The Vermont State Board of Education or VSBE, is appointed by the governor with approval by the senate.
The VSBE also makes recommendations to state leaders concerning education spending and policies.
The state spent $1.6 billion to educate these 76,000 students, the largest per capita in the country and twice the national average.
The state authorized two more pre-K grades to the school system for the benefit of three- and four-year-olds.
[14] However, when allowance for race is considered, a 2007 US Government list of test scores shows Vermont white fourth graders performed 25th in the nation for reading (229), 26th for math (247).
Education Week ranked the state second in the nation[16] in high school graduation rates for 2007.
[17] In 2008, Vermont high school students achieved the highest five-year increase in the country in Advanced Placement testing.
19.8% of tested students scored a 3 or higher, compared to an average of 15.2% in the rest of the country.
States were evaluated for education reform on academic standards, change in proficiency standards, private school choice, charter school law, online learning policies and programs, home-schooling regulations and removing ineffective teachers.
[23] Vermont's 1777 constitution was the first in English-speaking North America to mandate public funding for universal education.
This requirement was first met by elementary-level village schools with sessions held in the cooler months to accommodate farm work.
By the end of the eighteenth century, grammar schools, instructing students in English, algebra, geometry, Greek, and Latin, had been established at Bennington, Burlington, Castleton, Middlebury, Montpelier, and Windsor.
By the mid-nineteenth century, an expansion in settlement and the population of the state, coupled with increased prosperity, brought grammar schools to all corners of Vermont.
Even the most remote Northeast Kingdom had established high-school-level instruction in Brownington, Craftsbury, Danville, Hardwick, and Newport.
Many of these established grammar schools and academies, though not entirely public, received funds from area town governments in exchange for education of their students.
Additional post secondary schools instructing students to become teachers were called seminaries.
These seminaries also graduated teachers to staff Vermont's growing number of primary and secondary schools.
The one-room school house, born of small multi-age rural populations, continued well into the twentieth century.
Rural towns without a single central village often built two to a half-dozen school houses across their terrain.
Much of this came from a lack of transportation and a need for students to return home by mid afternoon for farm chores.
In the early 1930s state legislation established a review and certification program similar to accreditation.
Education quality in rural areas was maintained through a program called Vermont Standard Schools.
Judge Robert A. Mello of the Franklin County Superior Court upheld the implementation of the law in 2019.
[33] In 2010 Vermont ranked 49th out of 50 states in the nation for the amount spent subsidizing higher education, per capita.
In 2008, Vermont has the highest average in-state annual tuition and fees for 4-year colleges at $11,341, up 8.1% since 2007.
[34] The average Vermont graduate in the class of 2007 owed $24,329, making the state the fourth worst in the country.
By the mid-twentieth century all but one of the state normal schools, and many of the seminaries, had become four-year colleges of liberal arts and sciences.
A non-profit organization dedicated to education reform, gave Vermont the lowest ranking in the nation for college readiness programs for high school.
It said that the state was doing nothing in four areas: 1) aligning high school standards and graduation requirements with college and workplace expectations, 2) administering a college readiness test to all high school students; 3) developing a data system to track students from kindergarten on; and 4) holding high schools accountable for graduating students who are college and workplace ready.