Opinion: Virginia’s New Accountability System Looks to Raise the Bar on Schools

In late August, Virginia took the final steps in adopting a tougher but more honest school accountability system.

Long championed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the project started from the premise that the existing state system used to evaluate school performance was not providing accurate information to parents or the public at large. In the wake of COVID-19, an analysis by Stanford and Harvard researchers found that Virginia students suffered larger academic declines than those in almost any other state. And yet, the percentage of schools that were identified as needing to improve barely budged, rising from only 7% to 10%.

As a consultant working on the state’s new School Performance and Support Framework, I’ve had a front-row view into the changes. Some of them are unique to Virginia. For example, the commonwealth used to operate two accountability systems, one for federal compliance purposes and the other the state accreditation system that everyone actually paid attention to. That added complexity, with extra data points and additional paperwork, and it meant that Virginia was running two parallel systems that sometimes agreed, but sometimes did not.

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Moreover, the state system was weak and purposefully obscured key data points. For example, rather than reporting student performance metrics separately and clearly, it used what it called a combined rate that added student achievement, progress and English proficiency rates into one overall measure, without a way to disentangle the three components.

Worse, the commonwealth made a series of decisions that hid the results of lower-performing student groups. In one particularly egregious example, it allowed school districts to exclude English learners from their ratings for up to 5½ years. Effectively, some schools were never held accountable for the learning outcomes of those students. When the state Department of Education counted those students, it found 35,000 marginalized kids who were being ignored.

The recent changes clean all that up. Newly arrived English learners will be tested and included after a one-year grace period, the maximum allowed under federal law. And Virginia will have one unified system that will reduce paperwork for school and district leaders and allow them to focus on one set of high-quality performance metrics. I’m also personally excited about a middle school math acceleration indicator , which will evaluate schools on whether they’re giving high-scoring students the chance to take algebra in eighth grade.

Will the new framework boost student performance? Well, that depends on a lot of factors, not least of which is whether state policymakers sustain and build on the new system over time. For example, the state Board of Education had a lot of debates over the last year about how much to weight student achievement versus student growth. Because growth was only partially included in the old system, this will be the first year that all schools will be held accountable for the growth of all their students. That’s a big deal, but the regulatory structure allows for changing that balance over time. It also depends on how parents and educators perceive the changes over time.

We officially called the new system a school performance and support framework because we were interested in accurately identifying schools that needed extra help, and we deliberately chose not to use A-F grades or use shaming language like “failing” schools. But time will tell if that original intent will stick and how the new system will be regarded once it becomes operational at the end of the current school year.

Research suggests that schools can and do respond to clear and transparent rating systems in ways that boost student outcomes in the short and long term. Last year, for example, a study came out that looked at the effects of a school accountability system South Carolina put in place in the year 2000. The authors found that high schools that were given a low accountability rating subsequently boosted attendance and achievement. More importantly, those benefits persisted: Kids who attended those schools had lower rates of criminal activity and were less likely to need welfare programs like food stamps throughout their 20s.

On the flip side, when states backed away from accountability a decade ago, it may have contributed to achievement declines and widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students. With attendance rates and achievement scores still well below where they were pre-COVID, now would seem like an especially important time to put these findings into practice. But in many parts of the country, policymakers are doing the opposite. New Mexico recently weakened its school accountability system, while Oklahoma and Wisconsin are relaxing their testing standards.

School districts adopted their own versions of lax grading standards during the pandemic, and, while grades have come down somewhat from their COVID highs, they remain elevated. Easier grading standards may boost student scores in the short run. But they can also depress student effort and cause kids to learn less over time.

And, as Paul Peterson noted in a recent piece for Education Next, the presidential campaigns are completely devoid of discussions of student learning results.

Virginia is bucking that trend. It’s trying to raise the bar on schools, and it’s betting that they can and will respond in ways that lead to improvements in student performance.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman helped write new accountability regulations for the commonwealth of Virginia. Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on The 74 ’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this essay.