VDOE's Dishonesty about Virginia's Math Scores (Part I)
How will VDOE use their Shocking Narrative to Upend Public Education?
On February 17, 2025 the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) made a shocking announcement:
“Virginia ranks 51st in the U.S. — behind all other states and Washington, D.C. — in math recovery from 2019 to 2024 for its performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an assessment known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”
News outlets around the commonwealth picked up the story and shared the news.
Legislators were quick to comment, but few asked how it was that Virginia that had long performed as well as or better than most states suddenly dropped to 51st?
The simple, obvious answer is Virginia did not drop to 51st.
In the actual profile report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it says, “In 2024, the average score in Virginia (275) was lower than those in 10 states/jurisdictions, higher than those in 24 states/jurisdictions, and not significantly different from those in 17 states/jurisdictions.“
Higher than those in 24 states is NOT 51st!
“We know where we want our children to be—on track and ready for life. But we can’t help them get there without being honest about where they are today,” said Secretary of VDOE, Aimee Guidera.
Secretary Guidera has accused Virginians of having an “honesty gap” with parents since the early days of her term in office, and insists her data methods are superior. Is she being honest?
So What Happened to Virginia Math Scores?
The report where the VDOE got the sound bite is titled “Pivoting from Pandemic Recovery to Long-Term Reform: A District Level Analysis,” which is authored by a group of educational economics professors, operating under Thomas Kane’s auspices at Harvard’s Center for Educational Policy Research (CEPR).
Thomas Kane has long been a proponent of charter schools, particularly related to middle school math. As early as 2009, he was writing positive reports on the idea of “school choice” and has continued to use Harvard’s policy institute and education-economics program to push for reform ever since.
The formulas for CEPR’s derived rankings are only partially based on the NAEP actual results, and are a change from NAEP’s long standing resistance to equating their basic and proficient scores with grade-level equivalencies. Yet, the authors created a new mathematical formula for standardizing the many types of state level tests with NAEP to create a “grade level formula.” As Dr. Marianne Burke pointed out in 2023, this Virginia administration and reform promoters has a pattern of Gaslighting Virginians about NAEP scores.
Is it a valid formula, when it ranks a state that scored better than 20 other states on the NAEP as 51st? Is it a valid formula when Virginia’s average scores have been consistently higher than the national average?
At the February 26-27, 2025 Board of Education meetings the Department laid out its most recent initiative to change the scoring bands for Standards of Learning tests. In it they renewed their attacks on the “honesty” of Virginia’s schools, and established that they will use NAEP “proficient” as the basis for SOL cut scores in spite of the fact “proficient” in NAEP terms is higher than “grade level” standards.
See Part II VDOE's Dishonesty about Skewing Assessment Scores To understand how changing cut scores will return to the department’s projected massive failure rates.
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