By Dale Chu
To date, 49 states and Washington D.C. have released their Spring 2025 summative test results. Only Vermont remains a holdout, with official statewide results now not expected until early 2026. That simple fact encapsulates a systemic problem that’s persisted for years: Vermont’s inability to provide timely, transparent academic performance data.
To be clear, the Vermont Agency of Education published preliminary 2024–25 statewide assessment results last October. But the agency has already fallen behind its own stated timeline for releasing final school- and district-level results, which it said would come “later this fall.” Preliminary numbers have already been shared with select stakeholders, but the state says it needs more time to validate student information before final results can be published.
This delay matters, especially in light of Vermont’s academic performance challenges on national benchmarks. The most recent NAEP results show that Vermont students’ reading scores in grades 4 and 8 have declined significantly over the past decade—from once being among the nation’s highest performers to now sinking below national averages.
Sadly, the situation isn’t new. In “Years Late and a Dollar Short in Vermont” (2023), I wrote about how late reporting of 2022 results rendered them effectively useless for instructional planning. That critique still holds because little seems to have changed: timeliness in Vermont remains elusive. And while school and district staff received preliminary data, ostensibly for planning purposes, October is still far past the date from when they can be actionably used.
Vermont’s delay stands out for all the wrong reasons. This is one of the smallest education systems in the country, serving fewer students than many large districts. If states with orders of magnitude more students can validate data and release results far sooner, Vermont’s foot dragging is difficult to justify.