Vt. schools aren’t as broken as some say – A different ‘transformation’ is in order

April 11, 2025  |  By Elijah Hawkes

As someone who trains future Vermont school principals — and as a taxpayer, parent of kids in Vermont schools, and someone who attended them — I see two big problems with the current proposal to transform our education system. 

First, it demands massive changes to a system that is working well in various ways. Second, it will distract the Agency of Education — and many others — from the actual work required for important school improvements.

Strengths of our system

There’s plenty that needs changing in Vermont schools. But people who perceive a system-wide crisis may not be taking into account some core strengths.

Student outcomes

Newspaper headlines are not telling us the whole story about student proficiency in reading and math. The National Assessment Educational Progress (NAEP) is often cited when discussing how well our students are doing; whether or not fourth graders, for instance, are reading “at grade level” or not. But a little reported fact is that “proficient” scores on NAEP don’t necessarily correlate to “grade-level proficiency.”

NAEP itself says: “NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).” Some refer to this as the “NAEP Proficiency Myth” and say that a “basic” score on NAEP is a more accurate correlation to grade level. In this light, it is not appropriate to say that most Vermont students are achieving below grade level on NAEP, which is what we often hear. It is actually more accurate to say the opposite.

Teacher workforce

Vermont scores high (4.2 out of 5.0) when it comes to states where it’s good to be a teacher, according to the Learning Policy Institute’s State of the Teacher Workforce. Even though we have vacancies that are hard to fill in some schools, teachers are not leaving the workforce in our state in the same way they are in others. Teacher turnover is hard on schools and on students. Vermont being a good place to be a teacher is a strength of our system.

Capacity for change

One of the benefits of attracting strong teachers is that it gives schools the capacity for making needed changes. A strength of our system includes recent literacy education reforms. There is a significant course correction happening right now across many districts in terms of how we teach kids to read. This is born of national shifts in understanding how to teach reading, local community groups applying the right pressure, and educators wanting to do right by our students. These reforms show how the current system has capacity for significant corrections.

Fiscal responsibility

“Local voters have done a good job of controlling education costs over the last two decades,” according to the Public Assets Institute, which goes on to say that “after adjusting for inflation, the average annual increase in per-pupil spending was less than 1 percent per year.” This suggests school boards are engaged in more responsible financial resource management than many other sectors of our economy. I’m no accountant, but if this data is correct, it constitutes a strength of the current system in terms of fiscal responsibility.

Building on our strengths

If the massive structural changes being considered by our legislature become law, making them a reality will take years of work and will distract the AOE from transforming itself so it can better perform its core task: helping school leaders and communities improve the quality of our schools. Thankfully, defining education quality doesn’t have to be on the to-do list. Recently updated Vermont Education Quality Standards go into effect this July. What these standards expect of us is worth striving to attain, and helping schools do that is the work ahead. A related task is making changes in how we measure the quality of education delivered in our schools.

Measuring education quality

Most people not directly connected to a child in school will have to look to newspaper articles about standardized test scores to assess how schools are doing. But there are also the “annual snapshot” school report cards that the AOE publishes each year. These are less frequently discussed. Perhaps this is because they need improvements if they are to be more useful as an accountability and measurement tool.

Last spring, when I looked up the school report card for my former high school, it told me that the school was scoring “under-performing” in the area of “Personalization,” one of a few domains on the report card. What is being measured in this area is how many students are taking advantage of “Flexible Pathway” options. At this school it was 50%. This means that half of the students have non-traditional learning experiences in their schedule, while the other half is following amore traditional core academic pathway. Why would a school be labeled “under-performing” because half of its students have chosen a traditional college-prep course of study? The goal of a personalized education is a good one, but how we measure it needs improvement.

There are similar issues in the “Safe and Healthy Schools” category of the school report card. In this area the school was “exceeding” the standard. How did the school achieve this score? There is just one data point, “Exclusionary Discipline,” which is when a student is removed from the learning environment. Too much exclusionary discipline is definitely a concern. It can leave problems unsolved and lead many students to disengage from school, and some may eventually drop out. But having a low rate of suspensions is not the only factor we should measure to judge school climate. Indeed, sometimes a school with no suspensions may feel unsafe to the people in it.

It’s not only improved school report card metrics that are needed. We should also improve the “school quality review,” which has been on hold for a few years now. Before returning to Vermont, I was a principal in New York City and I looked forward to every school quality review. This was when an expert former administrator would visit the school for two to three days and conduct observations, interviews, and a rigorous review of our portfolio according to a meaningful set of criteria. The results were published for the community and the school received useful feedback while being held accountable to worthy standards.

Helping schools improve

Having meaningful ways to judge how a school is doing should be a priority for the transformative work that lies ahead for the AOE. Another core task for the AOE is helping school leaders make improvements in the areas they are coming up short.

One key strategy for making institutional improvements is identifying and building on strengths. Having worked with school and district leaders across the state over the past four years, I know that for every problem we identify at one school, there is another school somewhere else in the state doing a good job of solving it. We can help these schools learn from each other.

For every small school in a rural zone struggling with teacher retention and academic achievement, we can find another small school in a rural area that is doing great work in both of those domains. For every career and technical center program that is faltering in its enrollment and outcomes, we can look to another that has great work to learn from. If we need to support a school struggling with matters of harassment or bullying, we can learn from a peer school where educators are fostering a culture of inclusion and belonging.

Learning in this way is possible in any area, including staff-to-student ratios. For instance, a few years ago I visited a small elementary school where there were only two classrooms. The principal struggled to get adequate staffing for her students with disabilities. There was often no special educator in the building. In contrast, that same year I became familiar with an elementary school an hour away where there were probably too many staff. I attended a meeting of teachers and one remarked that there were so many adults working with her special needs students she had no idea who the people were or what they did. The educators working with a child shouldn’t be so numerous they don’t know each other. Surely, appropriate staffing allocations lie somewhere in between what we see in these two settings.

Knowing our schools well can help districts learn from each other and find common sense solutions to local problems.

More Measured and Precise

I’m not saying we don’t need changes. I’ve written two books on what needs to be different in our schools, and the work of helping school leaders identify and address problems is my job every day. But a more precise and measured approach is worth considering as our state tackles both structural system reforms and how we pay for education.

The Vermont Superintendents’ Association has offered a proposal for restructuring at a measured pace — and it doesn’t shy away from outlining significant changes to state-wide systems that could achieve important efficiencies, such as having a statewide calendar and common information systems. Administrators spend countless hours each year — and thus taxpayer dollars — debating calendars or adopting new information systems for student data and finances. Standardization can help find efficiencies in these areas and others.

And certainly, it’s time to change how we are paying for education in Vermont. But how we pay for schooling is a different question from how many districts we should have. The Public Assets Institute’s plan for adjusting who pays what based on property and income seems fair and worth trying. It proposes to lower the burden placed on middle-income Vermonters, which would be good. And an adjustment like this can happen without aggressive structural changes to a system that working well in many ways.

If the legislature adopts more measured approaches for school system reform, our education leaders — at the AOE and in our schools — will be better able to focus on the core work of transforming how we improve our schools. This includes better measures for identifying shortcomings and strengths and then leveraging our strengths to help all schools meet Vermont’s worthy standards for education quality.

Elijah Hawkes is the Director of School Leadership Programs and Program Faculty at Upper Valley Educators Institute in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Hawkes lives in Middlesex.