Tag: SOLs
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Virginia’s Student “Growth” Model Stunts Achievement
by Matt Hurt Virginia’s system for accrediting public K-12 schools has engendered some concern since the release of school accreditation data on September 19. While students exhibited lower proficiency during the 2022 school year than in 2019, as measured by Standards of Learning test scores, the percentage of schools meeting the requirements for full accreditation…
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Addressing the Spiral Effect in Learning Loss
by Dr. Kathleen Smith During the COVID-19 pandemic educators did what they had to do in a short amount of time (five months in the case of Virginia) with little resources (extra funding came long after September of 2020) to keep kids learning through the 2020-2021 school year. A wholesale shift to remote and hybrid…
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Schrödinger’s Schools? Are Virginia’s Schools Good Or Not? Yes.
by Andrew Rotherham In the tiresome debate about our schools, here in Virginia and nationally, questions like “Are schools as good/bad as people say?” dominate. These are the wrong kind of questions. The big story of American education is variance — in everything from funding to outcomes. School performance is mixed overall and here in…
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Youngkin Admin Questions Value of School Accreditation Standards
by James A. Bacon A Virginia Department of Education press release issued yesterday contained a vitally important message: Virginia’s school accreditation standards are failing to do their job. Despite unprecedented learning losses during the COVID epidemic, the percentage of Virginia public schools meeting the standards fell from 92% pre-COVID to 89% post-COVID, a decline of…
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Some School Divisions Successfully Mitigated COVID Learning Losses in Math
by James C. Sherlock Congratulations are in order. Some school divisions, spread around the state, did a terrific job in mitigating mathematics learning losses during COVID. I picked math for its baseline importance in school and in life and the relative inability for students to advance in that subject without instruction, compared to reading and…
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Virginia Public Schools and Learning Losses – Part 1 – Winners and Losers
by James C. Sherlock This article is the first in a series about COVID-associated learning losses in Virginia public schools. The contribution I hope to make is to measure learning losses and correlating factors in each of 132 school divisions horizontally against its own pre-COVID learning assessment results. That is different than comparing Richmond to Falls…
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Another Way to Crunch the SOL Numbers…
For simplicity’s sake in recent posts about the 2021-22 Standards of Learning (SOL) results, I’ve used the pass rates for English reading tests as a proxy for all five subjects, including English writing, math, science, and history. Perhaps a better way to rate the performance of Virginia school districts would be to compute a composite…
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Can We Learn from the Lexington Outlier?
We can learn a lot from outliers. They draw attention to variables and correlations we may not have considered before. In researching the previous post, I came across this anomaly: in the City of Lexington, economically disadvantaged Blacks passed their Standards of Learning reading tests at a higher rate (83.3%) than Blacks who were not…