Once again, Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried to change the Virginia public school system, but as is the case with every new Marvel movie, the disappointingly simple plot reveals itself instantly. The beginnings of this plot came about via a new school rating system, “School Performance and Support Framework,” with the goal of refining specific per-school data. It has been approved by Virginia’s Board of Education but still requires approval from the U.S. Department of Education. The new system advocates a more accurate way of rating Virginia’s primary and secondary schools in an attempt to find more explicit data on which schools need more help than others. In reality, this change is a blatant way to identify struggling schools to parents and legislators, allowing both groups to avoid them like the plague.
To be clear, Youngkin is right to think that our current ratings system is flawed. Over half of all Virginia students in elementary or middle school failed or nearly failed math or reading, yet 89 percent of all schools were accredited. Graduates receive the same accreditation from all these schools no matter their ranking, but the students maintain extreme differences in knowledge. Youngkin’s reforms aren’t meant to reinvent how schools are judged, but to have a more precise method of judging. The old system places schools in categories that are too large, and in doing so fails to recognize per-school nuances and properly fund struggling institutions, perpetuating failing patterns without end.
The proposed new rating system addresses these nuances with an emphasis on school-specific data while also swinging the door open for disastrous school choice support to grow. It arbitrarily re-categorizes schools as “off track,” exemplified by a shortened waiting period before non-English speakers’ test scores be counted towards a school’s rating. The old system had a waiting period of 11 semesters of English instruction before non-English speakers’ scores could be counted towards the school’s performance. The new system has a period of three. This means schools with higher immigrant populations are bound to be rated worse than those with more native English speakers, and as such, will appear worse to those looking at scores without context. Thus, both parents and legislators will view these schools as underachieving when that is not the reality…