The Virginia Board of Education on Thursday voted 7-1 to change the school accreditation model that will now publicly rank each Virginia school in a system with at least four performance categories.
The new system could develop into a school rating score signified by a number of stars or different category labels for schools.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration has long criticized Virginia’s current accreditation system, saying that it is confusing for parents and lacks transparency. The governor announced in 2022 that he would overhaul the state’s accreditation system.
Virginia’s current accreditation system designates schools as “accredited,” “accredited with conditions” or “not accredited.” This school year, 89% of Virginia schools are fully accredited and 11% are accredited with conditions.
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“We need to be clear that what the (Youngkin) administration is proposing here is an A through F grading system for schools,” said board member Anne Holton, who was appointed in 2017 by then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe and again in 2021 by Gov. Ralph Northam, both Democrats.
Holton, a former state secretary of education in McAuliffe’s administration, is the only remaining member of the nine-person board who was not appointed by Youngkin, a Republican.
“That may not be entirely obvious, since crucial provisions are buried in 60 pages of regulations that were only shared publicly a few days ago, and they haven’t been highlighted in the presentations, but that’s what this is,” Holton said. “It may get labeled with stars or something else instead of letter grades in an attempt to soften the blow.”
Board members last fall said they did not prefer an A-F system, but the regulation the panel approved Thursday does not preclude the board from making that decision in the future.
On Thursday, board member Andy Rotherham, a Youngkin appointee who also served on the board from 2005 to 2009 as an appointee of Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, pushed back on Holton’s criticisms of the adopted system.
He said the grade does not have to be an A to F system, and that talking about it as such is a way to “get everybody spun out and create a … big political storm.”
“You can call it a blow, but Ms. Holton, respectfully, telling the truth is not a blow. It is our obligation, and it’s an obligation we have failed for far, far too long,” said Rotherham, who is a co-founder of the national nonprofit Bellwether.
The A-F school rating system is used in at least 10 other states including Florida and North Carolina, but is generally not viewed favorably in Virginia and has been voted down by the state legislature.
Holton cites school segregation
Holton, at Thursday’s meeting, said the system will likely exacerbate school segregation, and nearly every other board member at the meeting pushed back on her statements.
Holton said, “It’s not hard to understand how that works — when you label some schools as C, D or F schools, families — and teachers — who can afford to will be incentivized to move away from those schools, leaving behind the neediest students — mostly Black and brown students — and the least experienced teachers. Those schools will then spiral further behind.”
Rotherham said that while residential segregation is a problem, the remedy is not to lie to the public about school performance.
A wave of states implemented rating systems between 2012 and 2015 toward the end of the No Child Left Behind Act. The federal law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 and was replaced in 2015 significantly increased the federal role in holding schools responsible for students’ academic progress. Experimental studies are just now coming out, as about 10 years have passed since the states implemented the new rating systems.
New research that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released Thursday says most school rating systems reflect the race of the student body and not quality.
“Simple measures of school quality, which are based on the average statistics for the school, are invariably highly correlated with race, and those measures tend to be a misleading guide of what you can expect by sending your child to that school,” wrote MIT economist Josh Angrist.
Rotherham said school choice — allowing families to decide where they want to attend school — is a more logical way to address school segregation.
“We can start there if you want to address segregation. We can stop treating school district boundaries as international borders and only allow mostly affluent kids … to move across them … (and) trap poor kids in other districts,” Rotherham said.
Youngkin has long criticized the state’s current accreditation system, asserting that it does not reflect the learning loss and achievement gaps Virginia’s students face, and that it fails to provide a clear picture of the academic achievement of Virginia’s schools for parents, teachers and local school divisions.
Under the current system, more than half of the students in schools that are not fully accredited are Black, although Black students make up only about 20% of Virginia’s student enrollment overall.
Critics of the new system say they fear that moving back toward a higher weight on proficiency could revert the state to where it was in 2014-2016, when the accreditation system was more racialized than it is now.
Virginia spends less on a per-student basis, on average, in schools that do not have full accreditation compared to schools that do, according to the most recent school finance data.
During Thursday’s meeting, Virginia Education Association President James Fedderman asked the board not to adopt a system that would place schools into such performance categories.
“A summative score such as star ratings or letter grades would not provide the level of nuance parents need to make informed decisions,” Fedderman said during the public comment period. “Parents could easily be misguided by a summative score based mostly on mastery to enroll their students in a school with high pass rates but low growth.
“As we’ve seen in other states, this type of summative score may also contribute to worsening racial segregation in our schools.”
Board member Bill Hansen called Holton’s comments about school segregation “offensive” and said there is no better leveling agent than school choice.
The changes adopted Thursday are now posted for a 60-day public comment period.
Mastery, or growth?
The new model that the board approved weighs proficiency scores more heavily than it weighs student growth for elementary school students in the accreditation scores.
Critics say the move does not take into consideration that young students enter school with achievement gaps that have nothing to do with the school.
On Wednesday — the first day of the board’s two-day meeting — Youngkin appointee Amber Northern, the senior vice president for research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, pushed for higher growth weightings and floated the idea of weighing growth at 40% for elementary school.
The board has not yet defined measurements for growth and proficiency, so the debate around which aspects to weigh more heavily is largely theoretical.
“We can have a rigorous growth bar and then a mastery bar that’s dirt low,” Northern said Wednesday. “Just by saying mastery is going to be 70% in no way guarantees that we’re holding anybody’s foot to the fire, because we haven’t even set the mastery score bar yet.”
Last fall, the board 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.”
During the board’s lunch break on Wednesday, Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera urged the board to adopt a system with a higher emphasis on mastery.
Although the debate on growth versus proficiency was contested, the board ultimately voted 7-1 on Thursday to adopt a system that weighs content mastery at 65%, growth at 25% and readiness at 10% for elementary school students.
There was less debate around middle school and high school because there is widespread agreement that at those stages students should be evaluated on whether they have mastered the content.