Only one other state calls its education body an agency: Texas. Almost no state changes how it picks its education chief. Vermont did both at once, in a 2012 law whose text gives no reason why. Reform, or experiment? Part 3 of 4.
Part 3 of 4, a series on Vermont's schools statewide. Only one other state calls its education body an agency, and only five others have changed how they pick their education chief in about twenty years. Vermont did both at once, in a 2012 law whose text sets out no findings and no rationale. It abolished the Department of Education and its board-hired commissioner; in their place came an Agency of Education, led by a secretary who serves at the pleasure of the governor. The change took force in January 2013 — the year Vermont's scores peaked and began to fall, though nothing in the data makes the one the cause of the other. The old era was not more stable; the tenure numbers refuse that story. What changed is the kind of instability: who leaves, why, and what a change of governor can now set off. Whether that was reform or experiment is a question Vermont has begun asking itself. Last year it moved two of the governor's ten seats on the State Board to the Legislature.
The first story in this series laid out a decade of falling measures beside a graduation rate that barely moved. The second reported how Vermont rebuilt its diploma and changed its test three times. This one reports the third change — who steers — and it came first: enacted in 2012, in force on the first day of 2013, the year Vermont's scores peaked and began to fall.
For decades, Vermont's education chief was a commissioner hired by the citizen State Board of Education — a board built for insulation, its members serving staggered six-year terms. Act 98 of 2012 abolished that post. In its place came an Agency of Education led by a secretary the governor appoints — a cabinet member serving "at the pleasure of the governor." The word "agency" is doing less work than it looks. Vermont law asks, "for the purpose of clarity and uniformity," that agencies be headed by secretaries and departments by commissioners (3 V.S.A. § 213(b)), and it defines the governor's cabinet as "the Secretaries of such agencies as are created by law" (3 V.S.A. § 2101). But the ladder is not clean — about half a dozen departments, Public Safety and Labor among them, sit under no agency at all, and the governor appoints their commissioners directly. So the 2012 law did not leave the question to the filing system. It wrote the answer down: the secretary "shall report directly to the governor and shall be a member of the governor's cabinet" (3 V.S.A. § 2702(b)). What moved the power was narrower and plainer than the new name — the act repealed the board's authority to hire the chief and handed the appointment to the governor. The name followed the title. The board was left to propose a slate of candidates, and little more. Supporters argued the change would make the education chief answerable to an elected governor, and give education a seat in the cabinet alongside every other part of state government. The last commissioner, Armando Vilaseca, became the first secretary — one person on either side of the line.
The State Board kept its name and lost its function. Before 2012 it supervised and managed the department. After, its job was to weigh proposals that came from the governor and the secretary — and the secretary sits on the board, as a nonvoting member. By 2019 the board was publicly asking what it was for. Its chair, John Carroll, put the change simply: "We are not the board that we used to be — by law."
The argument over what had been traded ran on. Jay Nichols of the Vermont Principals' Association warned that an appointee would be "beholden to the state's chief executive"; the Agency answered that its secretary is "beholden, first and foremost, to the students of Vermont." Jeb Spaulding — the Shumlin administration's secretary of administration when the agency was created — said of the change in 2018: "you're really adding a level of volatility to the education system."
Not by simple tenure math. Seven commissioners served from 1982 to 2012, about four years each on average. Stephen Kaagan and Richard Mills each held the job six to seven years. But the late 1990s and early 2000s ran through three commissioners, with two long stretches when no one held the job at all. Vilaseca's year in the new post was transitional by design. The two completed secretary tenures since — Rebecca Holcombe's and Dan French's — each ran slightly longer than the commissioners' average. The record does not show that the board era kept its chiefs longer.
The kind of instability changed. Every documented commissioner departure was a better job or ill health. Mills left to run New York's schools; Richard Cate left for a university post; Marc Hull left sick. Four of the seven served across a change of governors, and none was replaced when a new governor arrived. The secretary era's turbulence is political. Holcombe resigned abruptly in 2018 amid differences with the governor's office — the administration said "personal reasons"; the board's chair cited "differences in opinion about major issues." French served four and a half years and left for a national post. A deputy filled in as interim twice, about a year and a half in all. Then, in 2024, the Senate rejected Governor Scott's nominee, Zoie Saunders, 19 to 9 — a rare rebuke of a cabinet pick, over her charter-school background and short public-school record. Scott installed her as interim secretary the same day. Senators sued, and lost on mootness. A newly elected Senate confirmed her the following March, 22 to 8. The state ran nearly a year under a secretary its Senate had voted down.
Fights like that could not happen before 2013. There was no Senate confirmation, and no governor held the appointment. In 2018, Seven Days asked veterans of the system whether the new structure had made the office political. Brad James, the state's longtime education-finance official, answered: "That's exactly what happened."
Start with the name. As of July 2026, a Gazette survey of all fifty states found one other that calls its K-12 education body an agency: the Texas Education Agency. There is no third. Most of the rest say department — though not all. Washington and Montana run an office of public instruction, and in Illinois and Utah the state board is itself the agency. The count is easy to get wrong, and one reason is federal — under the laws that route education money to the states, every state's education body is a "state educational agency," a label that attaches no matter what the state calls it at home. No one keeps an official list of the names the states use themselves.
Texas is not a companion case, though not for the reason its history suggests. Its agency name comes out of the Gilmer-Aikin reforms of 1949, which abolished the elected office of state superintendent and replaced it with a commissioner the state board chose — a move away from the ballot, not away from the governor, who had never held the appointment. Texas did eventually hand the job to its governor: since 1995 the commissioner of education has been appointed by the governor with the Senate's consent, and serves a four-year term running with the governor's. But the word did no work in either change. Texas has no cabinet for an agency to sit in — several of its executive officials are elected in their own right — and the word carries no rank there. And when Texas did put its state board under gubernatorial appointment, from 1984 to 1989, it renamed nothing.
The two states are not a study in one being freer than the other. Texas elects all fifteen members of its board; Vermont's ten are all appointed. On the chief the pattern reverses: Vermont's governor must choose from at least three candidates the board proposes, where Texas's picks a commissioner freely.
The way Vermont picks its chief is rarer still. The National Association of State Boards of Education's July 2024 governance matrix records all fifty arrangements; counted by the Gazette, the board hires the chief in 21 states, the governor appoints in 16, and the voters elect in 12. Oregon is the fiftieth and a case of its own — there the governor holds the superintendent title and appoints a deputy to do the work. Vermont is one of the 16 — but its version ties the governor's hands in a way almost no other does. The governor must choose from at least three candidates the board puts forward, and the Senate must consent. Only Nevada binds its governor to a board's slate at all — and it binds differently: there the list is fixed at three, and no Senate vote is required.
States rarely change any of this, and when they do they take one of two routes. Six have changed how the chief is chosen in about twenty years: Florida and New Mexico in 2003, Nevada and Oregon in 2011, Vermont in 2013, Indiana in 2021. Two more left the old chief in place and handed the department to a governor's appointee above that office — Ohio in 2023, and California this month, where AB 181, signed July 10, 2026, takes effect in January. Wyoming tried that second route in 2013, stripping its elected superintendent of most of the job's authority and giving it to a director the governor would name; the state's supreme court struck the law down the next year. South Carolina put the question on the ballot in 2018, and voters said no, 60 to 40.
Not one of them renamed anything. New Mexico's is still the Public Education Department, Ohio's the Department of Education and Workforce.
Then Vermont did a rarer thing still. Act 73 of 2025 cut the governor's appointments to the State Board of Education from ten of ten to eight of ten, handing one seat to the Speaker of the House and one to the Senate's Committee on Committees. Pullbacks like it are unusual, but Vermont's is not the first. Texas took its board out of the governor's hands in 1949, when the Legislature replaced the nine members the governor had appointed with an elected board. That was the larger step; Vermont's leaves the governor eight seats of ten. It also arrives slowly. Seats change hands only as terms expire, so in July 2026 the board seats eight of the governor's appointees and one of the Speaker's — Kate Webb, a former House education chair, appointed in April — while the governor's non-voting student seat sits vacant and the Committee on Committees seat is not yet filled. All eight are appointees of Phil Scott, governor since January 5, 2017. Non-student board terms run six years; Vermont governors are elected to two-year terms.
Some of the reference works have not caught up. NASBE's governance matrix, last updated in July 2024, and the Agency's own website both still describe a board the governor fills entirely. Both also count eleven members where the statute says ten; the extra seat is the Secretary of Education, who sits on the board without a vote. The Education Commission of the States revised its fifty-state comparison in February 2026 and has it right — ten members, eight of them the governor's.
One state's legislature has at least put the question on paper. When New Mexico lawmakers moved to undo their own 2003 change, the Legislative Education Study Committee's analyses of those bills reported that there "appears to be no cause-and-effect relationship between governance structures and student performance or outcomes" — a comparison of NAEP scores across states with different structures, not a verdict on New Mexico's own change. The bills died.
The department became the governor's agency on the first day of 2013. By several measures, 2013 is also the year Vermont's scores peaked and began to fall. The data can show that the two run together. It cannot say whether one caused the other. What the 2012 law plainly changed is who steers the system — and what can pull the person steering off course. A governance chart does not move a fourth-grader's reading score. Whether a decade of churn at the top reaches a classroom is a question the data cannot settle.
Vermont is looking again. A Senate education workgroup has been studying how other states choose their chief, and whether the 2012 arrangement should change. The final story turns to the number all of this steering is judged by: the diploma.
The governance change has no demonstrated effect on any test score, and by raw tenure the secretary era is no less stable than the one it replaced. The roster and its averages come from contemporaneous records and are approximate; one commissioner's 1988 departure reason is undocumented. Every account of motive here is the participants' own, quoted or attributed. Where accounts conflict, as with Holcombe's exit, both are given.
Explore the underlying data yourself: the Comparer · District Outliers.
Method and caveats: the structural change is Act No. 98 of 2012 (H.440), approved May 3, 2012, effective January 1, 2013 — it repealed the State Board's power to appoint the chief (former 16 V.S.A. § 211) and created the governor-appointed secretary (3 V.S.A. § 2702(a): the governor chooses from at least three board-proposed candidates, with Senate advice and consent, and the secretary serves at the governor's pleasure; § 2702(b): the secretary "shall report directly to the governor and shall be a member of the governor's cabinet"). Act 98 as enacted contains no findings and no purpose section, and no version of H.440 — as introduced, as passed by either chamber, or as enacted — carried findings; acts of the same session did (Act 95 of 2012, approved two days earlier, states legislative findings). H.440 as introduced carries a "Statement of purpose" describing what the bill would do rather than why, and Vermont drops statements of purpose from its enacted acts. The supporters'-rationale sentence reflects the debate as recorded in later retrospectives; no contemporaneous statement of the reasons for the change was located. The commissioner roster (Kaagan, early 1982–1988; Mills, 1988–1995; Hull, 1996–1999; Wolk, 2000–2001; McNulty, 2001–2003; Cate, 2003–2008; Vilaseca, 2009–2012) and tenure averages are compiled from contemporaneous records — Education Week (1982), press archives, official bios — and are approximate to within about half a year; interim stretches in the mid-1990s and 1999 are unattributed. Secretary roster: Vilaseca (2013–14, transitional by design), Holcombe (2014–April 2018), Bouchey (acting, 2018), French (August 2018–April 2023), Bouchey (interim, 2023–24), Saunders (April 2024–, rejected 19-9 on April 30, 2024, reappointed November 26, 2024, confirmed 22-8 on March 13, 2025; the Vermont Supreme Court dismissed the senators' challenge as moot in February 2025). Quotes: Carroll per VTDigger (September 2019); Spaulding and James per Seven Days ("Head of the Class," June 6, 2018); Nichols and the Agency's reply per Seven Days (2024). The Senate workgroup on chief-selection methods is per its commissioned research memo; its conclusions were pending as of this writing. The fifty-state name count is the Gazette's own survey of each state's education body as of July 2026, taken from the states' governing statutes and official sites; there is no authoritative registry of these names, and the federal usage is a plausible source of higher counts: under ESEA (20 U.S.C. § 7801(49)) and IDEA (20 U.S.C. § 1401(32)) each state's education body is a "state educational agency" — a functional label keyed to whichever body is "primarily responsible for the State supervision of public elementary schools and secondary schools" rather than to its name, and reaching, in IDEA's words, a "State board of education or other agency or officer." NCES publishes its fifty-state directory under the heading "State Education Agencies." The Gazette located no published count that in fact makes this error. The survey counts the word each state uses for its own K-12 body, which is not always "department": Washington and Montana use "office," in Illinois and Utah the state board is the agency itself, and Arkansas's Act 910 of 2019 renamed its department the Division of Elementary and Secondary Education inside a new cabinet-level Department of Education. Texas: the Texas Education Agency dates to the Gilmer-Aikin laws of 1949 (S.B. 115, 51st Leg.), which abolished both the nine-member board the governor had appointed since 1928 and the elective office of state superintendent, replacing them with an elected twenty-one-member board and a commissioner that board chose. The 1995 recodification (S.B. 1, 74th Leg., ch. 260) moved the commissioner's appointment to the governor with Senate consent (Tex. Educ. Code § 7.051) for a four-year term running with the governor's (§ 7.052), and is the source of the agency's current statutory section (§ 7.002). The Texas state board was appointed rather than elected from 1984 until January 1, 1989 under HB 72, which had the Legislative Education Board — all legislators — nominate three candidates in each of fifteen districts, the governor choose one from each, and the Senate confirm; the same law fixed that board's expiry at January 1, 1989 and required elections in November 1988. A 1987 statutory referendum (S.B. 86, 70th Leg., 2nd C.S.) asked voters to make the board appointed permanently and they rejected it, 52.4 percent against; the elections HB 72 had already scheduled went ahead. The 1987 vote is not counted here as a pullback: the governor did not hold the appointment to begin with, and the return to election was already law. It has been elected since 1949 apart from that interval — from 1928 to 1949 it was nine members appointed by the governor, and before that an ex officio body. Vermont's board composition is per Act 73 of 2025, § 24, effective July 1, 2025, codified at 16 V.S.A. § 161: ten members, eight appointed by the Governor with the Senate's consent — a count that includes both student members, leaving the Governor six nonstudent seats — one by the Speaker, one by the Committee on Committees. Act 73 changed the appointing authorities prospectively: sitting members serve out their terms, and the next two nonstudent vacancies pass to the Speaker and the Committee on Committees in that order. Act 73's Section 25 sets the order in which seats change hands. The July 2026 seat count is from the Agency's own current member list, retrieved July 15, 2026; the appointing authority and date for each sitting member are from the Vermont Senate Journals, which record each nomination as it arrives from the Governor and each confirmation vote, and where the Agency's roster and the Journals differ on a date, the Journals govern. Kate Webb's appointment rests on Speaker Jill Krowinski's April 23, 2026 statement and the Board's May 20, 2026 minutes. The eight are Samuelson, Kolbe, Lovett, Werner, Diop, Campion, Stuart, and Marsh; the earliest first appointment among them is August 2020. The ten-member figure is the statute's; the eleven on the Agency's site and in NASBE's July 2024 matrix counts the Secretary of Education, whom the same section seats on the board as a nonvoting member. Student results are not compared across these states on either grouping — not by what a state calls its education body, and not by how it picks its chief. The two that use "agency" differ in enrollment by more than sixty to one and in student demographics by margins that swamp any label. The selection-method groups are no more comparable: states sort into them by history and politics, not by anything that would make their students alike.
Sources: Act 98 of 2012 (H.440) as enacted, and H.440 as introduced; Act 95 of 2012 (legislative findings); 3 V.S.A. §§ 212, 213, 2101, 2701, 2702; 16 V.S.A. § 161; Act 73 of 2025; Vermont Agency of Education, State Board member list (2026); Tex. Educ. Code §§ 7.002, 7.051–7.052 and the Gilmer-Aikin laws (S.B. 115, 1949); Texas House Research Organization, "State Board of Education: Controversy and Change," No. 76-19 (Jan. 3, 2000); Fla. Const. art. IV, § 4 and art. IX, § 2 (Revision No. 8 of 1998, eff. Jan. 7, 2003); Or. Rev. Stat. § 326.300 (2011 c.731); Nev. Rev. Stat. § 385.150; Ind. Code § 20-19-1-1.1; New Mexico Const. art. XII, § 6 (2003 amendment) and LESC bill analyses of HJR4 (Jan. 29, 2025) and SJR3 (Jan. 30, 2025; Feb. 3, 2026); Ohio HB 33 (2023) and Ohio Rev. Code §§ 3301.08, 3301.13; California AB 181 (Ch. 66, Stats. 2026), signed July 10, 2026; 20 U.S.C. § 7801(49) and § 1401(32); NASBE state education governance matrix (July 2024); ECS, 50-State Comparison: K-12 Governance (February 2026); Powers v. State, 2014 WY 15; South Carolina Amendment 1 (2018) returns; VTDigger (2013–2025, as linked); Seven Days ("Head of the Class," June 6, 2018; 2024 retrospective); Education Week (January 1982); UVM Legislative Research Shop, chief state school officer selection; Vermont Supreme Court (February 2025); Stanford Education Data Archive 2025.1 and NCES NAEP (the 2013 peak).
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