After two years of research and deliberation, the Virginia Board of Education (VBOE) voted at meetings in March and April to propose several changes to regulations governing how public K-12 schools are accredited statewide. Much like a report card, a school’s “accreditation” status is intended to describe how well or poorly a school is doing at meeting the state’s educational standards. According to board members and education experts involved in the review, Virginia’s current accreditation standards are convoluted and unhelpful for identifying struggling schools in need of support.
Educational consultant Chad Aldeman described a steep decline since 2017 in Virginia students’ scores in reading and math on national assessments, particularly for lower-performing students, but he said that Virginia’s accreditation system is barely picking up on these trends. “Grade 4 performance declined two times more than the national average in math and three times more in reading,” said Aldeman, “but no school in Virginia had its accreditation denied either last year or the year before.” Within the Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) system, no school has been denied since 2016, despite several that have reported student pass rates on state reading and math assessments below 50%.
The problem lies in the way Virginia groups together data on student and school performance. A school’s accreditation status is based on several factors measuring performance in areas such as graduation and absenteeism rates, as well as proficiency (pass) rates on student Standards of Learning (SOL) tests in several subjects. However, instead of reporting a simple pass/fail rate, Virginia’s grade 3-8 measure also includes the percentage of students who did not pass the SOL but who showed “growth” by improving their score over the prior year (called a “performance band shift”). In addition, if a student showed neither academic proficiency nor growth but is an English Language Learner who improved their language skills, that student also counts as passing and is added to the overall proficiency rate.
Thus, for example, if a school has 53% of students pass the English SOL test, and another 16% fail the test but show some growth in their score, and a further 6% of students neither pass nor show growth but are English Learners who improve their English language skills, that school would add all three groups together and report a 75% pass rate, which would satisfy the state’s accreditation requirement. But the result is an accreditation measure called “proficiency” that does not communicate subject mastery. “The drawbacks of using a combined rate are that it’s very complex and not transparent for parents and the public,” said Aldeman. “It’s not a statistically valid measure of student achievement or school performance as it masks the true percentage of students who are proficient.”
In meetings and work sessions last fall and spring, the VBOE expressed support for a growth metric that would help identify students whose proficiency is improving though still not at mastery, but stressed that growth must be reported separately from proficiency. To provide a more accurate measure of growth, the proposed system will employ statistical modeling to predict “expected growth” based on the student’s own test history along with general trends on the tests. Expected growth will be compared to actual improvement (or decline) to measure the growth component.
Other tweaks to the various metrics are also proposed. The stand-alone proficiency measure will move from a simple “percentage of students who passed” to a weighted index that awards one point for a student who passes but (for example) 1.2 points for a student who scores in the Advanced Pass range and 0.5 for those at the Basic (below passing) level. The index allows for all students’ scores to be incorporated into the metric (instead of just those who passed at any level), and it incentivizes schools to encourage student achievement beyond merely passing.
Clarifying the Standards
An overarching goal of the board is to disentangle the “accreditation” and “accountability” frameworks for school divisions. Under the new plan, accreditation will be based on school inputs such as operational quality, safety, and rates of absenteeism, dropout, and graduation to comply with state statutes. Student achievement and achievement gaps will be part of a new accountability report called the School Performance and Support Framework. The accountability measures will drive how state and federal funds are allocated to schools that need help.
“Right now, Virginia schools are either ‘accredited’ or ‘accredited with conditions,’ and that’s all that is reported,” said Alliance for Education consultant Ann Hyslop, who is advising the board, “but this is not how it works in other states.” She gave examples of the accountability reporting systems of states where school quality is described with a “summative” rating over a range of outcomes—from an A to F rating in Mississippi, to a 0- to 100-point index in Michigan, to a one to five stars system in Ohio. The form that Virginia’s “summative” rating system will take (such as stars or color bars) is still under discussion, but it will be “much more transparent,” said Hyslop.
Under the new rating system, parents and other interested parties will have access to a school performance report card that separates mastery and growth data to allow them to compare schools across the division, and to examine how demographic subgroups and individual grade levels within schools are performing. In some states, students’ mastery and growth data is also used to evaluate teacher performance.
Albemarle County Public Schools Superintendent Matt Haas said that the new accreditation system “holds potential benefits for Albemarle schools and communities by offering a more nuanced evaluation of school performance,” so long as it “ensures equitable access to resources and considers diverse perspectives.” However, Haas does not favor the single summative measure approach, saying it may “fail to capture the multifaceted nature of school performance and incentivize schools to focus narrowly on boosting test scores rather than fostering holistic student development.”
In April, the VBOE settled on overall weighting of the various components of accountability, reflecting the board’s priorities. For instance, elementary schools will be evaluated based on a proportion of 65% mastery index (proficiency), 25% growth scores, and 10% readiness metrics. High schools will be rated on 50% mastery, 35% readiness, and 15% graduation rate. Readiness at all levels refers to how prepared students are to advance to the next grade or post-secondary experience, and considers factors like attendance levels, critical thinking skills, and advanced work.
Haas believes that mastery and growth should be weighted equally. “While content mastery reflects students’ achievement of academic standards, growth measures their progress over time, accounting for differences in starting points and providing insights into instructional effectiveness,” he said. “Prioritizing one over the other risks neglecting essential aspects of student learning.”
Discussion and Debate
The board spent dozens of hours in meetings, work sessions, and listening sessions about the accreditation standards over the past two years. Of the nine current VBOE members, eight were appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin, and those members broadly supported the contours of the standards revision proposals. Only Anne Holton, appointed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, voted ‘nay’ on most of the revisions, instead suggesting that growth should be weighted almost twice as much as mastery.
“The board is preparing to disregard the experts and base the new system heavily on proficiency measures called mastery that are based solely on our antiquated and flawed SOL tests,” said Holton. “The notion seems to be that raising expectations alone will somehow magically help everyone do better. We’ve tried that and it did not work. As former board president Dan Gecker has said on occasion—if that were the case, we could raise the height of basketball hoops and we would all then be able to dunk.”
Holton also strongly objected to an A to F grading system. “It may get labeled with stars or something else in an attempt to soften the blow, but research shows it will likely exacerbate school segregation, which will in turn make our achievement gaps worse,” she said. “When you label some schools as C, D, or F, families and teachers who can afford to will move away from those schools, leaving behind the neediest students, mostly black and brown, and the least experienced teachers.”
Board member Dale Sturdifen took issue with Holton’s language. “When I hear people say, ‘this is all about black and brown kids’—it’s not,” said Sturdifen. “[Those kinds of phrases] and others like ‘slavish devotion,’ those are triggers that are used to get people fired up. Every kid deserves the best educational opportunity in the Commonwealth. We need to have high standards—I’m more of an 80/10/10 [referring to his preference for a high proportion of mastery in the metric] guy, myself—and we should never consider lowering the standards. I think we should strive to increase the level of difficulty of our courses at every grade level, because if you raise the bar, you may not make it but you’re still at a higher point than having that low bar.”
“There is not an A to F system proposed here,” said board member Andy Rotherham in response to Holton’s comments. “[In this proposal] there will be some sort of summative measure to communicate to parents a way of thinking about all the data we’re going to present. You can call it ‘a blow,’ but Ms. Holton, respectfully, telling the truth is not a blow, it’s our obligation, and one that we’ve failed at for far, far too long. Part of accountability means there’s that uncomfortable moment for those being held accountable.” Rotherham is a co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, the consulting firm used by the Albemarle school division last year to determine the source of its persistent academic achievement gaps.
“Virginia’s legislature adopted an A-F grading system for public schools ten years ago and repealed it before it passed, partly because we heard from the realtors,” who were worried about housing segregation, said Holton, who served in 2013-16 as Virginia’s Secretary of Education and oversaw the repeal.
“Why would we allow realtors to control us and what is good for kids?” said Rotherham. “This is the entire problem in a nutshell—is there anything more emblematic of adult politics driving this than [us discussing] what the realtors think? The fact that we’re having this conversation illustrates why we’re in the corner that we’re in.”
Board member Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the Fordham Institute, relayed what she’d heard from students at a recent Virginia Student Council meeting. “So many of those students stood up at the microphone and said that less is expected of them now [than prior to the pandemic], that they get away with a lot more with grading and disciplinary [policies], and they get annoyed when other students seem to be getting As and doing nothing,” she said. “It was like they were screaming out ‘we want to be held to a high standard,’ ‘we see what’s going on here and it doesn’t make us feel good,’ ‘you don’t have faith in us.’ I was really struck by that.”
Regarding the substantial weighting of mastery in the accreditation metrics, Rotherham was resolute. “At the end of the day, parents send their kids to school because they want them to master content,” he said. “We need to have clear standards where [parents and schools can expect] logical consequences and logical support when that is not happening, and we don’t get there unless we have a model that’s heavily weighted towards mastery of the content.”
VBOE Vice President Bill Hanson summed up his view during a 2023 work session. “[School performance] is getting worse, not better, and we’ve got to have a sense of urgency about this,” he said. “We owe it to our teachers, our parents, and our students to have a system in place that’s understandable. The thing that gets lost whenever we have these [SOL] scores coming out is an understanding of the human lives that are underneath all of those numbers. This system could bring reality to putting a face to each of those kids that are impacted. … Growing ourselves out of this massive challenge that we’re facing is critical.”
The new school performance system will be piloted during the 2024-25 school year, and will be implemented in full and will report out results for schools and divisions in 2025-26.
Updated 5/6/24: This story has been edited in the fourth paragraph to clarify the calculation of pass rates.
