The Vermont Agency of Education has walked back portions of a data report it publicly released last month, citing an unspecified “coding error” that may have led it to misidentify certain schools as having persistent achievement gaps on standardized state tests.
The error goes back to 2017, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders wrote in a February 26 memo to superintendents. She said the agency discovered the mistake after releasing the annual “Vermont State Report Card” on February 19.
Eight days later, the agency put out a new version of the report that omits some of the previously published information. The agency plans to conduct a review of every school that has been designated as needing “targeted support and improvement” or “additional targeted support and improvement” over the past eight years, Saunders wrote.
“On behalf of the Agency, I apologize for the confusion that will inevitably result from this error regarding equity designation going back nearly a decade,” she wrote. She noted that the review of the designations “does not alter overall statewide findings or performance results at the school or [district] level.”
The annual report card, which is mandated by federal law, contains a wide array of information, including statewide standardized test results and rates of graduation and enrollment in postsecondary institutions. It also lists schools that are targeted for additional support because of low state standardized test scores or persistent achievement gaps between students from historically marginalized groups — such as students from lower-income households, students of color, those who are learning English and those who qualify for special education — and their peers.
This year’s report, which captures data from the 2024-25 school year, paints a bleak picture of Vermont students’ performance on standardized tests in math, reading and science. For example, just 48 percent of third-grade students were deemed proficient in reading last year. That’s a stark contrast to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Vermont had some of the highest standardized test scores in the country.
In past years, several superintendents told Seven Days, the Agency of Education has shared an advance copy of the report with them so they could review it for accuracy and be prepared to answer questions from community members. That didn’t happen this year.
The agency did provide a heads up to district leaders with schools designated as needing additional support. But that process was problematic, according to several superintendents.
When Mount Mansfield Unified Union superintendent John Muldoon learned that two of his schools were designated as needing additional support from the state, he sent formal appeals to the agency requesting more information about its methodology and the data used to make those determinations. But Muldoon didn’t receive substantive answers to his questions before the report was publicly released. That prompted him to send a candid message to his school community the night the report came out.
“It is extremely concerning to us that these designations were posted by the state while our formal questions remain unanswered,” Muldoon wrote.
In light of the data errors, Jericho Elementary School — one of the schools in Muldoon’s district that initially received an “additional targeted support and improvement” designation — is now being reviewed. The list it was included on has been removed from the rereleased data report.
Muldoon said on Tuesday that he was disappointed that the education agency did not put out a more widespread public statement acknowledging its data errors. He said he believed the report should not have been published until the agency was able to confirm all of the data.
In a statement on Tuesday, Vermont Superintendents Association executive director Chelsea Myers called for a “more collaborative review process” with school leaders before releasing information publicly.
“When reports carrying significant consequences for schools and communities are released with strong conclusions and later revised, it understandably raises questions,” Myers wrote. “Vermont’s superintendents are committed to accountability, and that commitment must extend across the entire system.”
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