Tag: SOLs
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Don’t Forget the Dismal History SOL Pass Rates
by Carol J. Bova As the battle rages over the History and Social Science (HSS) Standards of Learning criteria — the State Board of Education decided earlier this month to delay its review of Youngkin administration revisions — it is worth noting how poorly Virginia students mastered the old standards. More than one-third of Virginia…
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Board of Education: Stick to Your Guns!
by James A. Bacon The Youngkin administration’s proposed revisions to the history and social-science Standards of Learning have run into a buzz saw of opposition from critics who claim the standards aren’t, for lack of a better word, “woke” enough. As The Washington Post summarizes the changes: “The new proposed version generally places less less…
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Lame Responses to Youngkin’s History SOL Standards
by James A. Bacon The Youngkin administration has laid out the thinking behind its revisions to the History and Social Studies Standards of Learning tests. The broad thrust is to educate students on how Virginia and the United States came to have the institutions they have. Underlying assumptions are that (1) representative government, property rights,…
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So Much for Burying the Dark Side of Virginia History
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has posted a new set of proposed goals for the teaching of civics, geography, and economics — the first major changes to the History and Social Science Standards of Learning since the existing standards were adopted in 2015. Critics have accused the Youngkin administration of…
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Surveying the Damage in K-12 Schools
by James A. Bacon Last month the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its Nation’s Report Card, which showed that the average math test scores declined by eight points nationally. It was difficult for most Americans to know what to make of the loss. The scores were an abstraction. How bad was the loss of…
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Dem Talking Points Emerge for Virginia’s Educational Meltdown
by James A. Bacon Democrats and the mainstream media were blindsided by the release of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data last week showing that 4th graders in Virginia experienced the greatest decline in learning between 2017 and 2022 of any state in the union. I conjectured that the evidence was so conclusive that…
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Virginia’s Test Scores at The Bottom of the Nation’s Steaming Heap
by Kerry Dougherty Geez. Who could have predicted this: Only one thing wrong with The New York Times reporting on yesterday’s horrifying report that showed the sharpest drop in national test scores in three decades. It’s this: the devastating failure of American education isn’t due to the pandemic.
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A “Catastrophic” Collapse in Virginia Test Scores
by James A. Bacon The big news today from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), which administers a common test for all 50 states, is that student test scores nationally saw stunning declines in math and reading over the past two years. The drop in math scores was the biggest decline ever recorded for…
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Graduation Inflation
by John Butcher The estimable Jim Bacon points out that the (already inflated: see below) graduation rate this year was higher than the pre-COVID 2019 rate, despite the effect of the pandemic and the government’s response to it. The Virginia Department of Education’s excellent new Cohort Graduation Build-A-Table provides a more nuanced look. The reports we see in the press…
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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…