Vermont's yardstick moved

Washington Central's English scores run seven to eleven points ahead of the Vermont average. But that average has itself fallen behind the country. Set against the nation, the district's standing shrinks on most measures. Its test results have dropped nearly a grade level since 2013. Adjusted for the community it serves, its national test standing is now average. Its college continuation trails the national rate by nineteen points — and Vermont's count uses a more generous clock. Its attendance advantage is gone. Its spending, $30,402 a student, comes to $1.73 for every national dollar. Graduation is the exception: the district clears a national bar the state misses. In Vermont, though, what a diploma requires is decided district by district.

Every school comparison the Gazette has published measures Washington Central against Vermont — its peers, its state average, its own past. That is how Vermont talks about its schools, and it hides a variable: how Vermont itself is doing. Judging a district by the state average only works if the state average is standing still. It isn't. Once the country enters the comparison, most of what looks like strength in Washington Central is a lead over a state average that is itself losing ground to the country.

1 · The district in Vermont's frame: near the top of most tables

Start with the standings as the Gazette has reported them. Washington Central graduates 89% of its cohort in four years, fifth of 43 systems. Its English scores run seven to eleven points above the state average in every tested year since 2018 — fifth of 46 against demographic expectation, nine points above it. Its math, against the fifteen systems most like it, sits above the peer median — 45.1% proficient against 39.9%. Set against Vermont, the district's tests and diplomas are near the top of the tables.

The weaknesses in that story were trends, not standings: college continuation at 43.1%, behind every one of the thirteen close peers reporting; a senior-class decline among the steepest in the state; attendance fallen from fourth-best of 44 systems to nearly four points behind its peers. Strong where it stands, weak where it's headed — in Vermont's frame.

Vermont's own average, though, has been falling against the country for a decade. A state that sat near the top of the nation's report card in 2013 now runs no better than even on three of its four federal test measures. So "above the Vermont average" is a moving claim.

2 · How to read a Vermont district against the country

Two federal instruments make it possible. The first is the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the "Nation's Report Card." Every two years it tests a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders in math and reading, and it is the one test given the same way in every state. But it scores states, not districts. Vermont's entire student body is smaller than one big-city district the assessment does track. For districts there is Stanford's Education Data Archive. It takes each district's results on its own state's tests — math and English, grades 3 through 8 — and turns them into a single number on the NAEP scale. That number says how many grade levels the district's average student tests above or below a fixed national norm, averaged across those subjects and grades. One number per district per year means every district in the country lands on the same list — a Vermont supervisory union next to a district in Ohio. The archive's newest release, on July 10 of this year, covers tests through spring 2025. By its own coverage tables, it is the first to carry Vermont districts' post-pandemic years.

NAEP places the state; the Stanford scale places the district. The rest of this story runs both, side by side, on every measure that allows it.

3 · Tests: the state fell through the floor; the district fell nearly a grade level

The state first. A decade ago Vermont sat well above the national average on all four NAEP checks. At the peaks, the lead was 9 to 12 points — and a point is roughly a tenth of a grade level. In 2013, by the point estimates, only three states scored higher in grade-8 math. By 2024, three of the four leads were gone. Grade-4 math sat 2.5 points below the national average — a gap the federal snapshot calls statistically significant, with twenty-three states and jurisdictions measurably higher. Grade-4 reading sat about even (1.6 below), and grade-8 reading about even too (0.6 above) — after a seven-point fall between 2022 and 2024, a significant decline by the same measure. Only grade-8 math still held a lead worth the name: 3.4 points.

The country was falling too — on every check but grade-4 math, the 2024 national average is the lowest in the two decades the series covers. Vermont fell faster, from higher up: in the grade-8 checks, close to twice the nation's pace. "About even with the country," in 2024, means even with a country at its low-water mark. And grade-4 math is the exception that stings — the one check where the country is recovering is the one where Vermont now sits significantly below it.

Now the district, on the Stanford scale. In 2013, Washington Central's students tested about a grade level and a quarter above the national norm. That placed the district at the 86th percentile of reporting U.S. districts. In 2025 they tested about three tenths of a grade above the norm — the 71st percentile. Those readings hold two different declines. The first is against the norm itself, which never moves: it is fixed at the 2019 national average. Against that constant bar, the district's students test nearly a full grade level lower than they did in 2013. The second is the percentile, which compares the district with everyone else. It fell too — so Washington Central lost ground even relative to other districts, most of which were also falling. Vermont fell further on both counts. The state went from nine tenths of a grade above the norm to half a grade below it, crossing the norm between 2019 and 2022. And the median Vermont system dropped from the 78th percentile of the country to the 40th.

Against the state, Washington Central's lead more than doubled over those twelve years — from about a third of a grade level to about four fifths. Against the country, the same district fell by nearly a full grade level. When the Gazette reported the district's math scores rising against the state average since unification, part of that rise was the state coming down to meet it. The district still sits above the national median in 2025 — fifteen percentiles below where it sat in 2013.

The timing says the pandemic is not the whole story, for state and district alike. Vermont lost nine points of relative ground in grade-4 math between 2013 and 2024. Nearly eight of those points were gone by 2019 — before the pandemic closed a single school. Grade-8 math and grade-4 reading tell the same story. Only grade-8 reading's fall is mostly a pandemic-era loss: six points, most of it after 2022, while the nation's reading average slipped 2.4 points to Vermont's 6.5. Washington Central's slide — its grade-level reading on the Stanford scale — has the same two-chapter shape. Of the roughly one grade level the district lost between 2013 and 2025, nearly two-thirds was gone by its 2017 reading. Between 2017 and its next reading, in 2022, it gave up nothing. (The archive carries no readings for Vermont's districts in between.) The remaining third came after 2022. Whatever explains all this has two chapters, and COVID accounts only for the second.

The peer group shows the same fall at different speeds. The measure here is each system's percentile — where its single Stanford number ranks among reporting U.S. districts. Washington Central fell fifteen percentiles, from the 86th to the 71st. That was the fifth-smallest decline of the sixteen systems in its cohort. Only four fell less: Montpelier Roxbury (which barely moved, 89th to 88th), Lamoille South, Mountain Views, and Colchester. Other close peers fell forty-plus percentiles: Addison Northwest and Windsor Southeast each went from the 85th to the 40th. A district whose English scores the Gazette called "a steady strength, not a recent one" held that strength while the rest of the state was falling.

4 · Graduation, attendance, college: one qualified win, one erased advantage, one shared fall

Graduation is the district's strongest number in any frame. Washington Central's latest four-year rate is 89% — the same as in '17-18, with a pandemic-era dip to 77% in '20-21 in between; small classes make any single year noisy. The national bar is rising: up nearly seven points, from 80% in '11-12 to 87% in '21-22. On that latest federal count Vermont stood at 83% — only nine states graduated a smaller share. On its own state series, Vermont drifted from 85% in '17-18 to 82% in '24-25. The district clears the bar the state misses. But the district's number is three years newer than the federal one, so read that as direction, not a verdict.

The diploma question. An uncomfortable reading of that rate, next to everything else on this page, is that the diploma asks less than the numbers around it suggest. The data cannot convict — and Vermont gives it no way to acquit. There is no exit exam. Under the state's Education Quality Standards, each district's board writes its own proficiency-based graduation requirements. A diploma therefore attests to a local standard with no external check. The district's own numbers put the question sharply. 89% of the cohort graduates. Yet 43% of the juniors tested in spring 2025 met the state science bar — 13% the year before; small classes swing hard. The last common checks in English and math, in grade 9, ran 54% and 43%. And one student in four is chronically absent. The rate is not new. Washington Central graduated 89% in '17-18 too, when the district's last federal-scale reading sat a third of a grade higher than today's. That is the point: the diploma rate held still while the measures beneath it moved. The same question hangs over the whole state, which graduates 82% while 39% meet the math bar. The state has begun asking it of itself. Act 73 directed the Agency of Education to recommend statewide graduation requirements; its report went to the State Board in December; and a single statewide standard is due to take effect with the class of 2031. What would settle the question locally is public and specific: Washington Central's own graduation proficiencies, and the proficiency profile of its graduates. Neither is in this data.

Attendance is the erased advantage. Before the pandemic, chronic absence barely registered in Washington Central next to either benchmark — 8.5% of students in '17-18 and 12.9% the next year, against state rates of 21% and 18% and a national rate of about 15%. By '23-24 the distinction was gone: district 25%, state 27%, country 24%. And the country's 24% is itself only a partial recovery — chronic absence plateaued at 28% across '21-22 and '22-23. The district once ran far below the national rate. Now it merely matches it — and that rate sits far above the district's own old numbers.

College is where the national comparison bites hardest. Against its peers the district trails; against the country it trails farther. The federal figure: 62% of U.S. graduates enroll in college by the first fall after graduation. That national rate has itself slipped from a peak of about 70%. Washington Central's latest reading is 43.1%. The two rates are not measured the same way. The federal count stops at the first fall after graduation. Vermont counts anyone enrolled within 16 months — a year longer. The longer window can only raise Vermont's number. So the true gap is wider than the nineteen points the raw figures show. The district's own fall outpaces the nation's. From its 66% reading in the '21 snapshot, it is down 23 points — nearly three times the national slide from peak. The state fell from 62% to 46%. The series bounces — the district has crossed the state line in both directions — so single-year orderings prove little. The level does not. Against the country, Washington Central's college continuation is not a peer-group weakness. It is a deficit.

5 · Spending: $1.73 for every national dollar

Here the district sits above the nation by the widest margin of any measure — on the other side of the ledger. On the federal definition — the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of School System Finances — Washington Central spent $30,402 per pupil in fiscal 2024, up from $21,788 in its first unified year (fiscal 2020, not adjusted for inflation). Vermont as a whole spent $28,818 — behind only New York and the District of Columbia. The national average was $17,619. The district spends $1.73 for every dollar spent on the average American student, and more than its own third-in-the-nation state. The Gazette makes no claim about why the test results and the spending sit at opposite ends of the national tables; the costs of running small rural schools are real. But in a national frame the two facts belong in the same sentence.

6 · Adjusted for the community it serves, the advantage disappears

One more adjustment closes the loop. In Vermont's frame, Washington Central beats its demographic expectation — nine points above it in English, fifth of 46. The Stanford archive lets the same question be asked nationally. It publishes a socioeconomic measure for nearly every district, built from Census data on income, poverty, education, employment, and family structure. Score every district against what that measure predicts, and each one gets a national expectation — the same logic the Comparer applies within Vermont, though built on a broader community measure rather than the Comparer's enrolled-student low-income share.

On that measure, Washington Central serves an affluent community, and an increasingly affluent one. In 2013 the district beat its national expectation by about two-thirds of a grade level — the 81st percentile of U.S. districts after adjustment. By 2024, the last year the Census-based measure covers, the margin was gone — a hundredth of a grade level below expectation. Unadjusted, the district ranked at the 73rd percentile that year. Adjusted, the 50th — average, for a district in a community like its own. The adjusted fall is steeper than the raw one for two reasons at once: scores went down, and the community's measured affluence went up, which raises the bar. The path was not smooth — the district dipped below its national expectation in 2017, recovered above it by 2022, then settled back to par. "Beats its demographics," it turns out, is also a Vermont-relative claim.

Percentiles in this table rank the roughly 10,500 to 13,600 U.S. districts that carry both a score and the Census-based measure in each year — a slightly smaller pool than the raw percentiles quoted earlier in this story, which is why 2013 reads 85th here and 86th above. Columns are rounded independently, so a row's standing minus its expectation can differ from the printed margin by 0.01. The 2025 score exists, but the Census inputs stop at 2024.

What this doesn't say

NAEP samples two grades in two subjects and says nothing about music, trades, or whether a fourth-grader is safe and known at school. The Stanford linkage is a model, with a model's uncertainty — the percentile moves in this story are large enough to survive it; the decimals are not.

Nothing here assigns a cause. Demographics, screens, staffing, school consolidation, the pandemic's long tail, and the state's own test transitions are all live suspects, and sorting them is more than one story can do. What the numbers do settle is narrower: the yardstick moved — and not only Vermont's. On the federal test, the country of 2024 is a lower bar than the country of 2013; on graduation the bar moved the other way — the national rate climbed from 80% to 87% over the decade through '21-22, the last year the federal count covers. Every "above the state average" in Vermont school reporting — the Gazette's about Washington Central most of all — now comes with that footnote attached.

Both of the school tools the Gazette has referenced now carry a "yardstick" panel — Vermont against the country, on the same page as every district comparison. Check the work: the Comparer · District Outliers.

Method and caveats: the Stanford figures pool math with reading on a grade-equivalent scale; percentiles count districts rather than students, and the pool of districts the model can rank shrank by about a third between 2013 and 2025. Washington Central's graduating classes are small enough that the state suppresses some years outright. The college-continuation snapshots lag graduation by about two years, and the Clearinghouse match behind them misses apprenticeships, military service, and most short certificate programs. The attendance comparison crosses two sources — Vermont's own dashboard and federal compilations — that count in nearly, but not exactly, the same way. Spending figures are the Census Bureau's F-33 per-pupil current spending, one definition for district, state, and nation; Vermont's own per-weighted-pupil figures are not comparable and appear only in the interactive tools. The national demographic adjustment regresses each year's district scores on the archive's Census-based socioeconomic composite (unweighted; about 10,500 to 13,600 districts carry both measures; the relationship explains just under half the variation), and adjusted percentiles rank the leftover performance within that matched pool — raw percentiles elsewhere in this story rank the full reporting pool, so the two differ slightly. The Census inputs stop at 2024, so the 2025 reading is unadjusted.

Sources: NCES NAEP Data Service, average scale scores, public-school students, 2003–2024; NCES 2024 State Snapshot reports (statistical-significance calls); U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33), FY2024 — national and Vermont averages and Washington Central district file, FY2020–24; NCES Digest of Education Statistics table 219.46 (adjusted cohort graduation rate, 2021-22); NCES Condition of Education and Digest table 302.10 (immediate college enrollment: peak about 70%, 62% in 2022) and Vermont AOE accountability files (16-month continuation; Washington Central ACGR series); Vermont AOE Annual Snapshot (district and state college continuation, six snapshot years); Vermont AOE attendance dashboard and Attendance Works / AEI compilations of the federal EDFacts collection (chronic absence; pre-pandemic national rate ~15%, 2018-19); NCES CCD enrollment (Vermont ~83,000 K-12 students); Stanford Education Data Archive 2025.1, admin-district file, grade-equivalent scale, and its covariates file (ACS-based socioeconomic composite, through 2024) (released July 10, 2026); Vermont State Board Education Quality Standards, Rule 2120.8 (locally delineated proficiency-based graduation requirements); Vermont AOE, Statewide Graduation Requirements Recommendations (Act 73 §9a report to the State Board, December 31, 2025; statewide requirements effective with the class of 2031); VTCAP grade-9 and grade-11 district results, 2024-25. One NAEP scale point ≈ one tenth of a grade level, a rough conversion — use for magnitude, not precision.