This year’s annual report card detailing Vermont students’ standardized test scores, released last month, found that a substantial portion of schools were facing “persistent performance challenges.”
Just four minutes after the Agency of Education emailed out the report, Gov. Phil Scott weighed in. The findings, he wrote in a press release, illustrate “why education transformation is not optional, it’s essential,” a nod to the overhaul his administration first proposed in January 2025.
“Following through on our bipartisan commitment last year is our best chance at delivering the education system our kids deserve, and taxpayers can afford,” he said.
About a week later, the agency wrote to school superintendents about a long-standing “coding error” that had likely led the report to misidentify certain schools as having had persistent achievement gaps for the past eight years. Education Secretary Zoie Saunders apologized and promised a review.
The sequence of events felt all too familiar to some school leaders, who told Seven Days it was another example of an education agency that often seems to them more focused on supporting the governor’s push for major education changes than on helping schools improve. They say that dynamic has led to a steady erosion of trust between educators in the field and the state agency tasked with overseeing them, creating conditions that make it difficult to work together.
After the report card snafu, Vermont Superintendents Association executive director Chelsea Myers released a statement saying that data should not be used to “drive political narratives.” She called for “strengthening the integrity of the state’s accountability system so that it truly supports improvement, restores trust, and reflects a genuine partnership between the Agency and school and district leaders.”
In an editorial, Vermont Principals’ Association leaders accused the Scott administration and Agency of Education of “distancing themselves from the real work of providing equitable opportunities for all students” and not “looking out for schools.”
The association’s president, Chris Young, who serves as principal of North Country Union High School in Newport, said in a subsequent interview that he has “no confidence” that the agency can provide “any level of support” to educators in the field.
In response to written questions from Seven Days, Agency of Education spokesperson Toren Ballard sent a lengthy response noting that Saunders is clear-eyed about the long-standing problems the state’s education system faces — including “fragmentation, the lack of consistent support and the need for clearer direction” — and is committed to working with educators to “chart a new course.”
“We are not interested in admiring the problem; we are interested in fixing the issues,” Ballard quoted Saunders as saying. The agency’s statement acknowledged the inherent tension between a system that has traditionally emphasized local decision-making and the state’s responsibility to provide oversight and guidance to schools.
We are not interested in admiring the problem; we are interested in fixing the problem.
Education Secretary Zoie Saunders
Wendy Baker, superintendent of Addison Central School District in Middlebury, said she remembers a time, not too long ago, when the relationship between state education officials and those working in schools felt much less fraught. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she worked for what was then the Vermont Department of Education as a school improvement specialist, a job that required her to provide hands-on support to struggling schools. At that time, Baker said, the state worked with a team of local consultants with expertise in different areas who provided training to teachers and administrators.
“The main difference is that it was collaborative,” Baker said. “[Everyone] had a shared goal to help students improve.”
Bill Kimball, superintendent of Maple Run Unified School District in St. Albans and an administrator in Vermont for more than two decades, recalled how the department worked with school districts to ensure reliable data collection and to use data to improve instruction. The partnership between the state and schools always centered on “what’s best for Vermont kids,” he said. “That tone is no longer there.”
Baker and Kimball both noted that Vermont had among the highest standardized test scores in the country during that time — a stark contrast to today, when Vermont falls in the middle of the pack.
Many point to a decision, spearheaded in 2012 by then-governor Peter Shumlin, to create the position of education secretary, appointed by the governor, in place of an education commissioner chosen by the independent State Board of Education. At the time, superintendents had mixed opinions about the change, according to Vermont Principals’ Association executive director Jay Nichols, who was a superintendent then. He opposed empowering the governor to choose the state’s education leader because he didn’t like the idea of that person being beholden to the state’s chief executive.
“If you’re in that position,” Nichols said, “your responsibility is to do what the governor tells you.”
Ballard, the agency’s spokesperson, challenged that characterization.
Although Saunders “serves at the pleasure of the Governor,” he wrote, she “is beholden, first and foremost, to the students of Vermont and the Agency’s constitutional obligation to ensure that all students receive equitable access to a high-quality education.”
When Scott appointed Saunders in 2024, she pledged to learn more about the needs of Vermont’s schools through a monthslong Listen and Learn tour that included conversations with administrators, teachers, students, families and community members. But Saunders’ actions have caused some educational leaders to question whether she has truly digested what they have told her.
In August 2024, the agency released a “State Education Profile Report” that superintendents said contained numerous data errors. The agency rereleased the report three months later, noting that, in the interim, it had “worked with education leaders across Vermont to share data and gather feedback about potential data inconsistencies and ways to improve data presentation.”
Then, in January 2025, Saunders became the face of Scott’s education transformation plan, delivering a speech to the legislature in which she laid out a vision of consolidating the state’s 119 school districts into just five while also changing the way Vermonters pay for K-12 education. Many school leaders were taken aback by the plan — and especially the scale of districts that would have 10,000 to 34,000 students each.
“When we, the field, saw what the [agency] distilled from the [Listen and Learn] tour, we were all like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Young, the North Country principal, said. “It led to this wacky map.”
That was just one instance, Young and other leaders said, in which state education officials didn’t seem to consider the perspectives of those who work in schools.
More recently, the agency held a “statewide strategic planning retreat” in Killington to get input from educators on graduation requirements, special education and other topics. But participants were given only a short window of time to provide feedback, which for Young amounted to “one comment on a sticky note,” he said.
In late December, when the agency released a report recommending changes in graduation requirements, Kimball said he was dismayed to see it didn’t reflect any of the input he had given at the planning retreat.
Ballard, the agency spokesperson, wrote that the planning retreat “provided important input” that informed the agency’s report on graduation requirements but noted that “given the large number and wide range of perspectives shared, it is not possible for every individual comment to be incorporated directly in the final recommendations.” The agency’s report, Ballard continued, was also informed by “research, national best practices, and standards of excellence.”
The agency has touted statewide initiatives in reading and math — Read Vermont and Count on Vermont — as ways it is supporting schools. But those programs have not made an impact in Kimball’s Maple Run district, he said.
“We’ve been doing work in math and reading and don’t use the agency,” he said. “I don’t have a good understanding of those two initiatives.” He said it feels like districts are “out here on our own” to make schools better.
In the Agency of Education statement, Ballard described those programs as “still in their infancy” and noted that early indicators suggest that Read Vermont is “beginning to make an impact.”
The way the agency handles data has also continued to be a sticking point. Before the data report card was published last month, Mount Mansfield Unified Union superintendent John Muldoon learned that two of his schools would be designated as needing targeted state support because of student achievement gaps and poor performance on standardized tests. He asked the agency to clarify the methodology and data it had used so he could better explain the designations to families.
But Muldoon said he didn’t receive substantive answers before the report was publicly released. That night, he sent a candid message to his school community expressing concern that “these designations were posted by the state while our formal questions remain unanswered.”
One of Muldoon’s schools that initially was identified as needing “additional targeted support and improvement” is having that assessment reviewed due to the coding error related to school designations. A new version of the report card, without the problematic information, has since been posted to the agency’s website.
Baker, the Addison Central superintendent, said she also asked the agency for additional data and an explanation of methodology — and no one was able to provide it. She found inconsistencies in test-score data the state provided versus what she found on the standardized test’s digital portal.
Baker wants to work with the agency, but “the difficulty is we’re asked to verify data we know is incorrect,” she said.
“Under no circumstances would it be appropriate for the Agency of Education to ask districts to verify data that is known to be incorrect, and the Agency has not asked districts to do so,” Ballard wrote in his statement.
Secretary Saunders has acknowledged “longstanding challenges with education data in Vermont,” Ballard continued, and the agency has “publicly identified timely, accurate and usable data as a key priority area under its strategic plan.” Ballard noted that improving data quality can only be achieved with engagement from educators.
Harwood Unified Union superintendent Mike Leichliter, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on standardized testing, said he sees several problems with the way the state is using data.
First, he said, the agency is defining student growth as advancing from one proficiency level to the next, rather than showing improvement in a numerical, or scale, score. In simple terms, that would be like saying a student who moves from a score of 80 to a score of 89 isn’t improving because they haven’t gone from a grade of B to a grade of A. That doesn’t provide “an honest reflection” of how kids are actually doing, he said.
Saunders acknowledged as much in legislative testimony last month, saying that Vermont’s way of capturing student growth is a “blunt measurement” and “not as refined as other states.” She committed to fixing the problem by revising the state’s education accountability plan, known as the ESSA plan, which states are required to maintain by the federal government.
Leichliter said he believes the agency is putting a strong emphasis on holding schools accountable for student performance on tests without providing them with the tools they need to succeed. Other states, he said, have put a lot of work into making sure that all their schools are teaching a common curriculum and working to meet specific learning targets — but Vermont has not.
On this last point, Ballard, the agency spokesperson, concurred with Leichliter, describing Vermont as having “a fragmented system in which districts are asked to manage responsibilities — such as curriculum coherence, data systems, and instructional improvement — that in many states are more effectively coordinated at the state level.”
As the legislature resumes education reform conversations this week, the rift between the agency and schools could be a complicating factor in implementing whatever plan is passed. And without buy-in and support from the educators working on the front lines, it will be hard to make meaningful change.
“We should all be on the same page and working on making the educational system better,” Leichliter said. “Right now, that’s not happening.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Learning the Hard Way | School leaders say state officials are politicizing education, fraying their relationship with the Scott administration”
This article appears in March 11 • 2026.
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