The Virginia Department of Education on Tuesday launched its new school accountability system, and some Democrats are already eyeing potential changes.
Lt. Gov-elect Ghazala Hashmi, the outgoing chair of the Senate Education and Health Committee, said the system needs to give more weight to students’ progress, not just their proficiency.
“These metrics are going to continue to show us that our schools that are in the lowest economic communities, the most impoverished communities, that those students are going to face greater challenges than students who are in affluent school districts,” Hashmi said in an interview.
“What we really need to be measuring — and I think this is an area of significant weakness with this new accountability measure — is that we need to be measuring growth.”
A spokesman for Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said that Spanberger is “not commenting at this time” on the new school accountability system.
Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger will detail specific legislation to help Virginians cope with rising energy, housing and health care bills next week, she said at a session sponsored by Politico and McKinsey and Co.
The new system publicly ranks each Virginia school in one of four performance categories: “distinguished,” “on track,” “off track” or “needs intensive support.” The criteria for each ranking include test scores in reading, writing, math and science.
In the initial rankings, 774 Virginia schools were rated as “on track,” 425 as “distinguished,” 399 as “off-track,” 213 as “needs intensive support” and officials deemed eight schools too small to rate.
Different views
The new system’s proponents say it holds schools and students to a higher standard and encourages growth. Critics say they worry that labeling schools as “off track” or “needs intensive support” without also sending additional funding to those schools will further hurt those schools and potentially drive qualified teachers away.
Decisions about whether to send more money to underperforming schools are up to legislators, not the Department of Education. It generally takes an additional 40%-200% in funding for students in poverty to have educational outcomes comparable to students who do not come from poverty, according to studies of funding adequacy.
The state’s old accreditation system is still in place because it is legally required, but Virginia no longer uses it to publicly report on how schools are doing academically.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who spearheaded the effort to redo the state’s school accountability system, has for years criticized the old system, saying it does not accurately communicate how each school is doing.
The Virginia Board of Education would enact any changes to the new accountability system. Youngkin appointed all nine current members.
On June 30, two appointments to the board will expire, those of Grace Creasey, the board president, and Bill Hansen, the board’s vice president. Two more Board of Education appointments are set to expire in June 2027, at which point Spanberger would have four appointments to the board, but not a majority. That’s if the General Assembly confirms the three members Youngkin appointed this year since the end of the regular General Assembly session.
Youngkin’s take
Youngkin and his state superintendent of public instruction lauded the new system.
“On day one we committed to delivering the most transparent K-12 accountability system in the nation, with the highest expectations for every student,” Youngkin said in a statement.
“Our Student Performance and Support Framework is doing just that, providing timely, trustworthy data so we can target support to the students, schools and communities who need it most, and we can all learn from our Distinguished top-performing schools.”
Spanberger has not yet named her appointments for secretary of education or state superintendent of public instruction.
Hashmi’s view
Hashmi, who won’t have a direct role in potential changes to the system, said she wants to see a higher weight given to growth measures. The new system puts a high weight on proficiency, meaning it heavily takes into account how much students have mastered their annual Standards of Learning tests.
During this year’s regular legislative session, Hashmi proposed a bill that sought to delay enactment of the new accountability system by one year. The bill did not pass.
Sen. Barbara Favola, D- Arlington, who will succeed Hashmi as chair of the Senate Education and Health Committee, has criticized the labels of underperforming schools, saying the designations as “off track” and “needs intensive support” could be “used to undermine the support that school systems need desperately.”
Upcoming key report
On the campaign trail this summer, Spanberger did not give a direct answer about whether she would want to keep Youngkin’s school accountability system in place if elected, but noted that a study by a state watchdog agency is underway.
“It’s important to recognize that there’s a (Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission) study that will be released by the end of the year focused on this accountability program and assessing its value,” Spanberger told reporters on Aug. 18.
That JLARC report, which will likely include recommendations for the system, is scheduled to be released at a meeting Tuesday.
Spanberger also noted in August that she wants to ensure that schools “are not receiving year after year one new requirement after another.”
“As a basic issue of principle and as governor, I will recognize and advocate for the clear understanding of the value of growth and mastery,” she said. “We want our kids to be both meeting and then exceeding expectations.”
Although Spanberger hasn’t talked much in specifics about school accountability, she said generally she wants to hold kids to “high, high standards, because we believe in them and we want them to have every opportunity for the future.”
Growth versus proficiency
Under the new system, proficiency is weighted more heavily into the scores than growth. Critics say this does not take into consideration that some young students enter school with achievement gaps that have nothing to do with the school.
State Superintendent Emily Anne Gullickson, who Youngkin appointed in March, said the education department affirms the value of student growth as one component of a balanced accountability system but the recommendation to weight growth equally or more heavily than proficiency “does not align with stakeholder perspectives or research.”
In fall 2023, the Board of Education held listening tours across the state, and the summary of that feedback says there was “general agreement growth should be, at least, weighted equally to achievement if not more” for elementary school students.
Virginia Board of Education members took up growth and proficiency during conversations in 2024. The board ultimately voted last year to adopt a system that weighs content mastery at 65%, growth at 25% and readiness at 10% for elementary school students.
Gullickson said: “While growth provides important information about student progress, an outsized emphasis on growth, compared to proficiency, risks signaling that mere progress toward proficiency is acceptable in place of actual readiness.”
The superintendent said the current framework “prioritizes proficiency and incorporates growth to offer a more complete picture of student performance. This balance ensures that schools demonstrating strong outcomes are recognized, schools requiring additional support are accurately identified, and resources are allocated where they will have the greatest impact on student success.”
There is less debate about the formula’s application to middle schools and high schools because there is widespread agreement that at those stages students should be evaluated on whether they have mastered the content.
Social studies excluded
As the system stands, the criteria for each ranking include test scores in reading, writing, math and science — but not social studies.
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D- Henrico, a social studies teacher at a county school, has been pushing for the Virginia Board of Education to include social studies tests in its criteria.
VanValkenburg, a member of the Senate Education and Health Committee, is one of the most pro-school accountability Democrats in the legislature.
“This data shows us where we most need to get to work to boost achievement and where we most need to send our resources — monetarily and otherwise — to ensure that all kids can get a world-class education,” VanValkenburg said in a statement.
“I’m ready to roll up my sleeves to be part of the solution.”
English language learners
Under the old system, the test scores of a student from another country who is learning English did not factor into school ratings for 5½ years, or 11 semesters. Under the new system, such students’ scores count toward school ratings after the student has been in school in the U.S. for 1½ years, or three semesters.
Hashmi said she would like to see a compromise — a notion that Gullickson, the current state superintendent, strongly opposes. Gullickson said including the students sooner makes the ratings more transparent and will help the state target assistance.
“Not only does (the current system) contribute to aligning and complying with federal law, it helps us now see more than 35,000 English Learner students who were excluded in the prior system of accountability,” Gullickson said.
“When more individual students are included, we can deliver targeted supports to those who need it most.”
Gullickson said that waiting 11 semesters before counting some students’ scores into the system “did not serve these students because it did not allow us to intervene in time to improve performance and growth.”
Hashmi said three semesters of learning “is not adequate … to make sure that students are at the capacity they need to be.” Hashmi said she would like to find a middle ground.
Faith in the data
Although the new system launched Tuesday, the education department had said that results would be ready for public release weeks earlier. Gullickson said in October that the department ran into issues crunching the data and hired a third party to ensure accuracy.
In an interview this week, Gullickson said the department has full faith in the data.
“We have really committed — especially since I joined the agency — on effective and transparent practices,” she said. “We want families to have the confidence in our data integrity and quality, as well as principals and teachers.”
The state education department partnered with Old Dominion University, which has a modeling, analysis and simulation center that helped externally validate the data and the outcomes.
“We think that really helps on transparency and the confidence and trust in these inaugural (results),” Gullckson said.
Carol Bauer, president of the Virginia Education Association, said educators and families deserve a system they can trust.
“Unfortunately, the entire rollout of this new accountability framework has been a mess, from repeated miscalculations and delayed data to a launch marred by widespread errors,” Bauer said in a statement.
“VDOE promoted this as a simpler, more transparent system, yet they clearly lacked the internal capacity to calculate the results correctly. Schools that had been celebrated for years of growth suddenly found themselves labeled ‘off track,’ while the near level funding between our highest‑need and most advantaged schools is stark.”
Bauer said the Spanberger administration “will have an opportunity to fix these problems so that accountability in Virginia reflects reality and supports, rather than demoralizes, our students and educators without meaningful support.”
State Democrats’ reaction to the new system ranges from tepid satisfaction to disdain. After Tuesday’s JLARC report, all eyes will turn to Spanberger.
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