by James A. Bacon

Eighty-five percent of Virginia’s public schools meet the state’s standards of quality and effectiveness under the current system for establishing accreditation, according to data released Monday by the Virginia Department of Education.

Under the rating system, no school is denied accreditation. Rather, under-performers are tagged with the euphemism “accredited with conditions.”

“Today’s accreditation certifications are a testament to the failure of Virginia’s current accreditation system to provide parents, educators, and communities timely, accurate and actionable insights into how well their students are actually performing academically,” Governor Glenn Youngkin said yesterday.

“The issue couldn’t be clearer: no schools are denied accreditation, and 85% of Virginia’s schools continue to receive the state’s highest ranking while 60.7% and 64.8% of Virginia’s students [in] 3-8 grades failed or are barely proficient in reading and math,” he said.  

Accreditation is currently based on student performance across a set of nine indicators of educational assessments, racial/ethnic achievement gaps, absenteeism, and, for high schools, dropout rates, graduation rates, and college/career readiness.

As flawed as the ratings are as a measure of effectiveness, the 15-percent figure of schools falling short of full accreditation is the lowest since the State Board of Education revised the system in 2017. Last year, 12% of Virginia schools were accredited with conditions and in 2022, 10% of schools received that designation. Previous to that, accreditation was suspended due to the collapse in learning caused by COVID school shutdowns.

Under Governor Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s educational leaders devised excuses and rationales for refusing to recognize the obvious: that some Virginia schools were failure factories. Citing the close correlation between performance and the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition of the student body, educators argued it would be unfair to penalize schools for their demographic makeup. It would be counterproductive to deny accreditation to a school where students were showing progress under challenging conditions.

Essentially the thinking boiled down to this: acknowledging failure would make people feel bad. The self-esteem logic that created grade inflation for students was applied to schools as institutions. The result has been a disconnect between accreditation ratings and academic achievement as measured by the Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores and other assessments.

The system will change in the 2024-25 school year when VDOE adopts a new “accountability framework” enacted by the Virginia Board of Education last month. This new methodology, say its proponents, will better identify the public schools performing at the highest levels that can serve as “distinguished models for others,” as well as those schools in need of additional supports to help them strengthen students’ academic performance.

“As soon as I came into office, I committed to reverse the systematic lowering of standards and lack of transparency in Virginia’s education system,” Youngkin said. “As students struggle to recover from pandemic learning loss, it’s more important than ever to prioritize high expectations, transparency and accountability. We must be honest with ourselves that too many students and schools are not on track for success.”