Governor Youngkin’s Big Initiatives Stumble Yet Again

Delays and Mistakes Plague Youngkin's History Standards

About three weeks ago, on March 14th, Governor Youngkin’s second Virginia Superintendent of Instruction, Lisa Coons, resigned suddenly. Within a week, Governor Youngkin had appointed Coons’ deputy Emily Anne Gullickson as his third Superintendent in as many years. Gullickson is an Arizonan. Arizona is known for being 51st in education and having blanket vouchers which have blown a hole in the state budget. Gullickson is noted for having founded a pro-privatization non-profit named “A for Arizona.” 

For weeks, speculation had been circulating among education stakeholders as to when the instructional guidelines for Virginia’s latest History standards would be released–each week came with another promise of “soon” as history teachers anxiously waited for the materials. With past updates, guidelines and substantial resources were provided well in advance to give teachers a chance to prepare students for the different standards, new test questions, and changed formulas, thus insulating students from sudden and unnecessary failures.

The 2023 History standard revisions date back to Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order One and his decree that he would “restore excellence” to Virginia schools “without the influence of inherently divisive concepts.” But the reality was very different.

His first Superintendent (Jillian Balow) and Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera threw out a draft of the history standards which had been two years in preparation, included robust incorporation of parental and historian input, and which were ready to go. Instead of adopting the draft, in October 2022, the administration commissioned a secret rewrite. What they substituted was a haphazardly drafted and highly controversial Hillsdale-esque version that took out many Black, Asian, immigrant, and women’s contributions to Virginia’s history, and inserted both developmentally inappropriate and sequentially problematic topics. 

After a vocal uprising from parents, stakeholders, history teachers, and historians, the initial Youngkin drafts were withdrawn and a not-quite-so-terrible, compromised set of standards was approved by the Virginia Board of Education (VBOE) in April 2023. 

Now, almost two years later, on March 26, 2025, Emily Anne Gullickson, the 3rd Superintendent in as many years, delivered her first presentation to the VBOE. In it, she promised the guideline documents necessary to implement those standards will be rolled out week by week across April 2025. 

Each set of standards are mandated to be updated every 7 years. The Northam administration finished timely revisions of the History SOL in December 2021. Due to Youngkin’s unnecessary delay, we are now 10 years beyond when the 2015 History standards should have been revised. 

Rumors as to why they are still not out and are so late have included talk of the need to conform the standards to Trump’s most recent anti-DEI Executive Orders. At the March VBOE work session board member Anne Holton asked outright what happened, but Gullickson’s response, that they had been adding resources, left more questions than answers. 

Adding to the confusion, during the delay, the VDOE once again removed Indigenous People’s Day from the materials. It has since been added back in, but the change calls into question Gullickson’s assertions that they were only “adding resources.”

In a letter co-signed by 12 organizations, the Virginia Social Studies Leadership Consortium asked VDOE to delay implementation of the standards for another year because Virginia’s teachers will not be able to prepare in time for the roll out in August of 2025. However, the department still plans to implement them in the coming year (2025-26) 

There are three signature initiatives that Governor Youngkin believed would cement his reputation as the “education governor” and substantially overhaul the whole K-12 system. They are:

• Changing the core subject Standards of Learning to more reflect business and socially conservative values.

• Establishing school choice through Lab Schools and Private school Vouchers called Education Savings Accounts, and

• Creating the new Support Framework for Accreditation and Accountability, which would be “honest” about student and school failures. The Framework includes changing the curriculum tracks and the scoring formulas for all K-12 subjects.

Besides the rewriting of the History and Social Studies standards, in the first two years of the Governor’s tenure, the VBOE has changed the Math and English Language sets of standards.

• Though the Math standards were announced as implemented in Fall 2024, approved textbooks and materials were not approved by the VBOE until March of 2025, a short 5 weeks before actual SOL testing was to begin. Once again Youngkin left teachers and students without the necessary materials or time to perform well. 

• The English Language Standards were similarly changed a year ago, March 28, 2024 to be implemented during the 2024-25 academic year, with video support being released on February 12, 2025, a week and a half into the second semester of the implementation year. 

When they reach implementation, the Accountability Framework initiatives promise to be the deepest and most disruptive changes in Virginia’s K-12 education system since the introduction of the Standards of Learning and their yearly state tests under Governor George Allen in 1997.

Like the Standards changes, the School Performance and Support Framework was originally to be implemented the 2024-25 Academic year, then was postponed to begin data collection in January of 2025, but now is scheduled to roll out along with two new sets of standards, and an untitled change in score formulations in Fall of 2025.

Aimee Guidera, the Secretary of Education who came to Virginia from Minnesota and her DC data collection business, has very much been involved in these last two Frameworks. The goal is to completely remake middle school and high school curricula and testing toward three tracks students will choose in 7th and 8th grades (Post HS schooling, Work, or Military) and raise the cut scores of the state tests to meet or exceed Proficient on the NAEP, the federal test given every three years to a relatively small sample of students. NAEP’s Proficient score has long been established as a performance score above grade level. The expectation is once again that close to 70% of students will not meet the new cut scores and increased difficulty of the new tests, created for the newly established standards requirements.

Although the VDOE is currently staffed with approximately 25 people over the legal staffing limit, much of the Governor’s flagship initiatives have been developed by privatization consultant groups, some from outside Virginia, rather than by the VDOE or the numerous experts within Virginia’s highly regarded universities. However, several of the VBOE members appointed by Youngkin have a vested interest in the History Standards project, having long standing relationships with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute of Ohio and DC, which was involved in the development of the standards 

The Governor’s proposed budget amendments which would have funded much of his agenda. He called for $50 million to fund his Accountability Framework implementation, $15 million to fund his lab schools, and private school vouchers for an additional 5,000 students at $5,000 each or a total of $25 million. Fortunately, on April 2 in a one day session, the legislature rejected most of his budget changes. 

Many questions remain as the Governor, his VBOE, third Superintendent, and his data analysis Secretary approach their last nine months in office. 

• Will the guidelines tailored to meet President Trump’s anti-DEI directives actually follow the compromise History standards approved in April 2023, or push them farther back toward the mostly-white, “patriotic” history Youngkin originally tried to get approved? 

• Will the Accountability Frameworks set to fail a majority of Virginia’s students and communities reach implementation and be permanently established? 

• How hard will it be for the new Governor in January of 2026 and senior staff to deal with the fall out of 70% failure rates created by Governor Youngkin and his appointees? 

There is little to be gained for Governor Youngkin and his appointees by implementing these last initiatives other than contriving a false proof of their earlier assertions that Virginia’s students and schools are not performing well. Yet, it is likely that neither the highly pro-privatization VBOE nor Governor Youngkin’s appointees will change course unless they are forced to.

Time is closing in for both Youngkin’s agenda and for Virginia to avoid the threat those plans pose to Virginia school children and teachers.