Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Good morning. This is House of Education, 02/26/2026. The House of Education Committee this morning is getting an update from the Agency of Education on the process for creating new graduation requirements. Just a reminder to the committee that it was something that was in Act 73 to come up with statewide graduation requirements and sort of the legislative part of the process is sort of done. Now it's really between the AOE and the State Board of Education and the State Board of Education's own sort of public facing process. Anyway, with that, welcome to both of you and introduce yourselves and the floor is yours. So thanks for coming in.

[Sally Sonders, Secretary of Education]: Good morning, thank you for having us. I'm Sally Sonders, Secretary of Education. I'm Doctor. Erin Davis, I'm the Chief Academic Officer for the agency. We look forward to this opportunity to share an update on the statewide graduation requirements. As Chair Conlon indicated, this is part of Act 73 and it is a critical element as we think about improving and elevating statewide academic opportunities and outcomes. So with that, I will turn it over to Doctor. Davis to provide an update. Great. So just wanted to start with some framing that we shared with the field throughout this process.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: We launched it in August and had ongoing participation with members of stakeholders across the state, educators. We were really clear in helping them understand exactly what you just spoke to, that this is from Section 9A of Act 73, which was requiring that the agency provide a set of recommendations to the State Board of Education for these new statewide graduation requirements. That report was due at the end of the calendar year. We submitted it on 12/31/2025. And we used these objectives as a way to frame the work that we were engaging in for this process, that we were treating these recommendations as an opportunity to set the standard of excellence across the state of Vermont to promote equity and consistency of rigor. I'll speak to that in a moment. That's an area that we do need to address as a state, according to some findings from our latest US education visit. Then also, in establishing this really clear statewide finish line for all of our students, that we treat that as an opportunity to strengthen what we call alignment. So pulling that finish line all the way down into the earliest educational experiences, the way back to pre K, and thinking about what the experience and trajectory of a student looks like from the moment they walk in our doors all the way to crossing that finish line of graduation. We do have currently a Vermont Portrait of a Graduate. That was a useful foothold for us in this process to think about the Portrait of a Graduate and align to it. When we created that as an agency, it preceded my tenure here at the agency, but it went through a really robust process of stakeholder engagement as well. So it felt important to show that we're not starting from scratch. We're building upon important work that's already happened. And lastly, that this be a way for us to ensure that all Vermont graduates are set up for success in college and or career and are prepared to be actively engaged citizens in our communities. So the main takeaways that I'm hopeful that you all and those listening will leave with are that we did have this US Department of Education finding from their last monitoring visit to Vermont, which occurred in 2024, that showed we have uneven rigor in our graduation requirements currently across the state, and that's something that we need to address. Also hoping that you understand that the statewide graduation requirements alone, and that we understand this will not fully address the concern of uneven rigor that we're seeing in our schools currently, but that it is a really important first step. And it's part of the agency's broader strategy and work that's already underway. That our graduation report includes our recommendations and the rationale for them and that it identifies area of further inquiry and next steps. It was quite an aggressive timeline to get that report with those recommendations in. And we treated it as a way to, of course, make those recommendations, but then also position ourselves to provide ongoing support to the state board through their decision making process. And part of setting ourselves up to do so was to help them identify those areas of further inquiry.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Just a quick question before you change slides. The top bullet, what does it mean that they have a finding? What are the consequences of that?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: I'm going to walk us through that momentarily. Thank you. And then lastly, that we're engaging further with stakeholders already now that we've submitted the report. We did engage in a pretty robust set of stakeholder meetings before we submitted the report, including a survey that we had a really high response rate to. We were pleased with that, but that we knew that there were certain stakeholders we wanted to continue to engage as part of their decision making process. So here you are, Chair.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Are sure that I was not skipping ahead on the slides?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Okay, so as I mentioned, their twenty twenty fourth monitoring visit to Vermont found uneven rigor across both our flexible pathways programs and our graduation requirements when it evaluated their graduation rate indicator. So that is one of the things they look for when they come to a visit. Specifically, it's under Section 81,000 and one-five of the Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act that states that each pathway for earning a regular high school diploma must be aligned with requirements for the standard diploma awarded to the preponderance of students in the state. And specifically, they included this quote that I've listed that a pathway that's clearly less rigorous than the pathway that most students follow is not consistent with statutory requirements at the federal level. And so Vermont's existing approach to determining the criteria for earning a high school diploma involves deferring to local districts currently. So the proficiency based graduation requirements that are in our education quality standards right now leave the criteria for those diplomas up to interpretation by each of the local supervisory unions and districts. And so that means that potentially there's 119 different governance units that are making these decisions. And naturally, that complicates our ability to have that consistent level. I appreciate your reaction to And so that's something that we're seeking to address. And we were able to share back with you, as Ed, that that is already underway and was included in the decisions that you all made as part of Act 73.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Do you

[Chair Peter Conlon]: find that supervisory unions that have two high schools in bed have differing graduation requirements for each high school?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: At times and or they have different ways of satisfying the same graduation requirements for the supervisory union, and they may or may not have ways of monitoring the consistency of rigor across the ways that students are presented with for satisfying the requirements. We also see from the tech center perspective that when the sending school has different requirements, it can create a lot of challenges in terms of preparing those students for the next pathway within CTE. And to respond to your question around what it means with USAID, we are required to submit a corrective action plan, which they are currently reviewing. In that corrective action plan, we have identified that Act 73 is moving the state towards statewide graduation requirements to address the finding and to ensure that there is consistent rigor and equity within our system. They have signaled to us that they have concerns around the timeline. So we have shared that with the State Board of Education and have encouraged them to accelerate their review to provide the final recommendations as soon as possible. That's also important to giving input to the field because this does represent a shift and we need to ensure that our high schools have the ramp to prepare for these adjustments. So I do have a slide in just a couple moments where we'll explore our corrective action response to The US findings. But I first want to provide an overview of the current state in the way that, as we talk with educators across the state, they're currently conceptualizing the different educational priorities in Vermont. Although, just like many of the things that we've already mentioned, the way that they're being operationalized currently varies from one place to another. And I do want to name, but there are examples to build upon. The challenge with this right now is the variation. That's not to say that there aren't systems that are already doing this well and ensuring that there is an appropriate level of rigor. And we spent time meeting with those systems and really understanding how they approached that so that we could have that inform the recommendations that we made as well. So if you look at this graphic where the portrait of a learner oh, I'm sorry.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: What do you mean by that? Which The last part you just said. Meeting I thought you were spending time with

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: The systems that currently have a pretty robust way of both having clear expectations for their graduates and what they need to have satisfied before walking across the stage and receiving their diploma have really engaged in a thorough process, both in

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: terms of What systems are they? So

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: in part due to outcomes, we would expect that it would result in higher graduation rates, in higher performance on our state assessments, and in part through our meeting with them and understanding what their monitoring processes were and ways to give ongoing feedback to students to make sure that they were progressing appropriately. And lastly, the ways that they were holding students to an appropriate level of rigor in terms of their local comprehensive assessments and the evidence of learning that they were documenting for students along the way, the systems of supporting students toward that. So in some cases, was coursework. And in some cases, it was flexible learning opportunities, flexible pathways, but that they were inquiring that there was content standards alignment to that work in terms of how they had determined their requirements. I would say the systems that are going to need to make more of an adjustment are the ones that have not been attending to the content standards as strongly that you see in this graphic. So if you'll give me a moment to talk through the visualization, I think that'll help me be a little crisper.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Are content standards that we made up in these 119

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: different No, let me just describe the graphic, and I think that'll be a little clearer. So if we start biggest picture in terms of what we aspire to for our graduates, The state of Vermont and many local systems have created a portrait of a graduate or a portrait of a learner. It's very comprehensive. It reflects Vermont values and local community values. It includes things not only like skills that we would want students to have around digital literacy, for example, or critical thinking skills, but also ways that we would want them to be participating in our communities, like being a contributor to our local communities. So it's very big picture, comprehensive, gives us an idea of who we want our students to be by the time they leave our pre K to 12 system. Under guarding that are transferable skills, critical thinking skills being one of them or communication skills. These are sometimes referred to as durable skills or they used be called twenty first century skills, which of course we updated once we entered the twenty first century. And then undergirding that would be content standards. And so the state board has already approved for each of our content areas. So English language arts, mathematics, both use the Common Core state standards. C3 as a framework for global citizenship and for social studies. There's the shape standards for physical education. Each of the content areas has a set of approved content standards that makes explicit what students should have to demonstrate in terms of both knowledge and skills in order to be proficient at their grade level for each of those. And those are all nationally set. We selected ones that national sets of standards. They are not locally determined. And then the state of Vermont State Board is the one that selected for each of the content areas which set of standards we are expected to use in all of our schools across the state. Yes. But

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: the Common Core State Standards for math, and very likely for English, are really big. We can't possibly be teaching all of that in four years. And so what we asked the AOE years and years and years ago was, which was? What do you want us to focus on? Yeah. No answer. Bell on deaf ears, go pick whatever you want. So, yes, we're all working with the same content standards and the fact that we're looking at the Common Core State Standards for math, but which ones we pick are different from neighboring districts or SUs.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: That's right, and that's where we see the variation in terms of the current locally determined graduation requirements. And you're right. You're exactly right that there was a gap in terms of the agency's ability to provide the appropriate guidance to avoid this being the current situation that we find ourselves in. I've heard that across the board in terms of stakeholder engagement that I've done, both within the agency and in folks who've been in schools for a long time. So that's something that we're working hard to address as the statewide graduation requirements are going to support us in doing so.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: And also, I have one other question. I'm sorry.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: No, no. I'm glad you're so engaged. You use

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: the word systems a lot. Yeah. Are you referring to SDs and SUs? Yeah, so a school system. Okay. Yeah.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Okay, thanks for clarifying that. I didn't realize that was a I wasn't being clear enough on that. Thank you. In terms of the way that our schools are delivering opportunities for our students to demonstrate that they are learning transferable skills and the content standards that are expected of them, that's being delivered through flexible pathway opportunities and coursework. And even more discrete than that would be specific curriculum instruction, instructional practices, the ways that they're on a daily or ongoing basis providing practice assessment and feedback to students. And so what you'll see here is that at each level of this, there's room for a little variation. But you've actually done a wonderful job of homing in on where we're seeing the nexus of where much of this variation is coming from. It's predominantly from the content standards and that each local SU or SD, local school system, has been, through the education quality standards, asked to identify on their own which ones to prioritize or deprioritize as part of what's required before students leave our system. And therefore, the content standards and the content requirements is the part that, as the agency, in our recommendations, we focused on in terms of providing a framework for expected coverage for each content area and what we have recommended to the state board. I do want to name that having these statewide graduation requirements also provides us with the opportunity to strengthen the implementation of Act 77 and flexible pathways and Act 173, which is about meeting the needs of learners who have achievement gaps, learning gaps for them. And so both of those previous laws also vary in their implementation across the state. We firmly believe that those are the right legislation, and the challenge has been an implementation one. And in my opinion, it's been complicated by the fact that we, in my opinion, unfairly asked all of the different SUs and SDs to determine these graduation requirements on their own. And that makes it more difficult to design the flexible pathways for satisfying them and support learners who have gaps in closing them. Anything to add? I think you characterized it beautifully. What we often say is that we've asked our districts to be their own mini agency of education with adopting and implementing these large scale education transformation initiatives. And so when we think about the overall statewide system, we're being very clear around the agency's role and where we need to have really clear guidance and support to ensure transparency and clarity of expectations. I would just highlight, too, that once we get clear on those requirements and expectations, that allows us to really focus our support on what's going to make the biggest difference to students, and that's that innermost circle. By really understanding what the framework that we're operating within is as far as the statewide graduation requirements, it allows us to make sure that we're clear on what the appropriate instructional materials are and make sure that we're supporting teachers with the most effective instructional practices. I think as I've learned more about the background and what's been happening here in Vermont, I don't know all of you yet, but I'm a product of Vermont's educational system. I graduated from South Burlington High School twenty years ago. But I think that we've more than once reengineered the new system again, the system of education. And we've asked for local supervisory unions and school districts to come up with the system for themselves. And the work that that requires means that we've had to take our focus off of a focus on instructional materials being high quality and evidence based instructional practices. So the most important next step from all of this, that main takeaway from one of those earliest slides, and this is just the first step, It is so that once we have this clear framework for graduation requirements across the state, that we can really get to where the rubber meets the road in terms of those instructional materials and instructional practices, because that's what's going to make the difference for students. I have to hand raise. I do. Are you going commit to it?

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: A lot of what you're saying right now is worrisome to me in the fact that once we, in our little system, chose our standards, because we had to, Educators are professionals and instructional practices and instruction is our game. And so, I don't think that that's been lacking at all. I think that's where our focus is always, and I think we're really good at delivering on the content standards that we picked for ourselves. And so I think that if you spend the time with teachers somehow involved in the process of determining what those content standards should be, there needs to continue to be some, not sure what the word is, but I'm going to go with agency, for teachers to be able to do what they do best, which is deliver content with instructional practices that are evidence based and what you think is best for kids. So I don't want, it sounds like it's gonna be more prescribed than it's concerning, what you're I

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: understand why it's giving you pause, and I appreciate you asking the question, because I hope that if there's others listening, this also can provide some reassurance. It's inconsistent. So you all, I'm not familiar specifically with where you're based. I've been to Beth.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Oh, wonderful. Oh, I have

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: been meeting regularly with Becca. I love the work that you all have done. And so there are systems that have built a strong set of local requirements. And those are the systems that when we've talked to the leaders and educators in the systems, they've indicated that they don't anticipate, based on what we've proposed, for there to be a significant need to shift what you're already doing. The systems that have designed local proficiency based graduation requirements and again, by systems, I'm hearing myself say it now the SUs and SDs that have designed their local proficiency based graduation requirements in a way that is less focused on the content standards are not necessarily in the same position that you are. And so this is really a matter of identifying the way that it is done that has an impact on the learning for students and scaling those bright spots and spreading those practices. So yes, some places are going to need to shift. And some places who have already done really deep, meaningful work was a keen eye for the content standards I want to name for you that that is the biggest difference maker that I've seen as I even visited across the state and spent I mean, any time that I've gone out, I spend a full day. I've been out to King Denise. We've been up to Franklin Northeast. I've been down to Windham Southeast. I've been out I've truly canvassed the state as part of my onboarding. The difference maker is the level of attention to the content standards.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: I just want to make sure we're not going down a road that's going to be too canned or prescribed. Want there to be resources, and I want you all to provide those resources, especially to districts who feel like they don't have any, and be like, look, this is what we want you to teach and these are some resources that you

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: could use to get the job done. And I would say that through the listen and learn tour, we heard a strong call for greater instructional leadership at the Agency of Education. And in response, we created the chief academic officer position and we're able to bring Doctor. Davis on board and also realign through our organizational shifts, a focus more on supporting curriculum instruction. And in that process, we're developing a review where we at the agency are in the process of vetting high quality instruction materials.

[Sally Sonders, Secretary of Education]: The field has a role in that and can also request a review. So again, what we're trying to do is to really provide the level of statewide support and review of materials that can be supportive on the ground. And we're doing that in partnership with the field.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Can I throw out an analogy for those of us not in the education world that might fit here, and tell me if it's a bad analogy? All right, certainly based on what Brett McCann said, you said, okay, fine, thanks for common core, but tell us what part of the common core you want us to focus on. Searcy says like, you're telling somebody, okay, you're in charge of providing cereal for breakfast. Here's a grocery store aisle with 4,000 cereals, do whatever you want, and then the agency walks away. Now what you're saying is, well, we want you to focus on nutritious cereals, well delivered, but within that sort of framework, there's freedom.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: We also talked about that tight and loose framework, so we want to be really tight in ensuring that there's resources for help, but yes, you switch to those. Here's some clear expectations, here are sort of guidelines right in our rubric that will be used to evaluate and vet those materials that are going to be most aligned and supportive of the teaching and learning practices that we've outlined in our education quality standards. And I would also note that we have a lot of new teachers coming into the field that may not have as extensive training and we're asking them to do a lot of work. And so with this part, we've also heard a call for increased support with onboarding, right? So if we have this clarity of expectations with an identification of those resources that are well aligned to our standards that we're held accountable to, it helps our newer teachers also holding their craft.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: I think if we're, so we know that we have a deficit of teachers coming up, it's going to be really big. And I think that if this is something that we want people to continue to choose as career path, we just need to make sure that we're finding that balance, so that it's continuing to feel creative and flexible and like something you would put your passion into and not like you've been given a script to proctor the SATs. Right, absolutely.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: What we're looking for is the structure that allows for that creative freedom, right? If the teacher is spending a lot of the time on pulling the data or creating the lesson plan, they're not able to differentiate for each of their students. And so expand on how that structure is important and achieving that right balance is absolutely what the objective is for the agency. We just don't want them to have to start from scratch. My own experience was when I was a first year teacher, I was handed a huge stack of worksheets for each unit that my grade level lead had used in her own instruction. And so she would just photocopy the originals of everything and say, here you go. Hadn't And deeply internalized the grade level that I was teaching. I was an elementary teacher, so I was teaching all content areas. So after that first year of teaching, I spent the whole summer studying the standards and understanding the progression of them from the grade level I thought there, so second grade, fourth grade, and then pulling out even further. Because without the opportunity to do that work and with no structure and no real resources, I was having to build it from scratch. And we're seeing that some folks here in Vermont are being put in that position as a teacher. And that's just unfair, and it results in turnover. Because without the supports and resources, it's an overwhelming task to ask of any teacher, and it doesn't result in the impact we want for our students. I was spending all of my free time in the evenings and weekends designing my own curriculum from scratch instead of being able to think about how to bring my passion to it and teach in a way that I really valued and wanted to use to connect with my students. Yes, it's about finding that we don't want to move to either extreme. It's about finding the middle grounds to really support teachers staying in. I loved signing by Amber Killam. Oh, yeah. There were parts of it that I enjoyed. But truly, all content areas, day, every day, was ultimately, it became a passion of mine. That would have been nice to have a little bit of a starting point in the midst of also learning classroom management. Yeah. Okay, so the current status across the state of our graduation requirements, the inventory that's publicly available on each of the SUSD's websites, and the range right now varies from 16.5 total credits to 28.5. That's really significant variation in terms of coverage of standards if we bring it back to the content standards. And then again, not only did we see that there was inconsistency in the number of the content specific credits required, but that there was also inconsistencies in terms of the current locally determined proficiency based graduation requirements, attention to transferable skills, content standards, or some combination thereof. So beyond even just the total credit number variation in terms of what those credits represent, it varies even further. And then just pretty much across the board, depending on the implementation of their PVGRs, the proficiency based graduation requirements, some SCs and SDs are having to maintain duplicative systems, so one that's monitoring students' progress toward their proficiency based graduation requirements, and then an additional system that measures and credits the progress that students are making. So again, if we think about just the lift that our supervisory unions and schools are taking on to maintain all of this, it's quite significant. One of the things I have noticed just working in my own system that maybe this could address or you have answers to is that it seems at this point that we don't even have enough required graduation credits to keep kids with something to do in their eleventh and twelfth grade year. And so one of the problems I'm noticing is not necessarily the kids need flexible pathways, but that they've already met their graduation requirements. And so my question has always been like, well, wait, why is it

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: that we don't have the amount of requirements that it would actually take to fill three or four years, especially if we consider that twelfth grade year valuable, which I do, you know, I'm a little alarmed at the amount of kids that are done by the middle of their eleventh grade year. I have an eleventh grader with three free bands. What with what? With three free bands, right?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: That's what I mean.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: It's like, talk to my seniors like, three of my four courses are study moms. I'm like, how do you get to your senior year and three of your four courses are study? So I'm hoping we can address that.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Possible to fail at study

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: college. Right. Yes. That is a concern that we encountered early, both from our own parenting experiences as well as from folks in schools. And it did inform the recommendations that we ultimately made. So thank you for electing that. That's something we've also heard. Okay, so I feel like I've done enough build up. This is my last slide before we start to

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: get really good into that. That's interesting on the previous slide about the electives, that some have none. Zero to 10, that's a wide Zero to 10, what's creating that 16.5 to 28.5, really.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: In some cases, in some cases. Yeah? Environmental scan was really interesting. Of course, it's so foundational.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Those of us who aren't teachers, can

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: you just give us a basic definition of a credit? Is that standard across the state? What does that mean? If

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: you take Geometry, that would be one credit. No

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: matter how many hours a week it is, whether it's It's not consistent. Okay. Ish. Ish, ish. The answer is it's variable.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: It's a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: good answer. Yeah.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: But

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: again, the five credits is because not all systems are treating one year as one credit. So truly, I hope your biggest takeaway here is the level of variation across the state right In almost any direction that we cut it, there is variation in the approach to this. Okay, so we did issue a response, of course, our corrective action response to the US Department of Education based on their findings. And we do want to be clear, and we have communicated this, that compliance with the federal law is not our only concern here. This significant level of variation is resulting in different standards of rigor. And that leaves the door open for different standards of educational quality. So it was intentional that I walked you through those last couple of slides before showing you this one because I wanted you to have the depth of understanding of the level of variation and the implications of that. And so that ultimately complicates Vermont's constitutional guarantee of providing every student with a substantially equal education. The statewide graduation requirements go into effect beginning in 2027. The secretary has already spoken to the fact that we have since already heard just a couple of weeks ago, actually, from US Ed about their ongoing concern with our timeline. And so we did share what's currently in Act 73 around local supervisory unions and districts being required to align their policies and practices to ensure that students are provided with learning opportunities to demonstrate that they've met each of the graduation requirements, regardless of the path that they have determined to demonstrate that proficiency toward the new statewide requirements. And I just wanted to issue reassurance, and we included this in our corrective action, that we remain committed to flexible pathways as a state. And so there are going to be multiple ways that students can demonstrate their proficiency toward these new statewide graduation requirements as well, including what's already in Act 77 around clear tech education, virtual learning, dual enrollment, early college internships, etcetera. And that we're using the new statewide requirements as a way to ensure more consistency in the way that those Not in the way they're being delivered, but in terms of the rigor of those various opportunities. Okay, so we're treating this as a lead domino. If we can get consensus with these new statewide requirements as far as what the finish line is, that gives us the opportunity to more fully achieve on our promise to all of our students. It sets us up for a clear standard of excellence for our graduates throughout the state and ensures that they're set up for success post secondary, whether that's college, career, etcetera, and that they're prepared to be actively engaged citizens. I do want to highlight that this also provides us with opportunities for more meaningful collaboration across SUs and SDs. It's been really fascinating through this process to put teachers, educators, school leaders in conversation with each other to say, well, how were you doing your locally determined proficiency based graduation requirements? And the reactions that we've had a little bit of even today in terms of, oh, they're doing what just down the road was a pretty common theme in our conversations with folks. And the opportunity to benefit from places that are really doing deep standards focused work already, the impact of getting to pair somebody with the neighboring supervisory district or supervisory union and district to benefit from each other is certainly something that we see as advantageous to this as well. So if teachers are able to collaborate more with somebody who has a passion for curriculum design, for example, that's ultimately going to benefit more students than just those that happen to be in your classroom. It also eliminates the challenge that students are currently facing if they move from one SU to another one. And as the secretary mentioned earlier, for students that attend CTE centers, they are currently often encountering challenges with satisfying the requirements from their sending school, depending on what the offerings of the CTE center are and how they're being recognized. That also varies from one sending school to another, depending on their local graduation requirements currently. So how does this solve that? Because I think it's not

[Chair Peter Conlon]: so much the sort of minimum graduation requirements, it's the extras that some districts have requiring for graduation that often is in difficult competition for kids who are going to CTE.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Yes. So CTE is one of the areas that we identified for further inquiry. We continue to meet regularly. I was just there last week with BATTED, their association for career tech education directors. One of the gaps that we've identified that is leading to this is some of it's the language of EQS and rule making that I also have a little later in the presentation will direct you specifically to that. But for example, right now it says that sending schools only have to recognize one credit of CTE learning experience. We know that many of those students spend almost the full day, two years in a row, in some cases. And so that really does put them in a difficult position in terms of satisfying their local requirements. And in some cases, because the funding follows the student to the CTE center, folks have shared with us that the locally determined graduation requirements are designed to discourage students from going to CTE centers because that means that the local funding would follow them there. It's a challenge. Again, when I acknowledge that the statewide graduation requirements alone are not going to increase rigor across the state or establish more consistency, that there is work ahead in the implementation of this that is actually what's going to make the difference, but that they are a really important first step to starting to get some consistency. And that the agency is preparing to lead on that. So this next slide will touch briefly on the academic leadership that we're seeking to provide from the agency. I'm grounding much of this in the work of Doctor. Richard Elmore. You'll see the graphic here. It's kind of a simplification of his work. But essentially, his research and findings show that when you are trying to increase rigor and consistency and improve outcomes overall for students at a systemic level, that it's necessary to attend to three aspects of what he calls the instructional core. So we've already spent quite a bit of time talking about the content standards. That's that corner that talks about content rigor and relevance, what you're teaching to the students. The second component is that teacher, their level of knowledge and skill, and their pedagogical practices, instructional practices is the second key component to the instructional core. Of course, we want to recognize and value the work and treat teachers as experts in terms of how they're doing that. And then the third component is students and how they're being invited to engage in their learning. And ultimately, that determines what tasks we're putting in front of students and what the students are actually being asked to do for their learning. And so what his research shows, and one thing that I've noticed as I've spent quite a bit of time in schools across the state, is that sometimes we are over focusing on one or two of these three components. So again, depending on where, might be more of a focus on the teacher's instructional practices and then the students' engagement strategies. But in the absence of thinking about the grade level content standards, we are lowering the bar of rigor in those situations at times. Or if you think about flipping that where we've got really rigorous content that's grade level aligned using the state standards that have been approved, we've got a teacher that's got really deep knowledge in their content area, but they're perhaps not attending to methods for student engagement, well, now you might have somebody who's pushing a bunch of worksheets, and it's the sage on the stage model that many of us might remember from our own educational experiences. So this simple framework of making sure that we're attending to all three at all times is something that I've begun talking to folks in the field about and certainly training our own staff around, making sure that we're looking at all three all the time.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Yes, I'm not totally sure I'm convinced that that's the perfect analogy. I definitely see the point that you're trying to make, but I feel like in this triangle, teachers should be a little bigger than all of these because if in fact a teacher is a good, high quality teacher with knowledge and skills, then they would be knowing that they couldn't engage students without rigor and relevance anyway. And that would be part of their knowledge and skills that they're bringing to the table. I feel like these other two couldn't really exist in high quality without the third one, if that makes any sense. A good teacher wouldn't engage students without focusing on the content and the relevance. So this is a way for us to look

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: at it systemically, not from an individual teacher. So if a principal is monitoring what's happening across all classrooms in their building, it would be a way for them to look at all three things all the time. And obviously, the teacher as the one delivering all three parts of the instructional core is the biggest factor. We know that outside of what's happening outside of the school building, the teacher is what makes the biggest difference for our students. So you're right that that's the input essentially. That's what's delivering the instructional core are our educators, and that's why they are so important. But in terms of from a systemic level, again, the way that a principal as an instructional leader, a superintendent as the instructional leader of an SU or an SD, a curriculum director supporting multiple schools, multiple grade levels, multiple content areas, we want for them to make sure that any systems, professional learning, instructional resource decisions, etcetera, are attending to all three things at all times. But you're totally correct. The teacher is the one that I delivers guess what I'm

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: saying is that in that system, than micromanaging the content through

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: instructional practices or curriculum resources, which is great, you do need that. But that like how to offer teachers the best kind of professional development is where we should be focusing our Absolutely, that's what's going to make the difference. Absolutely. Totally aligned. There have been questions that have doubled through this process around proficiency based learning because the locally determined graduation requirements right now are titled proficiency based graduation requirements. So we, in our report and here as well, I'm trying to make clear that proficiency based learning, which is currently defined in our education quality standards, EQS, as a system of instruction assessment grading and academic reporting based on students' demonstration of mastery of the knowledge and skills that they're expected to learn according to the standards before they progress to the next level, get to the next grade or receive a diploma is absolutely something we still stand behind as an agency. And we're continuing to work on the AoE supports alongside a focus on the instructional core and coordinated curriculum to make sure that full pre K through 12 experience is meaningful. But the locally defined proficiency based graduation requirements are the part that is changing to the new statewide requirements. And there's just been some confusion throughout this process about which aspect of proficiency based we're talking about at any given moment. And so that's where we're trying to be pretty clear. It's funny. I wrote that down in my notes.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Had efficiency based learning, efficiency based grading, efficiency based graduation, and efficiency based learning is just good teaching.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah, we want to be very clear that we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But it has caused some confusion that the locally determined graduation requirements have that in their title. And so teasing those three things out exactly the way you just did is what's helped us to have some more meaningful conversations around this. Because admittedly and understandably, folks' initial particularly practitioners and teachers' initial reaction to this was like, woah, are you about to change proficiency based learning? That's what we all should be doing. And so we have sought to be really clear that that's not something that we're changing.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: There is some concern that proficiency based grading has led to reduced rigor. Great. We're totally on the same There

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: is a need to tighten that up. It's a little further out in terms of the things that we want to provide guidance on first, but that's absolutely on our list of things that we know we need to support and address. As far as the timeline of events, just this graphic folks have said have been pretty helpful. So starting back in August, like I mentioned, we launched this process. And just a quick note that anything I've got marked on here with that little asterisk is because that date was already predefined in the language of Act 73. And so back in August, we did our initial analysis and research, both of the current status of our SUs and SDs across the state. That's where a couple of slides back where I showed you the variation. That's where our initial research on that was. We also looked outside of the state to see what other statewide graduation requirements were. In some cases, we identified ones that we thought had some really great and exciting ideas. In other cases, we looked at it and said, that's not really aligned to the values of Vermont and our education system. We then moved into phase two in October and November and engaged in really robust stakeholder engagement to start to socialize some of the modeling that we were doing. We specifically used two different examples, models, of what statewide graduation requirements would be, the design of those, we tried to be very clear that we actually did not intend to recommend either of those two models, but they were intentionally designed to have folks notice what some of the advantages or disadvantages of two distinct approaches to this might be because we found that the feedback was more meaningful. One of them had a really high level or high number of requirements and was more aligned to the entrance requirements of institutions of higher education. And folks pretty quickly identified that actually doesn't meet the aspirations of all of our students. It wouldn't be appropriate to take an approach like that. But here are some aspects of it that feel important that we might still want to include or require of all students. So after that, as an example of just the way we approached it, we culminated with a survey. And I'll show you in a couple more slides down the road what the feedback we received from that survey was. And then we went through thorough analysis of the feedback we received in the survey, the stakeholder engagement, comments like those that you all have already been lifting in this conversation already, and ultimately made our recommendations and submitted our report at the December. As I shared, that was the required date for submission. So at this point, as the chair teed us up for at the very beginning, it sits in the hands of our state board. So they have, according to Act 73, until 07/01/2027 to finalize their decision about the statewide requirements. I saw a couple of eyebrows go up. These do go into effect in the 2027 for entering ninth graders. And then over the course of that class's high school experience, they would become the graduating class of 2031, and they would be the first class held to these new statewide requirements. So we included in our recommendations and our report back in December a recommendation that the board not use the entire runway that they've been provided with according to the dates in Act 73, because we know that that would make it quite challenging in the first year of implementation. Schools are typically designing their budgets, their master schedules, their staffing decisions, their course offerings, etcetera, by January of the preceding year for the upcoming school year. And so we recommended that they make their decision by the end of this calendar year in order for schools to have enough opportunity to prepare for that first year of implementation. I was going to ask if 07/01/2027 was too aggressive, and what you're saying is that it really shouldn't even be more aggressive than that. In order to go into effect in 2027. And I don't think we should back off of that any further because of what the secretary has shared around the US ed findings and the need to address the inconsistencies of rigor across the state pretty urgently here because of their finding. Yeah.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: And if we change that 07/01/2027 to a new date, do you have a recommendation for what that date could be? What makes much more sense?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: To a

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: new date, meaning sooner? Yes?

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Like 2026.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Yeah, I mean, we recommended that they make their decision by the end of this calendar year. So 12/31/2026 is what we recommended in order for Did

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: you get feedback from them?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: At this month's State Board of Education meeting, we signaled the concern around the timeline and they understand the sense of urgency. They have established a committee that will be focusing on this in earnest. And additionally, and I think you're going to touch on this later, we've established some other focus groups that we know will be important, including getting perspective from students over the next couple of months to further inform their decision making. Homing in more closely on this phase three of our process around the reporting and recommendations, as I shared, we spent time reviewing and synthesizing both the research that we did in phase one by looking at what's currently happening across the state as well as what's happening in other states with their statewide requirements, as well as the feedback that we've gotten from stakeholder engagement to ultimately inform various policy options that we weighed and draft our comprehensive report that included our recommendations. So the report itself includes the executive summary, our research findings, and stakeholder feedback trends. And then it includes specific graduation requirement recommendations and rationale for our recommendations. And lastly, it includes those areas of further inquiry, as we just mentioned, and our suggested work plan for additional decision making support that we'll be providing to the state board since we're coming to you in late February. Some of those additional focus groups and stakeholder engagement initiatives that we feel are going to be important for the decision making process have already launched and are underway. So the work continues. A text heavy slide. My apologies. I pulled from the report for each of the recommendations. So I'll walk us through this and try to synthesize where possible. There was a question earlier about the use of the term credit. This has been an area that ultimately it's an early decision we needed to make in terms of our recommendations is the way that we were going to measure what the students were going to be expected satisfy in order to graduate. And so this is another example of us trying to hold to best practices that are already in place. So we recommended quantifying the requirements as credits, in part because that is a familiar term to students, families, educators, that makes it easier for everyone to understand the progress that students are making towards satisfying the requirements. However, we know that there are some educators, myself included, that have concerns around the term credit because it originated from the Carnegie unit definition of it, which ties receiving a credit to the number of minutes of seat time by content area. However, in the state of Vermont, we had already moved away from that in what's already included in EQS, or education quality standards, under the current section on local graduation requirements. So that's 2120.8, if you all really want to do your homework. But it states that schools may or may not use credits in the current locally determined process for the purpose of demonstrating that a student has met the graduation requirements. When used, credits must specify the proficiencies demonstrated in order to attain the credit and should not be based on seat time or time spent learning. So we are aligning to that approach. Of course, we're not recommending that it be locally determined, but that approach and not tying the seat time minutes to receiving a unit as a credit is something that we are maintaining. So we ultimately recommended defining one credit as a set of essential enduring skills and knowledge in a content area based on the typical coverage of standards included in a year long course or equivalent learning experience. So it does still loosely map onto what typically gets covered in one year of learning, again, with the intention of it being accessible and understandable to students and families. But we're still acknowledging, for example, an algebra one credit in math would have a set of standards that are expected to be covered. That's another math teacher in the room. In order for the student to be able to show proficiency in the standards covered in Algebra I, one student may be able to demonstrate that more quickly, while another may need more support or time, but they both would receive one credit for the Algebra I learning experience. For example, we learned that there were some high schools where, for students who maybe had larger learning gaps, they provided Algebra I A over the course of an entire year and then Algebra I B over the course of a second year. And they awarded you're with me two two two math credits. And that was based on seat time, two years spent in math courses. However, the learning that was covered over two years' worth of time was, in fact, only one algebra one set of standards. So I offer that concrete example to try to really illuminate what some of the challenges are and what we mean in our recommendation of the use of credit to mean one unit of learning for a set of standards.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: But we come into conflict with something like that, just in terms of somebody wanting to graduate four years. Yeah. If we're only awarding one credit for what is a two year process?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: So what you're touching on is that many of our students are entering our high schools with significant learning gaps. And that's why we've continued to position the statewide graduation requirements not isolation as a high school decision, but as a full prepay through 'twelve framework. So if we know that this is the finish line, that means we need to be intervening much harder and more strategically, much sooner for our students. We acknowledge that right now in the implementation of this, that that's going to be challenging in 2027 when this goes into effect. And that did inform some of when I get to our total number of credit recommendation, you'll see that we tried to hit the sweet spot of there being enough flexibility in there so that students with learning gaps do have the flexibility in their schedules of time for additional remedial learning when needed and that we have a way of incentivizing students who might move through things more quickly to be recognized for the additional learning beyond the minimum graduation requirements they might do. But ultimately, the total number of credits that we recommended ensured that students were at least scheduled through junior year and that that allowed for the right balance of flexibility. And the flexibility with the intention of also providing deeper learning opportunities. From a student that wants to go into engineering, I may take five math courses and really truck through them and be taking AP statistics. So we needed some flexibility in there to get your reaction. I do want to

[Chair Peter Conlon]: be cognizant of the time and that we're only on slide 13 of 30. They're pretty dense slides.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: They are. Let me get

[Chair Peter Conlon]: some- But they're all filled with great information.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Will let you some time going back to these. But the last thing that I want to highlight on this slide is that we recognize this shift toward using credit as the measure of unit would require some messaging. But right now, what many of our SUs and SDs are doing and using the term proficiencies as their graduation requirements means so many different things in each of our SEs and SDs that ultimately we felt that the change management of moving to calling it credits would be an easier change management system than to try to get everybody to mean the same thing when they use the term proficiencies. Because right now, it's Pandora's box. It just opened up, and everybody's using it to mean so many different things. So this is a way of, yes, we need to make sure it's clear that we don't mean seat time, but we think that the benefits of it being easily understood by all stakeholders, and secondly, the challenge of the term proficiencies having so many meetings across the state right now would have created a more significant barrier.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Okay. I feel like this is one of the places that proficiency based learning is crashing into proficiency based ratings. And that makes it really confusing because like how many proficiencies does it 100% that a student needs to be proficient on to earn that credit? And furthermore, because of just the way that school exists, classes do have a first date and they have a last date and then the teacher is done teaching that class. So one student takes two years to take a class and another student had. So, you know, then it becomes part of sort of collective bargaining agreements and what constitutes a class and how many classes is the teacher teaching if they're still teaching half of the students this class, have been assigned five new classes. Now they actually have six classes. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? And so all those things kind of become a mess there. And those are the things that we need to figure out in this determination of what is a credit, because you can't really also tell a teacher, you're teaching these five new classes, but you have 30 kids that didn't get their algebra credits, so you

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: need to find time in

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: your day to get them to finish their algebra credit too. Does that make sense?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Yes. You're describing a dynamic learning process, teaching approach in a very fixed and structured way. So that's what we need to figure out. Do you have a solution?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Guess we won't

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: do that big solution. This has been the problem all the while. And this is why we need to figure out what is the difference between proficiency based learning and proficiency based reading and what are the standards?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: What is actually expected? Clarity of expectation. Okay, so what you see now, this is the big reveal, should have done a drum roll. But this is ultimately what we recommended in our state report in terms of the total number of credits and then broken down by content area. And then beyond that, you'll see that for certain content areas, and this was mirrored both in terms of the research that we did as well as stakeholder engagement processes, that there are certain topics within each content area that folks felt was worth naming more discreetly. So for example, in math, we've got algebra one, one credit of algebra one, one credit of geometry, one credit of statistics or data analysis. That's big change.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: That's a big change. It's a big change that you don't have algebra two up there, which just creates the bottleneck of these kids can go to college and these kids can't. It's always been that way. It would be great to see it go in

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: a different direction. That's right. I'm so grateful. It's like you're a plant later in the room because there's a shift happening across the country in terms of, as there should be, in terms of calculus is not necessarily the ultimate goal for mathematics for all students. And it's increasingly important for students to have proficiency in statistics and that of science in today's society. So one of the I'll show you now. Let me click ahead. Or you

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: can ask a question before you So click that these credits would still apply to any student that's choosing work based learning as well. They still need a civics credit. That's correct. Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. Just a follow-up to Kate. Kate, are you saying

[Chair Peter Conlon]: that Algebra two should be here?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No. Oh, okay. Thank you. Yeah, hated that too. Oops, can I say that one more?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: I remember my fusion's still darker for me. You

[Unidentified Committee Member]: hated me. You. I wanted you to love it. I did.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Would still be serious, right?

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: If Altra two is offered in your junior year, and in your junior year, you choose to go to the tech center, there is no way the tech center is gonna provide you Algebra two. They're gonna provide you some math, but they're not gonna provide you algebra two. It's not gonna be substantially equal or whatever it is that we use for language. And it never was. So let's make the change and make it for everybody.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's fifty years. I have

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: to ask as an ELA teacher too, are you considering oral communications public speaking as something that's embedded in all of these credits and not a requirement of ELA? Maybe this isn't, again, comes back to the locally. My system requires public speaking, which I think is super important, but is not in here. So that

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: would just be embedded in all the other courses. And so what you're starting to hit upon is that there's additional work within each of these that we need to do as a next step of identifying which standards need to be covered within which credits. And so within the ELA credits, we know that the Common Core standards around communication, both in terms of speaking and writing, are already included in the Common Core State Standards. And so we, through the framework within these of what credit coverage we're asking for, would be providing that guidance. Now, how you deliver it in terms of your specific course offerings would be fine as long as you can demonstrate within the for credit requirement that you are covering appropriately the standards that through input with other measures mapped out to this. Now, we wanted to get an initial reaction from the state board, bless you, as far as their level of alignment loosely to what we recommended before moving full steam ahead with the mapping of those state standards onto the credit recommendations that we've made. Because if they're significantly misaligned with us, we don't want to have moved forward too quickly. But that is one of the next steps that's on the horizon for us. So I am attending to time. And so I just want to quickly, on the next slide, highlight for you the breadth and depth of stakeholder engagement that we did through the months of October and November. You'll see that we met with teachers of the year. We met with the special education advisory panel. We specifically met with music educators at their annual conference. VPA, we partnered with regularly CTE school counselors and coordinators. We really tried in our approach to get ourselves invited into spaces where folks were already meeting. So rather than create a set of contrived meeting times that folks would have to make additional time in their calendars to attend, We took the approach of saying, hey, this is happening. We're giving you monthly updates as we share with the state board monthly about our progress. If you have any meetings coming up, we would love to come join you and present to you so that we can meet you on your home turf, tell you where we are with this, and get your input. And so, yeah, you'll see that reflected, that series of engagements reflected on that slide. And then it culminated with a survey. And the approach in the survey differed from the stakeholder engagement approach that I described briefly a moment of having those two example models. In the survey, we actually asked folks to build their own model of graduation requirements. What's your dog? Can you come back? Sure. Do you have a white suit, Ruth?

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Oh, I'm troubled.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Okay, so getting itself back on the track here. The approach we took for this survey was a build your own graduation requirements model. So we didn't ask folks in the survey to vote, do you want model A or model B? Tell us why. We built the survey in a way that they could enter each content area and then the number of credits that they thought should be required for it. And then that ultimately built out a composite recommendation from each individual survey respondent, which gave us some really interesting data. We also asked them about considerations in terms of the approach to graduation requirements. The conversation around flexible skills being a separate set of requirement or already embedded in the content requirements themselves was another topic. And then finally, we had some flexible pathways questions as well. We had almost 400 folks who completed the survey, it was open for less than I think it was ten days. We extended it by a couple of days just to get a few more respondents at people's request. We were very pleased not only in the total number of respondents, but also in the various stakeholder groups that it represented. Although one stakeholder group that we did not get many responses from were students. And so we planned proactively for additional student focus groups that are already preparing for and have partnered with Up For Learning to do partner engagement with students. And specifically within that, we have asked them to do focus groups with CTE students because we know that their experience, as we've listed up previously, is one that we need to through this process. So ultimately, with the build your own graduation requirements approach in the survey, this is what over 70% of people included. So we just used 70% or more as the cutoff. And everything you see included here was included in 70% or more of the build your own models. Is that making sense? I don't feel like I described that very clearly. Yeah, I'm getting nods. So 70% or more of people included math at a total of three credits, ELA with four credits. And then in total for these composite models, the Build Your Own survey respondents had a total of 24 credits on average is what their recommendation was. So you only changed that

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: by There you go. One now and the one elective.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Okay. So the things that we were really pleased at the level of consensus. First of all, I think that's a big win here. As far as our recommendations to the state board, we did increase math to be a total of four credits. In our research about what other states are doing, increasingly, is the approach that we give math parity with ELA. And again, that's not with the ultimate goal of all students getting through pre calculus or calc. It's with this different approach that recognizes the need for statistics and data science and other electives based on their college or career pathway. The other thing that we changed was the total number of electives on average. More than 70% of folks had said four elective credits. We went with three. And that changed our total number of credits different than what the average of the survey respondents of 24. Our recommendation was 22.5, so slightly lower. Again, that's with the intention of this being the minimum requirements of all students and knowing that we wanted to build in flexibility that allows for students who have learning gaps to get those addressed and for students, all students, to be able to go deeper in their areas of interest, including CTE, if that's one of them. Now, CTE learning should be recognized as satisfying many of these. CTE is not in addition to this set of requirements. So as you mentioned, there's math learning that happens at CTE centers. It should be appropriately recognized and counted toward the math credit requirement. And we included that in our report as well. One other change, or maybe I'll call your attention to some hot topics within this recommendation. One thing that's quite different from what many places are doing is this increase in PE and health. Specifically, a full credit of health is different than what most places are currently doing. Many schools, Supervisory Union school districts currently require half a credit of health. It's often a freshman or sophomore year semester long course. And we actually got the idea from a CTE school counselor who said student needs in terms of mental health, social emotional health, physical health, but just overall health and awareness of themselves are increasing, And therefore, increase in the total number of health course credits and therefore more space to cover the health standards would benefit our students in terms of achieving our portrait of graduate or learner.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Yeah. I'm wondering on that one and a half physical education part, I love the fact that, oh, it's gone up. Some schools allow you to meet that if you play a sport, and some schools don't. I'm wondering, do you have a recommendation?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: It's something that we're looking at. Again, we need to map the the shape standards or the health, the physical education standards. We need to map what we want to have covered within that. And then ultimately And that's going to come from No, state board we would be doing that work in partnership with folks in the field to map the standards coverage. Again, this is meant to be a framework for standards coverage. And so the next steps of actually identifying which standards map onto the total number of credits is the next step in this process. So for physical health, we would need to do that with the SHAPE standards and then determine if after school sports is essentially a flexible pathway, of like work based learning could satisfy other things. If it satisfies the standards, then it should be appropriately recognized.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I might push us ahead to slide 21,

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: which

[Chair Peter Conlon]: a lot of this speaks to.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: It's fascinating. But it should.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Well, this speaks to that, that those suggested requirements are increases in the vast majority Yes. Of our And so then, I hear the words unfunded, maybe they come up a lot. And increase, I think increasing standards is great. I think just hearing from the teachers that they will hear about the discrepancies that are there and kids with nothing to do in twelfth grade, they're all really important. But this sounds like this means hiring more people.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: In some cases, it may mean changes to staffing. But given that our overall recommendation is not a total of more credits, if you remember the 16.5 to 28.5 range, our recommendation is 22.5, which sits pretty squarely in the middle, it wouldn't necessarily be a change in total number of staffing. But you're correct that it may mean some shifts in which staff or which content areas.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: So specifically, the art increase,

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: we recommended 1.5 credits of art. There's only one other state that requires more than one credit. It happens to be Utah. That's a fact I didn't think I'd ever know, but now I do for this job. And we just felt like that was really aligned with Vermont values in terms of thinking about having a really well rounded graduate. It also allows for both the coverage of performing arts standards as well as fine arts standards. There's more than one set of standards for the arts, and that allows for a pretty well rounded but still the flexibility of a student if they took four years of band, for example, to be able to satisfy it. We already explored the math standards, the increase in the health standards we just talked about briefly would be a slight increase in the total number. You're right. There would be some staffing shifts that may be required from that as an example. Financial literacy was overwhelmingly popular to be a requirement as a standalone requirement. And then lastly, world language was really a hotly debated topic. We know that staffing world language teachers is quite challenging in some parts of the state. Vermont, we learned, was only one of 12 states with neither a world language requirement or a requirement that language courses at least be made available to students. That's not even a requirement here. But we've got EQS, education quality standards, that requires that students engage in learning around global citizenships, which includes world languages. And what you'll see on the next slide as well when we explore the entrance requirements to institutes of higher education, world language is quite commonly required. And so ultimately, in our recommendation, we included one credit of world language. We felt like that was a way, again, for a well rounded educational experience to make sure all students got exposure to it. And for a way that if students got to their senior year and maybe had never been thinking about going on to an institute of higher education, if in their senior year all of a sudden they thought, maybe they do want to, that they wouldn't find themselves in a position where they couldn't satisfy the entrance requirements because they would have two credits of world languages in order to make that pivot in their next steps and their decisions around it. And so, yeah, that was one of the more fraught recommendations that we've made. It continues to bubble as an area of interest. But ultimately, I feel pretty good about the rationale for why we made the recommendation that we did. Transferable skills is another hotly debated areas of this. Ultimately, our recommendation is not that we have a separate set of graduation requirements that are specific to transferable skills. We believe that transferable skills should be embedded within all content. That was overwhelmingly included in the stakeholder feedback. And there's research that supports this approach. The shifts in the Common Core standards themselves already provide deeper conceptualization of content knowledge and skills when the standards are taught at the appropriate level of rigor. And so this need to create a separate system to monitor and measure students' proficiency in transferable skills actually becomes redundant and a further stress on the system in our opinion. So we recommended embedding them. This is a little more about transferable skills. Certainly would encourage you to explore it. But I do want to, again, just kind of keeping interest on time here, get a moment to talk about future readiness and our recommendations. We want to make sure that our recommendations are preparing Vermont graduates for a future where we know that artificial intelligence, AI, is going to be a more common tool. And so we are really strongly recommending that the state board reinforce the central role of deep disciplinary content knowledge, those content standards, content knowledge and skills within the student standards. Obviously, generative AI is still pretty new, but early research and findings around it show that when you have an AI user who is lacking robust existing knowledge of the world and content standards, that they're reduced to passively accepting whatever the AI outputs are. They're not engaging at the same level of critical thinking to evaluate whether the output from the AI is accurate or skewed or biased. And so they end up, unfortunately, using technology and treating it more as like an oracle instead of treating AI capabilities as a collaborative thinking partner. And there's actually already a term for this phenomenon called knowledge asymmetry. And so ultimately, we feel like our recommendations being anchored to content areas with the appropriate level of coverage for all students in each of those content areas is going to give students a strong foundation to be able to use AI as a powerful tool that extends their expertise instead of creating a situation where those without the foundational knowledge rely on AI as a crutch and end up avoiding the hard work that's necessary to build true understanding. We did, as an agency, just release AI guidance to the field around that. And it's been well received, not just within the state. We engaged with a lot of stakeholder input for that as well, but also outside of the state, specifically for the inclusion around mental health considerations. Some of you may have seen in the news some situations where students have used AI as a therapist in concerning ways, scary ways. And so we included some of that in our recommendations as well, sorry, in that guidance. And so, yeah, just again continuing to emphasize the need for us to really ensure that students through the full pre K through 12 system are getting the appropriate level of exposure to core content and disciplinary expertise in order to be future ready. Career and tech, we've covered much of this throughout our conversation today. This is where I've got the appropriate section of our rulemaking, 2,383.5, that we recommend be adjusted. Go ahead.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Can I ask a question from the previous Oh, sure? Just they get it. It's a future ready kind of graduate. Wondering if you have worked with Advance Vermont at all and they graduate with a plan? Yeah,

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: they just started putting me in their focus groups as well. We actually have been talking about the ability for their work. I'm sorry, I don't know if it's a focus group. It's like a working group. I've been talking with them about whether or not there could be a future capability of using AI to help guide through what they've proposed. But yeah, we're in regular communication. Yeah. Okay, key points here I would say is what I've already hit upon, that CTE learning should not be in addition to the graduation requirements, but should be recognized appropriately as satisfying those. And again, we're recognizing that there would need to be some state board changes. Again, because the state board was our primary recipient of the report, we wanted to make very clear to them and direct them in the right places where there might need to be some shifts back. And just to name that this is another area where local decision making in terms of a sending school deciding to recognize CTE learning in one way and a different sending school deciding to not recognize that same learning toward their graduation requirements creates those inconsistencies and inequities in our system. And so that needs to be done at the state level as well, according to our recommendation. Are you taking sort of

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: the same approach with work based learning? Like if a kid gets into work based learning, then it must satisfy a math credit if they're using a cash register or a I

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: don't know. I've heard some really tenuous examples of kids getting credits for work based learning. And so I'm wondering if that is going to be the same. Yeah. So separate from CTE, work based learning that happens at our high schools, again, would need to demonstrate the standards that it is satisfying in order to count toward the credit requirements. The three elective credits that we included, course, that could be something that work based learning that doesn't satisfy certain standards can count toward. Alternatively, we know, for example, with an IB program, theory of knowledge is a required course for that. And so places that are offering that, we did include in our recommendation that up to one credit of the three elected credits that you couldn't otherwise map onto a content focused credit could count toward the elective credit. So for anywhere that has a local requirement like that, that's really an important part of their school community and identity. We built in a way for them to be able to maintain those experiences and offerings and still have them be recognized. So that's a little bit of a detour from your work based learning question, but it jogged my thinking about it.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: No, but it kind of relates to it. And so then like in the back of the original sort of way, posed the question is, it would be the flexible pathways teacher that would be taking a good hard look at each work based learning experience and determining and somehow assessing. They would

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: need to partner with the content. I mean, they were trying to say there's a math standard, would need to meet with that teacher to ensure that it was appropriately demonstrating proficiency of the standards that would count for credit. Yeah, that's right. Not all of our schools have a flexible pathways teacher, so the way they do that might look differently, but it would still need to be in consultation with a licensed teacher for that kind of period. Okay, and then this is an example of a working group that we've already launched since submitting the recommendations. We want to make sure that all students have access to the Vermont diploma. So when we think about students with additional barriers, maybe they're a multilingual learner, newcomer at the high school level, or a student with a disability with an IEP and some more significant limitations in terms of their ability to access the general education learning, we have this working group that's focused on accessibility for the graduation requirements that we're recommending. So that's something that we already have underway. We want to make sure that we're being proactive in establishing a system of modified graduation requirements and appropriate documentation where that might be applicable. Student feedback, I mentioned already that we've got this underway in the next three to four months. We've already begun drafting the focus group questions. We've already sent out communication to schools, asking them to help us identify some host sites for it. We're really excited to get student input, and it's on my to do list upcoming here to create a version of the report with Mark's accessible The report, just like this presentation, is written with educators and legislators in mind. And so we want to make an accessible version of it that's a more student friendly language in order for them to be well informed when they do their engagement in this. And then, yeah, as I mentioned, we've got additional areas of inquiry that we highlighted to the state board and have tried to be very clear that we are positioning ourselves to support them in their decision making process, specifically around CTE, accessibility for all students, the instructional core and coordinated curricular decisions, the mapping of the standards, the implications before ninth grade in needing to strengthen that whole pre K through 12 system. And then additionally, the seals and endorsement that would incentivize and recognize students who go above and beyond the minimum requirements of the statewide graduation requirements. So I use that. And future engineering student as an example, or a student like myself who had a real passion for world languages and took French, Latin, German, and Spanish over the course of my career to be recognized for that interest area, kind of the way that college degrees recognize a major or a minor that a student would take, that this would be a way to award an endorsement for CTE learning or for college readiness. That's an area that we're exploring further to offer and speaks to what you lifted up around the senior year experience as well as around students who have a lot of study halls in their final years if they've already satisfied some of the requirements.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: How many states are doing that?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Just Many of them already do. The breadth of what they offer or ask that their high schools offer varies quite a bit.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: And that would include our neighboring states, New England states?

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Some of them. And so like Seal of Biliteracy is one that's somewhat well known. There's seals that recognize civics learning. One thing that I would call your attention to in our report that we submitted is one of the appendices, I think it's Appendix D, we mapped out four example student profiles. One of them is a student who's a more traditional college bound student, and it walks through their freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year, the courses and learning experiences they engage in and how it maps on to what our recommendations for the requirements are. We similarly did that for a student that had some significant learning gaps to show the example of algebra one A and B, the remedial courses not counting toward it if they weren't at high school grade level state standards. We

[Unidentified Committee Member]: had

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: a CTE student. And then lastly, we had a student who was engaging in more flexible pathways. And that student happened to be one that had an interest in civics. So it was a good example of what the student experience might look like on just four different example students of how they would satisfy these recommendations for the statewide requirements. And then ultimately, as we've already shared, we recommend that they make their decision by the 2026 because of the implications in our schools and our supervisory unions. So you all have sprinkled a lot of questions throughout. I appreciate your level of engagement. But if there's any that I didn't touch on or that have occurred to you at this point, it looks like we do have a little bit more time. So it seems like

[Chair Peter Conlon]: this is probably a long overdue correction to a statewide system that has gotten a little boozy in terms of what counts as credits towards graduation. But I sort of bring up the idea of working as a cashier and getting fast credit for that. I just sort of wonder how many It sounds like one thing that may happen, I'm not saying it's just a bad thing at all, is that some flexible pathways may not be so

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: And that's one

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: of the US ed findings. It wasn't just about inconsistency of rigor of our graduation requirements. It was also about inconsistency of rigor of our flexible pathways.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: And then I think about various, I call them alternative education programs I've seen for students who really just don't have any success in the classroom for whatever reason. I would say many of those kids leave those programs with a diploma, but I'm not sure I've seen them leave with the level of credit that is being asked for here. And so, this may or may not have an impact on graduation rates as we make it essentially more difficult to graduate for a certain population of students. And again, know whether this is good or bad, But that's just sort of a thought that it's purchasing.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Our current graduation rates are quite difficult for us to be able, we know we're not able to compare apples to apples because of what we've looked at in this presentation. The variety of 16.5 to 28.5 credits, by its very nature, means that we're comparing apples to bananas, as my colleagues said a couple of days ago in a different testimony. And interestingly, the systems with the supervisory unions with higher number of credits are not necessarily the ones with lower graduation rates. That in some cases, they have done some really important work around holding the line in terms of the level of rigor and their systems of supporting students toward it. And students are rising to that bar at equivalent rates of success in terms of graduation. And so there's not necessarily a correlation the way that you would expect it to be. Yes, when this goes into effect for the first graduating class of 2031, we likely are going to see some kind of shift in graduation rate. Hard to know what it might be yet one way or another. And we've got some runway. And really, we've got the upcoming year where we've already got work underway at the agency level to provide and create the infrastructure and continue to get input from the field. And then we've also got four years of implementation. It's going to be important to us at the end of that first freshman year, those entering ninth graders, to do a pull up on what are the variety of courses and learning experiences that are being offered to them across the state. Are there places that are doing it better in implementation? And we could scale what they're doing to other parts of the state. So each year, we'll continue to monitor the implementation and provide support so that by the time that first graduating class hits 2031, as I said, we know kids are currently entering with significant learning gaps in some cases. We're going to need to really be strategic about our support and making sure our schools are able to offer the learning opportunities to close those gaps appropriately.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I wanted to just touch base on that. There's like three things that are jumping out at me. I, first of all, want to say I so appreciate the educators in the room. And so thank you to my colleagues for all the really important questions. But sometimes it's helpful to me not to be an educator and to be having a different perspective about it. So three things that have jumped out to me, the last thing you just mentioned, was a big concern for me to make sure we're asking you for some significant change here, and it's going to take time. And we're talking about graduation standards and our new graduation requirements, but we all know that children enter education at a very young age. And we want to make sure that they're prepared when they're starting to achieve those credits. So I'd love to hear, not today, but what the next steps are going to be to help shore up that process. So that's one of the things that jumps out at me. You've mentioned a bunch of times about the state board needing to ramp this up. And I'm very mindful of making sure that the state board has the resources they need to do the work that we are requiring of them. So I'm just laying that out there, making sure that we need to do this quickly. There's no question about that we're hearing this, but I want to make sure that they are able, staffed and able to handle that. Then, I guess the last thing I just wanted to mention was you've brought CTE into this many times, and I'm very grateful to hear that. And I want to continue to focus on this is my personal perspective of the way we're applying education to all of our children in the state. CTE should be available. CTE programming should be available to every child in our systems. And I want to make sure that we're making that link into the education of our kids, not just training of our kids. And so I welcome that, and I look forward to having more conversation about regional high schools in this state and how we integrate CTE into every program that we have, every school that we have in the state. So those are just three layman's observations.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: If I can quickly respond to the first around the need to strengthen pre K through 12, right? As the secretary mentioned earlier, we are gearing up for issuing clearer expectations around coordinated curriculum, the instructional practices. Again, those of you who are already doing it well, you'll be like, yep, already doing that. But really making clear to folks in schools what the expectations around that are around evidence based instructional practices and high quality instructional materials. Because we know that in some cases, teachers do not have access to the materials and resources that they need and would benefit from. So that's already in the works and separate from the graduation requirements, an area that we knew we needed to strengthen and provide clear guidance around. And then the other thing that I would say around some of the learning gaps is that in September, we published our legislative report around the current state of special education. But really, it was a focus on Act 173, which is not just about special education. It's about having really strong, what we call tier one instruction. That's the first time instruction, that if students are not getting high quality first time instruction, that you now have a downstream problem. And you're never going to get your way out of it because you're constantly playing catch up trying to fill these gaps that are actually a result of needing to strengthen the general education first type instruction for all learners. Certainly, with disabilities and IEPs are going the nature of needing an individualized education plan means that they specialized instruction to access that general education learning. But the first step is them having access to the general education learning, and it's presumptive on that being high quality. And so Act 173 is a big focus of ours. One of our major findings in that report was that it is the right legislation and that it's been an implementation challenge. It was signed in 2017, and we were just ramping up for, by we, mean the agency and schools for stronger implementation of that, and the pandemic happened. So there's some things that were outside of our control around it, but we're refocusing on that. And, again, with a real keen focus on the high quality first time instruction, what we call tier one. And some of that is a scheduling thing. Sometimes it's even just logistics. If students have gaps, they shouldn't be getting pulled out for services to address those gaps from the first time instruction. Everything needs to be double dosed. So a student with a gap in Algebra one, for example, should be in math more than once during the day in order to fill those gaps. I'll name less so at the high school level, but in my pre K to eight visits so far, I'm seeing quite a few places that are using instructional materials that are meant for intervention, meaning remediation to fill gaps, used as first time instruction. And when I talk to educators about it, they say, well, that's the level that the students are at right now. That's never going to address the problem. In fact, it's going to continue to widen the gap that the students have. They must have access to the grade level first time instruction and additional access to the gaps that they have. And that's what I mean when I say the instructional materials thing and the expectations that the agency is providing around that does need to be strengthened. I'm seeing folks who are using the low grade level materials as their first time instruction. It's not going to work.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: I think this goes into our bigger debate here. I think that's where scale becomes a real challenge if you are a small high school or a small school, whatever it happens to be, you don't have the resources to provide that double dose because you are working with a small staff.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Yes, there certainly are more options for how you address it. And I think that, particularly for newer teachers, I'm not seeing the level of familiarity and fluency with the standards on grade level. So part of the solution here, yes, is additional time and therefore staffing and creative scheduling, etcetera. And a way that you can address learning gaps that students have is by making sure that the teachers that they have really understand the progression of standards. So for example, I taught third grade. I had students that would come in and offer to my class often at a kindergarten level. And I gave the example earlier, how I spent my first summer after my first year of teaching. Once I understood, for example, with math, understanding that's necessary for later, more difficult math work, I actually could accelerate closing those gaps more quickly. And that's because I was a teacher that, after I had done more of my homework on my standards, I knew the progression deeply enough that I could remediate it much more effectively. So yes, it's difficult if you're at a smaller scale. And I don't mean to make it sound like resources is the only solution, but resources in terms of staffing and scheduling. Professional learning that was already listed earlier by this committee is really, really important with a real keen eye on the standards, the content standards themselves. So I gave this example earlier this week. One to one correspondence of the kindergarten standard in mathematics. Students need to know that if they have five objects, that they, one, touch one object, two, touch the next object, a different object, three, touch the third object, etcetera, and that I don't go back and touch another object that I've already done more than once. It's one to one correspondence. The student doesn't have that conceptual understanding by third grade doing multi digit addition and subtraction. But once you get that conceptual understanding solidified, they can really quickly accelerate all the way up to third grade addition and subtraction. So that progression of standards and really knowing your stuff as a teacher is really important.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Thank you very much for taking an extended amount of time. We'd love to just walk us this. Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Appreciate your questions. Also appreciate the questions that were asked today as well. Right, guess maybe if

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: I get that chart of the credits and whatever be shared out with schools. The chart with The recommendations for credits. The one

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: that put our report and it's public, and we've this one? No? No? Yeah. Yellow.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: Something that looked like that.

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: Yes. That was in our report and it's public facing and we've pushed it out through weekly field memos and superintendents update.

[Rep. Kate McCann, Member]: So we've also seen that. Oh yes. Yep.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: But just a reminder, are all recommendations to the state. But

[Dr. Erin Davis, Chief Academic Officer (Agency of Education)]: we've already heard from folks that it's been helpful for them thinking ahead. Know, class size minimums is something they're already attending to. The agency similarly issued some early recommendations and guidance on that. But we're hearing from the field that there's this I hope this is true for everybody that there's a sentiment that the agency is being more proactive in providing guidance that has helpful to prepare for some of these changes that are on the horizon. But yeah, this is absolutely already out there.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Great, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

[Chair Peter Conlon]: Why don't we return here at 11:30? We'll talk for half an hour, and we'll go break for lunch. And then this afternoon, see we have basically a large gap time. I'm not sure, we won't spend all that time just talking about Act 73. I think we might spend some of that time watching what is currently occurring in house commerce so that we have an understanding of the discussion going on about