Proficiency instead of seat time, defined district by district — while the statewide test changed twice more. Maine passed the same law and repealed it. New Hampshire kept its version, and its standing. Part 2 of 4.
Part 2 of 4, a series on Vermont's schools statewide. In 2013 and 2014, Vermont replaced the machinery under its high-school diploma: graduation by demonstrated "proficiency" instead of credits and seat time, with each district writing its own definitions. Most schools read the change as a mandate to rebuild report cards too — and the state waited five years to say it wasn't. In the same stretch, Vermont changed its statewide test twice more. Maine passed the same diploma law a year earlier and repealed it before it bound a single class. The research behind the movement was thin then and is thin now. This is the story of the rebuild.
The first story in this series laid out a decade of falling measures — test scores, college-going, attendance — beside a graduation rate that barely moved, and ruled out the pandemic, measurable demographics, and special education as explanations. This one reports the first of three changes Vermont made to its schools in the same years: what a diploma requires, and what the tests behind it measure.
A Vermont diploma had long worked the way most American diplomas do: students earned course credits, counted in time spent in class, and were graded A through F. Two coordinated moves replaced that. Act 77 of 2013, the Flexible Pathways Initiative, signed that June, gave every student in grades 7 through 12 a personalized learning plan and opened new routes to graduation: dual enrollment, early college, work-based learning. The State Board's Education Quality Standards, effective April 2014, then required every district to adopt proficiency-based graduation requirements — a diploma earned by showing mastery, not by piling up credit hours. They also barred time-based credit outright: credits "shall not be based on time spent in learning." The first class required to graduate this way was the class of 2020. The rule left the definitions to each district. What a Vermont diploma certifies was, and still is, written locally.
The aims were real. Seat time is a poor proxy for learning. Letter grades mix achievement with behavior. Personalized pathways promised something better for students the standard track failed.
The state never ordered schools to change their report cards. In practice, that did not matter. Districts read the new standards as a package — proficiency-based diplomas meant proficiency-based grading — and most of the state moved. By 2019, reporting put nearly all of Vermont's roughly 49 districts somewhere in the shift. Many replaced A-through-F with 1-to-4 proficiency scales. Students lost grade-point averages and class rank; the Great Schools Partnership, the regional coordinator behind the reform, circulated reassurances from some 75 New England colleges that the new transcripts would not hurt applicants. The rollout was, in the words of the teachers' union president, "all over the map" — and the union asked the state to delay the mandate.
Then came the fall of 2019. Bellows Free Academy-St. Albans issued erroneous proficiency transcripts, and its principal resigned amid the furor. Out-of-state colleges told U-32 they could not read its transcripts, and in December — the middle of college-application season — the school recalculated its seniors' grade-point averages on the traditional scale and re-sent them. Some schools had never converted at all: Burlington High kept letter grades throughout, and Montpelier High graded on a 1-to-4 scale but converted to letters on transcripts. None of it broke any rule. Only that November did Education Secretary Dan French say publicly what the record shows: "the law doesn't really speak about the grading piece, and neither does our regulation," and 2020 was not a hard deadline. The clarification came after the confusion, not before it — five years after the standards took effect, months before the first bound class graduated.
The test the public uses to judge all of this kept changing underneath. Each change had a stated reason. Each also broke the trend line.
Vermont entered the era testing students through the New Standards exams and its nationally known portfolio program. Then the No Child Left Behind law expanded required testing from three grades to seven. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island later explained that keeping their own custom tests across seven grades was "impossible" for states their size. The alternative was off-the-shelf multiple choice. So they built one test together: the New England Common Assessment Program, NECAP, first given in fall 2005.
Ten years later, Vermont switched to Smarter Balanced. The State Board had adopted the Common Core standards in 2010, and the new test was written to those standards by a group of roughly two dozen states. The Agency's pitch to lawmakers, filed with the House Education Committee in February 2014, promised computer-adaptive tests: "more precise student achievement results, in less time," at "significantly reduced costs." The first results came back in spring 2015. The State Board at once voted, unanimously, not to judge schools on them. The new test was harder than NECAP, and the scores were not comparable.
Eight years after that, Vermont switched again. The Smarter Balanced contract expired. After a competitive bid, the Agency chose the vendor Cognia to build the Vermont Comprehensive Assessment Program — VTCAP — first given in spring 2023. The stated reasons this time: the vendor's approach to equity, the accessibility of its testing tools, and one system across English, math, and science. The Agency voiced no complaint about the old test. Cognia, under its former name Measured Progress, is the same contractor that had run NECAP. Vermont had come back around to its original vendor. The state again cautioned that the new proficiency rates could not be compared to the old ones.
Three tests, three sets of passing marks, and a cancelled year in 2020. Anyone who says Vermont's proficiency rates rose or fell across this period is drawing one line through three different rulers. Fortunately, one ruler did not change: NAEP, and the Stanford scale linked to it, measure the same way across the whole period. Those are the rulers the first story leaned on.
Vermont did not attempt the diploma overhaul alone. Maine passed a proficiency-based diploma law in 2012 — LD 1422, requiring mastery across eight subject areas — a year before Vermont's Act 77. Both states were founding members of the New England Secondary School Consortium, a regional effort launched in 2008 with foundation money and the Great Schools Partnership as shared coordinator.
Maine's version never took hold. Its deadline slipped twice. The law required "proficiency" but never defined it, and districts set the bar anywhere from a middle-school to a twelfth-grade level — so a student could be denied a diploma in one town and granted one in the next. In 2018 the legislature changed one word — a diploma "must" be based on proficiency became "may" — and the mandate dissolved into a local option. No Maine class was ever held to it. Surveyed afterward, 38% of Maine superintendents planned to return to credit-based diplomas, 26% to hybrids; a quarter meant to keep the proficiency diploma anyway.
New Hampshire went the other way and stayed. It rebuilt course credit around competency over two decades instead of imposing a diploma gate on a deadline, and its rules — revised again in December 2024 — still award credit for demonstrated competency, not time in class. Its results held their place. New Hampshire's scores fell too — every state's did — and its math lead narrowed. But in 2024 it still sat above the national average on all four federal checks: by about four points in fourth-grade math, and about seven on the rest. Vermont, its peer near the top in 2013, held one.
Set the three neighbors side by side. Maine mandated the change, struggled, and repealed it before it bound anyone. New Hampshire built its version slowly into course credit and stayed the course. Vermont mandated the destination and left every district to parse the route on its own — nearly fifty districts, nearly fifty versions, transcripts colleges could not read. Then the state back-pedaled on the one thing it had mandated, telling schools the class-of-2020 deadline was not firm after they had spent five years building toward it. No one would call that process orderly, and its costs are in the record: report cards built and unbuilt, transcripts recalculated in the middle of application season, years of staff time spent on grading systems some schools then rolled back.
The research behind the movement was thin as well. The case against traditional grades is real and a century old: in a famous 1912 study, the same English paper drew scores from 64 to 98 from 142 teachers, and a 2016 synthesis of a hundred years of research calls conventional grades a "hodgepodge" of achievement and behavior. But evidence that proficiency grading improves what students learn barely exists. The strongest study — a randomized trial published in 2024 — found a gain in ninth-grade math from a bundle of changes, and could not isolate the grading itself. Everything else is correlation. The reform's own leading scholars now describe its demonstrated value as clearer communication with families, not better learning.
The switch, in plain terms: in 2013, by the federal point estimates, only three states scored higher than Vermont in eighth-grade math. Vermont set that system aside for one whose benefits no state had demonstrated. Maine, facing the same choice, turned back. Vermont's results since are the ones in the first story.
The locally-written-diploma era is now ending. A 2024 federal review found "uneven rigor" from district to district. Act 73 of 2025 now orders a single set of statewide graduation requirements, first binding on the class of 2031. Vermont spent a decade handing each district the pen, and is taking it back. The next story reports who was steering while all of this happened.
Nothing here ties proficiency-based learning to the score decline — the tests that could measure such a thing changed underneath it, which is part of the point. The reforms' aims were defensible, and thin evidence that a reform helps is not evidence that it hurts. Maine's reversal was political and about implementation; it collapsed before any cohort was bound, and left no measured effect on its students either way. New Hampshire's steadiness is a comparison, not a controlled test — its design differed from Vermont's from the start. The disorder of Vermont's rollout is documented; what that disorder cost in learning is not measured anywhere. And the documented Vermont retreats were school-level and about how grades were displayed — no district repealed its graduation requirements.
Explore the underlying data yourself: the Comparer · District Outliers.
Method and caveats: Vermont's rebuild is Act 77 of 2013 (16 V.S.A. ch. 23) and the State Board's Education Quality Standards, Rule 2000 (approved December 2013, effective April 5, 2014; proficiency-based graduation first binding on the class of 2020; the time-based-credit bar is the rule's own language). The grading clarification is Secretary French's, November 2019 (WCAX; VTDigger). The "roughly 49 districts" adoption figure and the "all over the map" characterization are contemporaneous journalism (VTDigger/Hechinger, April 2019, quoting VT-NEA president Don Tinney); the ~75-college reassurance is a Great Schools Partnership compilation. Test-transition rationales are as officially stated: NECAP per the consortium's retrospective account (DePascale, Center for Assessment, 2009); Smarter Balanced per the Agency's February 2014 House Education Committee filing; VTCAP per the Agency's October 5, 2022 vendor announcement, with the contract expiry per VTDigger (April 2023). The three regimes set passing marks independently and are not comparable across transitions, per the Agency and the State Board's March 17, 2015 resolution. Maine: LD 1422 (2012, Public Law ch. 669), LD 1627 (2016, ch. 489), LD 1666 (2018, ch. 466 — enacted House 116-7, Senate 17-12); the post-mortem is Evans, Center for Assessment (2018); the superintendent survey is the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (Nov. 2018, 82 respondents). Grading research: Starch & Elliott (1912); Brookhart et al., Review of Educational Research (2016); Kramer et al., Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (2024) — a bundled intervention, +0.33 SD in ninth-grade math, no motivation effect; Link & Guskey, Theory Into Practice (2022). The 2013 eighth-grade-math ranking is by NAEP point estimates (Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire higher). New Hampshire's standing is computed the same way as Vermont's, from NCES NAEP Data Service average scale scores against the national public average: in 2024, +4.3 points in grade-4 math, +7.2 in grade-4 reading, +7.5 in grade-8 math, +7.2 in grade-8 reading (2013: +8.3 to +12.1) — point estimates, above the national average on all four but narrower than 2013. New Hampshire's competency-credit rule is Ed 306 (mastery-based credit since 2005; the revision adopted December 12, 2024 retains credit "based on the demonstration of district and or graduation competencies not on time spent").
Sources: Vermont statutes and State Board rules as cited; Vermont AOE announcements and assessment pages; VTDigger, Seven Days, WCAX, Hechinger Report (2019-2020 grading coverage); Maine Legislature enacted laws; Maine DOE; Center for Assessment (NCIEA); Maine Education Policy Research Institute; Bangor Daily News, Portland Press Herald, Chalkbeat; New England Secondary School Consortium launch (2008); Great Schools Partnership; NCES NAEP Data Service (Vermont and New Hampshire series); New Hampshire Ed 306, adopted text December 12, 2024.
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