us a little bit more of the technical nuts and bolts that go into making a good and clear assessment.

Vince Verges (09:35.501)
Thanks for that warning about not going too deep because I learned a lot and would love to share more, but that's another teaching experience, right? And just that word itself, psychometrics and the people who do that work called psychometricians. And sometimes people jokingly say, well, they're really psycho magicians. And the idea is, the idea is there's really a deep professional science that goes on. And these psychometricians are basically the science, the scientists that study the statistics and data.

Noah Tyler (09:41.638)
Yeah.

Vince Verges (10:04.877)
behind human thinking. And the idea is in all our data scientists and research and things, you can measure say, know, variances on a pulley or a cog or how loose can nuts and bolts be. But when you measure human thinking, you can't necessarily open up a student's mind and look inside and see what it is they know. So you've got this psychological testing, these psychometricians that based on

Noah Tyler (10:15.089)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (10:30.691)
these different instruments, what we call tests. A test is an instrument that you use to measure student learning. And so there's an entire book, The Standards for Educational Testing, Psychological Measurement, that's kind of the Bible that you go through and all those processes you make sure that you follow to make sure that you're building a test. And the key point is that the results are valid and reliable for all of their intended purposes. So you can make a test. I can have a little bit.

classroom quiz to find out if my students know their multiplication facts and that's a valid and reliable test to know if a student knows his multiplication facts, but it can't tell me if the student is going to be a good banker or not. So that measurement of science is what psychometrics is about and it's kind of what drives the underpinnings of the work that the field does.

Noah Tyler (11:22.105)
Incredible. I geek out on this kind of work. And I know that you, starting in math, kind of leaned in hard on that. But also you were an incredible manager. That being good at math doesn't get you kind of a leadership role the way you've enjoyed one. But it was your leadership. Looking back, having retired as a recording just a few days ago, looking back on your legacy in Florida education, what would you say were a crowning achievement or two? What you're leaving behind there?

Vince Verges (11:52.849)
There were two that I kind of go back and I know about crowning achievements, but just incredible pivots. The first one was back in the time. You remember many, many states were part of the Common Core State Standards Consortiums. And then you had two separate consortia that were put together to basically give one student large scale assessment across all states. So there'd be kind of a common assessment that all states took in Florida early on.

Noah Tyler (11:58.481)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (12:04.473)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Vince Verges (12:19.635)
in my early time, earlier time with the department was making a move towards joining those. then as things unfolded and there are differences of opinion on whether you should implement Common Core or how much and so forth, it became clear that Florida would be best served not going down that path. And what I was afraid at the time when Florida was moving to implement these consortium assessments, my fear was that

we would have a year of giving our old legacy, what's called the FCAT back in the day. And then we might give this new test. were part of the park consortium that we would give the park test for one year and then leave the consortium and give another test. And so I was among others that recommended that we not do that. We move straight from our old test to another test that wasn't aligned to Common Core.

Noah Tyler (13:05.031)
Yeah.

Vince Verges (13:10.407)
So that was a big move and we did that successfully and made that transition. That was a huge achievement. And then most recently, this was Governor DeSantis and his staff, I'd thought about this idea of progress monitoring, giving students assessments early in the year as kind of a pre-test, see where students are starting off and a mid-year check-in and then an end of year assessment. An incredibly challenging but very innovative idea.

And on the timeline that there was legislation to implement it, was a timeline that I had not ever personally heard of being done successfully. So the law that required this implementation of progress monitoring happened in spring of 2022. And by fall of 2022, we implemented one of the first in the nation progress monitoring systems in the state of Florida. And we're currently, the state's administering approximately 15 million progress monitoring

tests per year, give or take, just an incredible accomplishment to move into that on such a short time. then for something that by many accounts has been successful, we just had our results released of same basically a day before my last day and just showed that students have grown not only year over year at the end of the year test, which we use for accountability purposes, but students are actually starting off at the beginning of the year higher than they started off in any of the prior years. So

It looks like the system is working.

Noah Tyler (14:37.169)
Wow. So it sounds like you were somehow able to transcend some of the limitations that people associate with bureaucracies, right? You were able to actually move things quickly, not slowly, to hit timelines, you know, rather than push past them. So that alone is an amazing accomplishment. But then to do something so innovative in assessment itself at the same time, just incredible. I'm wondering, what is the next frontier in assessment generally? Like you've done

There's adaptive and then there's growth metrics through year assessments. Where is the field of assessment going? What's the vanguard there?

Vince Verges (15:15.312)
I'm sure that many, many fields, this is probably a broken record. And I think where artificial intelligence fits into assessment, we just don't know. So currently we're fighting battles on artificial intelligence, trying to determine when a student's writing is their own. And again, this is not a huge thing, but it's happening. When is a student's writing their own and when is artificial intelligence assisted or wholly created?

Noah Tyler (15:22.119)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (15:34.3)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (15:40.923)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (15:42.044)
And then, you know, students are extremely resourceful and they're using artificial intelligence to solve math problems almost immediately that shows all their work and so forth. And so there's that line of what is actually a student's efforts and what is AI. But I think the frontier is how to tame that. Is there a place, for example, in writing for appropriate use of artificial intelligence and helping improve a student's writing that's existing?

We're so early in the field, I don't know how long it would take to get to that point. And then one place I'm not quite sure there's a lot of interest and there's been early work in artificial intelligence and say creating personalized lesson plans and personalized lessons. And we're too early in this field, but my fear there is that you're taking some of the, you know, some of the potential control and some of the human factor out of that if not applied correctly. So too early to tell what direction that will go. But I think

AI and its uses and potential misuses are area of influence in education.

Noah Tyler (16:45.233)
Hmm, that is fascinating. If you think about the word psychometrics and the idea of an accountability assessment, mixing in AI definitely muddies the waters. You want to know the latent trait in the student's head. You want to know what they're capable of, and you're getting some noise in that signal with not knowing the extent to which AI has mixed in. And certainly, we're going to see AI mixed into a lot of student performance.

But fundamentally, is it still worth knowing what they're capable of unassisted? mean, is there meaning or reason to sort that signal out from the impact of AI?

Vince Verges (17:26.842)
And in the area of assessment, it's what you're trying to measure. If we wanted to make sure that we are currently in writing, we're measuring what a student can do on his or her own without any assistance. And then if we decide we want to measure how well a student can employ AI, that's an entirely different question. It's certainly doable. Say how well, you know, use AI to create this and then measure how well the student does that, you know, so that

Noah Tyler (17:31.356)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (17:39.707)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (17:55.313)
Sure.

Vince Verges (17:56.749)
There is a place for that, but right now it's still a challenge.

Noah Tyler (17:58.929)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (18:03.203)
That's a great thought. So again, taking our audience as maybe more interested in classical education or the virtues, I'm interested in your thoughts on how virtue might mix into an educational model, whether you can teach justice and temperance alongside of reading and writing, whether those concepts mix at all, or if it's kind of more crowding each other out and you have to take precedence over one or the other.

And really also how assessment or accountability, it's to be hard to keep a school accountable for the courage of its students. Or maybe there's a courageous element to taking on new subjects that is built into the package. So just any thoughts you have on the role of virtue in education in a school setting.

Vince Verges (18:51.705)
A great, great question. you know, with teaching mathematics and the psychometrics, a lot of the things that we deal with are the black and white, the subjective, quantifiable things. in the discussions we have, and again, there's room for this. think whether you know it or not, match.com and all of the other those dating apps all rely heavily on psychometrics, which are all very much in the effective domain. It's all based on the algorithms that

Noah Tyler (19:16.135)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Vince Verges (19:21.621)
that those systems use to match people together. So something tells me that if you can measure those things psychometrically, there may be a place for it in somewhere else. what I see, and again, on the practical day-to-day aspect, what I learn about students and seeing their ability to persevere, can you teach students perseverance and that stick-to-itiveness?

Noah Tyler (19:48.679)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (19:48.778)
Or is that something that you can just measure how much they have? And that's what I'm just not sure about. What I would love to see is using more of the lessons and I mentioned my love of history, making sure that the things that, say World War II, you got to learn so much about what people did to overcome incredible circumstances. I'll talk about some prisoner of war, things persevered for years and various populations did.

Noah Tyler (20:00.23)
Yeah, yeah.

Vince Verges (20:18.675)
How do you quantify, how did that person get to have such great perseverance? How do they weather and how do they thrive? that's the kind of things you could take those historical skills and successes and kind of talk about what kind of virtues made those people successful and persevere and how can you teach that? And then how do you measure it? I don't know, get those psychometricians that are working on the dating apps and...

Noah Tyler (20:30.107)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (20:47.371)
you can be matched that better than our field can right now.

Noah Tyler (20:51.633)
That's great. That's a great thought. I was just picking up a curriculum of a friend of ours called Heroes and Villains, and it just goes through America and just some of the heroes and villains by virtue and just fascinating work. Assessments are not included in that. So I do think that piece has yet to be broached. And I think that there's room for organizations like CLT with great friends and advisors to potentially

cross into some of those areas. So excited to see where that could possibly lead. Winding down here, I'm wondering, you're retiring from a really key role. I understand there's some solid people that are in behind you to keep the lights on and keep the initiative spinning. Tell us about your plans post-retirement. I know a little bit about those. I'm excited to hear how those are coming together.

but also how you might keep one foot in the industry and keep tabs on the direction things are going in the field of assessment.

Vince Verges (21:51.908)
And we do, our plan is a great question. We do plan, my wife and I have lots of vacation plans, things to catch up on, things we didn't get to travel to do during COVID and so forth. having been doing this for so long and there's such a, whether it's a very specialized field, there's a pretty large group of national experts. And again, I still, I didn't retire because I don't like the work. The work is fascinating and I have a good relationship with a great many people that do the work. And there are a number of

Noah Tyler (21:59.847)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (22:12.219)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (22:20.391)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (22:21.362)
projects that I would love to continue to consult on and work on because, you know, I've got some institutional knowledge and really passion. And I think, you know, if I stick around in the field, I'll find out a little bit more about how AI plays into it. I mentioned we, it's too early to know. I'm kind of curious to see, you know, how that works and what the direction of the field takes and how I can continue to contribute. And again, on a limited basis, and it's great to be able to say yes or no.

Noah Tyler (22:35.046)
Yeah.

Vince Verges (22:47.887)
and only have to say yes to the things that I find interesting and will have a passion for.

Noah Tyler (22:54.023)
That's great. I think everyone's dream, right? To be able to actually continue on with the favorite parts of your job without having to say yes to every bit of it and have time to do some travel. Tell us a couple of the trips you have planned and then we'll cut to our final question.

Vince Verges (23:07.73)
Yeah, great. our first trip out of the way over the years, you know, said we've married for 34 years and a lot of, know, so between my wife and I, have friends and family from my days back in the Navy and her days in federal government service before she taught from all across the country. So I, we were driving from Tallahassee through Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Colorado, and up to Washington, where I'll actually officiate a wedding for a, a child is knowing our child.

from a long time ago and then we'll make our way back down and see our daughter who's an aerospace engineer working for Grumman Aerospace in Los Angeles and then make our way back home. So 8,000 miles of driving. And fortunately we know that my wife and I can get along in the car for that long. I'm pretty sure.

Noah Tyler (23:38.182)
Mm-hmm.

Noah Tyler (23:53.319)
That's great. Fantastic. Well, we will end where we always end with the book that has had the deepest, most profound impact on you, maybe something you've returned to frequently or represented a pivot point in your career or understanding of the work you wanted to do. So what book would you pick?

Vince Verges (24:12.335)
Well, I'm going to take a little bit of a guest liberty on this and I'll go back to kind of a mention about history. I'm still an incredible fan of naval history. When I was younger, I think as early as the age of 10 or 11, I started reading, you know, especially World War II history. And I was always fascinated, loved naval history. And the thing that fascinated me back then was the scope of what it took to

Noah Tyler (24:18.705)
Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (24:37.05)
to respond to the attack on Barbara, for example, build up a military and win the war and the incredible battles, like all the things that keep a young man interested in reading those kinds of things. But as time's gone on, I really focused on the books that talk about the human element, perseverance, problem solving. I mentioned one of the books, I'll give you a couple of titles, two of them, Ship of Ghosts by J.D. Hornfisher.

Noah Tyler (24:39.856)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Vince Verges (25:04.688)
It's a story of the USS Houston that was sunk in the Pacific in the early days of World War II. The crew, it was an incredible battle, some survival at sea. A number of those crew were forced to work on the Burma Railroad, which the Bridge Over the River Kwai movie was based on. And just incredible, incredible stories of leadership, survival, perseverance. And what I like about the later books about history,

Noah Tyler (25:21.683)
yeah.

Vince Verges (25:32.944)
or the kind of the unvarnished, the toll it takes on humans. And what I appreciate about that is letting people know that, you know, while we, are the greatest generation in my mind and they were superhuman in some ways, in a lot of ways they're human and they have the same weaknesses and challenges that we have today. So you can't just say, they were a special breed, but we as humans and Americans have the same capacity. similarly the other.

Noah Tyler (25:37.127)
Hmm.

Noah Tyler (25:47.015)
Hmm.

Vince Verges (26:00.816)
title, I'll mention Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll. And currently that's considered kind of the seminal book on the founding of the US Navy. And books like that, books like that, kind of really go in the depth of, know, things were challenging. wasn't all roses and kittens and things were really, really tough. And there were a good period of time when it wasn't clear that there was going to be US Navy. So reading about the political struggles and the real

Noah Tyler (26:08.611)
Okay.

Vince Verges (26:26.799)
you know, the real interpersonal challenges that still resulted in, you know, the most powerful Navy on the Earth is, know, that those reading those, taking those lessons away as an adult still fascinates me. And I come back to naval history, especially frequently for the lessons there.

Noah Tyler (26:45.319)
That's amazing, great answer. We talk about a well-rounded education, so you've got the mathematics, you've got the passion for history. Vince, you've been a great friend and a great guest on the Anchored Podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Vince Verges (26:59.107)
Thank you Noah, take care.

Noah Tyler (27:00.679)
Take care.