Bacon's Rebellion

Virginia Democrat Wants SOLs Offered in Foreign Languages

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by

James A. Bacon
in ,

by Kerry Dougherty

Image credit: ChatGPT

Hey Virginians, remember that $1.2 billion surplus in the state budget that Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been trying to return to taxpayers?

Unsurprisingly, Democrats in Richmond are finding ways to spend it. All of it.

Take State Sen. Barbara Favola, for instance. Please.

She’s introduced SB753, a measure guaranteed to cost a bundle.

The bill would require Virginia to administer the statewide standardized tests known as SOLs in languages other than English, despite the fact the ENGLISH is the official language of the commonwealth.

“Requires (i) the Board of Education to develop Standards of Learning assessments in native languages other than English that are most commonly spoken in the Commonwealth; (ii) each school board to make available any such native language assessment to any English language learner student who speaks any such language natively and is identified as having limited English proficiency; (iii) the English language learner faculty at any such student’s school to make the final determination as to whether administration of any such native language assessment is appropriate; and (iv) the provisions of the bill to be implemented by the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year. Finally, the bill directs the Department of Education to submit to the U.S. Department of Education by August 1, 2025 any amendments to its consolidated plan under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act, that are necessary to implement its provisions.”

Good Lord. Do you suppose the Democrat from Arlington knows just how many languages are spoken by students in Virginia schools?

I do.

According to the Virginia Department of Education there are 117,000 students enrolled in English as a Second Language programs in public schools. There is no data on how many of these students are in the country illegally. Continue reading.

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8 responses to “Virginia Democrat Wants SOLs Offered in Foreign Languages”

  1. f/k/a_tmtfairfax Avatar
    f/k/a_tmtfairfax

    What a terrible thing to happen to immigrant students. English is the national language and is also essentially the new lingua franca. Children living in the United States who aren't fluent in English will have a harder time being successful than children who do.

    This is also an act of bigotry as many Americans' ancestors and their descendants were not native English speakers but learned English. Why are some more recent immigrants held to the same standard?

  2. Eric the half a troll Avatar
    Eric the half a troll

    Gotta keep those immigrants down, eh Kerry?!

  3. Lefty665 Avatar
    Lefty665

    English is the language of the nation. If you cannot communicate in english you will not succeed in America. It is that simple. We have a huge problem with even citizen kids not learning basic english and math that stunts their lives. If anything add an indicator to SOLs that will let us tell how well english language learners are learning the language. That benchmark will let us measure, and hopefully improve, effectiveness of programs teaching kids to use the language.

    Offering SOLs in other languages is sheer idiocy. Clearly there are no standards of learning for some politicians in Virginia.

  4. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    There are two sides to this issue. On the one hand, I agree that it is important that immigrant students become proficient in English as soon as possible. On the other hand, the purpose of the SOLs is to measure the student's grasp of the subject matter. If a student recently arrived in the United States from another country has to take the science SOL, for example, and gets a low score, that score may be more attributable to his poor knowledge of English than to his knowledge of the subject.

    I suspect that this legislation grew out of Northern Virginia's unhappiness with the decision by the state to shorten the time that English learners have to demonstrate proficiency in English before their SOL scores are included in the computation of the locality's overall score. https://www.ffxnow.com/2024/09/09/fcps-leaders-criticize-states-new-school-evaluation-system-citing-resource-gaps/

  5. Nancy Naive Avatar
    Nancy Naive

    “Good Lord. Do you suppose the Democrat from Arlington knows just how many languages are spoken by students in Virginia schools?
    I do.”

    Well, how many languages do they speak? 3? 4? Cough it up, man! Curious minds want to know.

  6. Nancy Naive Avatar
    Nancy Naive

    Almost EVERY nation on the planet is multilingual. Some with significant portions of their populace speaking the second language. Some of those countries have different official languages in different parts of the country. For example, Spanish ain’t Spanish everywhere in Spain.

    Why, by golly, even here ‘bouts in ol’ Virginny, y’all speaks funny.

  7. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    What I got out of the reporting was that ESL kids , still learning English may not do well on some subjects (that they actually know the content) because they still do not yet have a complete grasp of English.

    The idea is to ask them the questions in their native language and see if they do better on the SOLs.

    This primarily in the early grades if not mistaken.

    That's the entire purpose of the SOLs – to know the subject.

    One approach is to given them time by not testing them until…
    and the other would be to test them but in their own language.

    The fly-in-the-ointment is that if they don't understand English when taking the SOLs , why would they be expected to actually LEARN the subject if it is taught in English int the first place.

    None of this should stop the state from moving forward on a general basis, now that they have essentially exposed the existing academic performance shortfalls on a demographic basis with regard to race, i.e. the race "gap" , ergo the Honesty Gap.

    Now we know, what's the plan for addressing this? So far, crickets.

  8. Clarity77 Avatar
    Clarity77

    Of course it is once again a democRAT advocating policy that serves not to unite but rather to divide our country. Just like their Confederate forebears before, the end effect being the balkanization of our nation into groups hostile to each other. Once again demonstrable insanity, and exhibiting a total lack of common sense.

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