With a budget surplus in Virginia, we have a historic opportunity to fully fund our schools, at a time when our kids need it the most. But based on today’s education press conference, the Youngkin administration is missing our shot at real reform. The press conference started with a bizarre attack on education data in the Commonwealth. Any teacher will tell you that we have plenty of good data because of the SOL tests kids are constantly taking. The problem is we fail to do what the data tell us – invest more in the schools with the highest concentration of low-income, school-dependent kids.
Currently every school that is unaccredited in the Commonwealth has less per pupil state and local government funding than fully accredited schools. We should be using student achievement scores to determine resources, but we’ve never done that in Virginia. We are spending less on schools in places where we need to be spending more. There is widespread agreement in the education community that our most challenged schools need more wrap-around services; a nurse in the building, more mental health professionals, school counselors and a reading specialist in every school. These goals are expressed in the Senate version of the state budget which has $270mn toward support positions in our school quality SOQ funding formula.
Listening to the press conference today, it seemed like they were using this new education report as a tool to make the case for charter schools. First you convince parents their schools are bad, then you offer the private alternative in the guise of charter schools and vouchers. The Report has chapter headings like “Learning Loss; Worse than Feared” and “Eroding Public Confidence in Virginia K-12 Schools” as well as “Virginia is Losing its National Standing.” In fact, Virginia students have been among the top performers for years on the NAEP National Assessment of Educational Progress. Yes, there are many gaps in student achievement, but research shows the way to support struggling students is with highly qualified teachers (think teacher pay) and building resilience and a positive school culture (think school support staff in mental health).
The Youngkin report has several obvious mistakes, for instance highlighting that reading SOL test scores went down from 2017 to 2019 despite the fact a new SOL test was introduced in 2018, making this a useless comparison. The report also hardly mentions the actual learning emergency in Virginia for English Language Learners whose pass rates on the SOL reading tests were 47.5% lower than non-English language learners on the 2019 test. That is the largest gap of any major student subgroup and it hardly got a mention.
We do need more innovation in Virginia but we don't need outside charter schools or private entities innovating for us. We already have the expertise with our colleges, teachers, administrators and local school boards. We have plenty of blueprints for innovation, school boards already have magnet programs and private public partnership schools around the Commonwealth. We just need the commitment from the Commonwealth to fire it up and get it done. And to take full advantage of STEM and technology opportunities in high school, students need wrap-around services and support staff from an early age to help them build the resilience and the grit they need to perform at the highest academic levels in the nation.