On Wednesday August 28, the Virginia Board of Education will hold a Special Session to consider the Statewide Comprehensive Support Plan. The Plan proposes the requirements that will be imposed on schools and districts when they do not meet the Board’s new rules for accreditation and accountability.
Despite significant outcry, the board approved the new rules for schools, the School Performance and Support Framework, at their July 24 meeting. The Board projects that under the new performance plan 60% of Virginia public schools will be rated as low-performing or failing, in spite of Virginia’s still high national ratings. Virginia public schools ranked 4th when Youngkin took office. Most recently they were rated best in the nation by CNBC.
The Statewide Comprehensive Support Plan will require schools in Tier 3, those in the 60% deemed low performing, to sign a custom designed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) which will in essence give Youngkin state control over the daily running and conduct of the school. Sixty percent of Virginia’s schools can, at the state’s discretion, be taken over based on the VDOE’s time-line by September 2025. According to the VDOE plan, schools will be reported for not conforming, and will be required to sign MOU’s by that date one year from now.
Currently, Virginia has only five districts which operate under MOU agreements. Most are economically distressed zones which have strived for decades to gain higher performance levels. Thus, such a large-scale take-over plan is unprecedented. Calculating the 60% estimate, based on Ballotpedia’s listing of numbers of schools and students, the new policy could impact over 1,000 schools and over 75,000 students across Virginia.
Though carte-blanche school take-over plans have been used in other states, they have occurred mostly where legislatures passed legislation to authorize such an invasive action. The Virginia legislature has not passed such a bill, nor has JLARC, the research arm of the legislature, recommended bills initiating such changes. The Youngkin VDOE is once again bypassing authorization from the elected legislators for enormous changes in how Virginia’s highly respected public schools will be administered.
Under the new policies, districts which have one-quarter of their schools labeled as failing under the new VDOE regulations will be required to agree to MOU which implements takeover for the entire district, not just individual “underperforming” schools.
The Performance and Support Framework cuts services for Multilingual Learners from 11 semesters to 3, effectively requiring them to take English Language exams long before academic language fluency can be met. Many researchers project that it takes 3 to 5 years for English language learners to reach conversational fluency and 3 to 7 for academic fluency. Three semesters is a radical expectation, likely to produce large scale school wide failures for Virginia’s high diversity districts. The test scores resulting from this change are likely to put highly diverse schools in the troubled or failing category.
Also, the new regulations increase the number of reporting levels. The changes will most affect students who meet the PASS standard in SOL levels. That level will be divided into Proficient, Basic, Below Basic. Proficient is a term from the national NAEP which is above grade level performance, but it is unclear how the Proficient level (or any of these levels) will be calibrated for Virginia students. This leaves schools with a moving target for testing goals. If Proficient is used as the required standard for pass rates, more schools will be caught in the “failing” net while being held to above grade-level requirements.
From Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order 1 on day one, to last week when he misrepresented SOL scores in a surprise, unvetted release of partial scores, the Governor has been attacking Virginia’s public schools. His appointments to the department and the board of education have almost universally gone to people whose day jobs advocate for privatization of Virginia’s schools, and they have acted as might be expected.
Each attempted policy change by Youngkin, from teacher tattle lines, to whitewashing Virginia history, to banning books, and creating Lab Schools as backdoor charters, has failed, creating more chaos, confusion, and cost than positive learning impact.
This scheme to take over 60% of Virginia’s schools in one year cannot be allowed to move forward. Youngkin and his allies cannot be allowed to strangle the futures of Virginia’s children for the sake of greed and politics.
Please message the Board of Education with your response to their plan via any (or all!) of these methods below.
Signup to speak at the 8/28/24 9am Board of Education
Send your written comments to Board of Education.
Contact your state legislators to let them know how you feel!