Far from “punishing” poor kids, as John is well aware, the revised SOLs simply exposed the true gap in learning that was taking place. “There is one obvious conclusion: Before the new tests, ED students did not perform as well as their more affluent peers,” John wrote. ” The new tests magnify that deficit.”
In a sense, the tests do punish school districts with large populations of economically disadvantaged kids. They look worse by comparison under the current testing regime. The Virginia Board of Education, he noted, abandoned a metric, Student Growth Percentiles, that measured students’ academic progress, creating an avenue for districts with a large percentage of poor kids to shine. I can’t begin to imagine why state officials jettisoned that measure.