Dear Editor,
For years, the reassuring answer to worry about Vermont’s schools has been a comparison: Vermont scores above the national average. That was true for decades. This year it survives on one of four federal checks — and the national average itself has been falling. Vermont has been falling faster.
I pulled together a public dataset putting nearly every Vermont district’s test results on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress scale, using Stanford’s Education Data Archive, so they can be compared honestly with districts across the state and over time. The short version:
In 2013, Vermont students scored about nine-tenths of a grade level above the 2019 national norm. By 2025, they scored half a grade below it — and most of that lead was gone before the pandemic closed a single school. The median Vermont district has fallen from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th since 2013.
It is not money. Vermont spends $1.64 for every dollar the nation spends per student: $28,818 against $17,619 in the latest federal accounting.
And the slide shows up in numbers that districts already publish. Fewer than half of Vermont’s graduates now continue to college within 16 months, down from about six in 10 in the 2019 count. More than one student in four is chronically absent.
My own district, Washington Central, illustrates the trap of local comparison. It still leads Vermont; its edge over the state average has more than doubled. Against the country, it fell from the 86th percentile to the 71st. And adjusted for the community it serves — family income, adult education, poverty, employment and family structure — its advantage over what communities like its own typically score is gone entirely: 81st percentile in 2013, 50th in 2024. A district can look excellent in the Vermont mirror while the rest of the country walks past it.
None of this is an indictment of teachers or students; test scores measure the opportunities that communities provide as much as anything a school does. But it is an argument that Vermont’s school debate — consolidation, funding formulas, governance — is being conducted against the wrong yardstick.
The comparison that matters is not “better or worse than the Vermont average.” It is “better or worse than the country,” and on that comparison Vermont has been losing ground for more than a decade.
Matt Rkiouak
Middlesex, Vt.
