The Latest from VEA

Richmond, VA — Today, the Virginia Board of Education has made significant revisions to the state’s Standards of Accreditation, fulfilling a long-time goal of the governor’s administration to label more schools as not meeting state standards. The new Performance Framework will greatly increase the weight of raw pass rates on reading and math standardized tests while reducing the emphasis on student growth. According to projections from the Virginia Department of Education, the percentage of schools deemed not meeting state standards will soar from 12% to an estimated 61%.

In response to the passage of the new state accountability system, Dr. James J. Fedderman, President of the Virginia Education Association said “Our students, parents, and educators all deserve so much better than this politically motivated accountability system. Sadly, the results of this new system will mislead the public about the true quality of our schools.”

The President-Elect of the Virginia Education Association, Carol Bauer, said: “Instead of designing a system with practitioners in mind, to improve teaching and push schools to focus on incremental improvements, this new framework will have the opposite effect.” She added, “Today, the academic bar has been lowered, and our accountability system has been revised to meet political goals rather than serve students. Lawmakers and education advocates must work together to fix this disastrous new system designed by private consultants.”

This drastic change is out of touch with reality, especially considering national rankings, including a recent one from CNBC praised by the governor, which rank Virginia as having the top education system in the country. The new system appears politically motivated, designed to propagate a narrative of “failing schools” to undermine public education and promote privatization.

The new Performance Framework will predominantly measure student demographics and privilege rather than the effectiveness of teachers and administrators in enhancing learning and comprehension. By de-emphasizing growth, the new approach will mislead parents and the public by promoting schools with homogeneous, affluent student bodies that traditionally perform well on standardized tests. Conversely, it will penalize schools that demonstrate significant student growth but serve students who start further behind due to various educational barriers. This will likely lead parents to make misguided decisions about enrolling their children in schools labeled as “Distinguished,” despite some of these schools offering lower prospects for improving their child’s achievement than alternatives with higher growth rates. Rather than being a transparent and useful tool, the new system will provide inaccurate information about school quality.

This inverted system undermines public trust, creating perverse incentives for school administrators and teachers to prioritize resources only towards students on the cusp of passing their math and reading tests. Furthermore, it fails to offer meaningful state assistance to schools labeled in the lowest ranking category, “Needs Intensive Support.”

Regardless of the political narrative this administration aims to promote with these punitive revisions to our accountability system, the outcome will undoubtedly harm student achievement in the schools that require the most support. Labeling schools as “Needs Intensive Support” without providing adequate support is both cruel and ineffective. When the Board had the opportunity to recommend increased resources for high-need schools through revisions to the Standards of Quality in the fall of 2023, they reduced recommendations from $2 billion set by the previous Board to a mere $50 million. The Board has shown no willingness to suggest that Virginia should, for the first time ever, provide more funding to schools currently not meeting state standards. Creating a system that labels schools as needing intensive support while avoiding the responsibility to recommend that support is counterproductive.