Four Reasons the Governor’s Accountability Framework Should NEVER Be Implemented

The question of what makes a good school has never been more complicated, and questions like “What are we educating students for?” have never been more relevant. Those are questions Virginia educators have long asked. Unfortunately, the most recently proposed answers from the Governor and Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) are not what kids, grads, or Virginia need. 

There are four important reasons the Governor’s VDOE School Performance and Support Framework (Framework) should never be implemented.

1. It reduces the time and quality of instruction

The Governor’s VDOE Framework hampers and diminishes instructional time and the quality of the instruction that can be delivered in K-12 schools. Already administering the SOLs takes approximately 5 weeks of the instructional year. New growth assessments implemented in the last couple of years add testing windows in fall and spring, and the VALSS which replaces PALS assesses K-3rd reading in each of the early years. The Framework’s 5th grade 8th grade, and new 3E assessments which will include various career and technology evaluations such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) will add to the testing load. Assessments can be expected to continue to proliferate as VDOE chooses and will add to the already staggering level of tests and reporting. 

Any system wide or large scale new programs should be required to enhance instruction and increase class learning time, not decrease it.

For 30 years we have relied on multiple choice testing as the primary measure of student achievement and school quality. Sadly that policy has not accomplished any of the stated goals for using it. 

Even the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) acknowledges that their methodology has not moved the needle on student achievement to a statistically significant degree. Even if we are to accept that their methodology is valid, standardized testing and mass assessment has been particularly ineffective when it comes to the most vulnerable students, particularly around what has been called the “achievement gap.”

Yet, the Governor and VDOE adamantly persist in implementing a Framework that creates an entirely new layer of assessments at 3rd, 5th, 8th, and in high school. 

How much education time will that take away from our students?

2. It narrows student curricula and choices

The Framework places restrictions that narrow rather than expand curriculum choices. The VDOE website insists that their 3E’s readiness Framework adds more options for students. However, at this time, students can select individual explorations to sample different fields of interest from music to computers, or from cars to cosmetology or other interests and career possibilities across 17 fields Virginia schools provide. Their elective choices belong to them. By adding the 3E’s, students from middle school onward will be tracked into one of three categories: 

• Enrollment (College or trade school),

• Enlistment (Military), or

• Employment (Work).

The decision about “what do I want to do with my life,” will effectively be moved earlier for the next generation by at least 5 years--to 12 and 13 year-olds.

Forget students deciding for themselves. Their paths for life will be decided by the state and guidance counselors, with the approval of a parent when they are in 7th grade. Their career choices will be streamlined to one goal, in an employment landscape that predicts they will hold multiple jobs, even multiple careers across their work life. 

3. It subverts the mission of public education

The Framework is destructive to schools’ primary missions of knowledge, skills, and civic understanding. The Framework shifts the entire purpose of K-12 Education towards an education whose primary purpose is to determine a particular career, and create workers. The increased assessments make sure early career choice and lock-in will be the focus. The Framework neglects any subject field that does not provide immediate workforce supply for existing, mostly regional, companies. That approach will reduce study of any fields that uphold and inform immensely important areas of civil, family, and personal lives, including entrepreneurship, small business skills, and creative fields (e.g., theater, visual arts, music).

The Framework’s calculations of quality at the school level has very specific requirements and penalties. For instance for student performance to count a full point in VDOE’s readiness ratings students in each category must either complete a CTE credential in a specific field the state selects as high needs, or get an ASVAB score of 65 or higher, or take 3 college credit courses and score B or better in each. Anything less will negatively impact their school on the school’s performance ratings from 1.0 for that student to .75 (or lower) in the calculations.

As a result, this structure will create incentive for schools to direct kids into programs that will provide better school ratings rather than better choices for the individual student.

The Governor has created an entirely new office in the state government for the sole purpose of collecting data to orient the K to college Virginia Education systems toward an employment-only set of goals. It’s called the Virginia Office of Education Economics, (VOEE). VOEE will choose which careers will be eligible for students to gain credit for their school. Given the proliferation of reports and dashboards the VOEE has been producing, it is likely it will become an embedded and expensive way to measure what our children are not learning by giving them tests that satisfy employers, but students don’t need–unless they are applying for an entry-level minimum wage job at the local mass employer. 

The Accountability portion of the Framework will be of little or no use to increase learning. The ratings have gone through several naming conventions due to public outcry. They have changed from actual grades to colors (red, yellow, green and blue) to finally Distinguished, On Track, Off Track and Needs Intensive Support. 

Though the names have changed, the policies and intent behind them have not been altered. The VDOE’s own projections reveal categories that will sort schools into categories that have more to do with socio-economic status of neighborhoods than school quality. 

An analysis of the VDOE projections reveals that: 

• “Distinguished” labels will apply mostly to schools in more affluent communities. “Schools labeled as Distinguished spend over $1,000 more per student on average in state and local funding than schools labeled as ‘Needs Intensive Support.’” 

• While “Off Track” and “Needs Intensive Support” will become the category for alternative, remedial, working class, and working poor Title 1 schools. 

• “Teacher vacancy rates in Needs Intensive Support schools are five times higher than in Distinguished schools. Nearly 1 in 5 teaching positions in Needs Intensive Support schools are either vacant or filled by provisionally licensed teachers, compared to just 1 in 15 in Distinguished schools.”

These categories have been confirmed by the VDOE’s own projections of which schools will receive each rating. 

That means the VDOE accountability and accreditation Framework will only serve to reinforce the mental health problems and deprivation of less affluent communities, and bolster housing and economic cycles that have led to segregation and housing shortages Analysis reveals that “Nearly 7 in 10 students in Needs Intensive Support schools are students of color. The share of English Learner (EL) students in Needs Intensive Support schools is more than double that of Distinguished schools.” 

Although there have been recent increases in state school funding, state budgets continue to exist with a status quo between schools that get support and those that don’t, which keeps us below the national average on most funding points.

This long standing underfunding of public schools is answered in the Governor’s Framework by a School Improvement grant system in which schools with low ratings must apply for a grant that can only give them up to $500 per student, which will likely provide less than it takes to pay for the bureaucracy of the reports and forms and agreements they must create and monitor. To fund these grants, the VDOE plans to use funds allocated to the school by the federal ESSA program, but the locality will have to apply to the state for the money allocated to them by the federal government.

4.  It adds expensive bureaucracy, not instruction

What the Framework calls “support” consists predominantly of management consultants. The VDOE’s plan describes “innovation” and exciting new designs, but a deeper look reveals strategies that have been used over the last 30 years to prove schools are underperforming rather than helping schools meet the needs of their students. The bulk of the Governor’s proposed funding will go to specialists and outside managers, not to classroom resources and in-school staff.

The resulting “support” does not address the “how” of resolving real instructional needs, achievement gaps or meeting the challenges of the changing work and culture landscape. Instead it tackles how to manage the teachers and students so they deliver the numbers VDOE wants. Notably, this method of “consult and break” has been used for years with dire results in other states as a means to disrupt and shift from local management to privatized school and commercial district managers. 

It would be detrimental to the state and to our children to implement an infrastructure that does not meet the needs of now nor correct the missteps of the past. 

The History of Education

Mass education in the public schools of the 20th century accomplished great feats for humanity: reducing disease, increasing lifespan, raising economic potential for most countries of the world, and exploding the potential of human creativity in every field by educating all students in our sciences, social sciences, and arts to a level once reserved for only elites. 

The early 21st century has already almost broken that incredible progress and the schools that created it. Now, if the schools of the near future are to survive and prepare children for their whole lives, not just their 9 to 5 life, we must abandon the stress, break, and punish models of the last 30 years and ask much deeper questions about what is necessary for our children and our human societies to be healthy and thriving, and how to design that success. 

The Future of Education

The currently accelerating speed-of-change is one of the more pressing reasons we cannot opt for an old fashioned, "train them to make buggy whips in 1910" kind of choice. AI, technology, and a changing economic landscape is altering faster than companies can keep up. As Forbes put it, “In 2030 there will be 30 Technology Companies by 2050 there will be 10.” The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2027 44% of workers' core skills will be changed or disrupted and 41% of companies will have reduced their work forces.

The 2028 graduates who entered high school in fall of 2024 will already be entering a changed job market. It is not that we shouldn’t equip students to hold jobs, but that we must be more deliberate and cautious and simultaneously more discerning and insightful than Governor Youngkin’s and the VDOE plans allow. 

Certainly Governor Youngkin’s hastily designed and deliberately destructive Framework, which seeks to prove one more time that the schools which have given us so much are failing, will not give our students and Virginia the thriving future they deserve. 

There are currently bills in both the House and Senate to call for a review and report on the controversial revision of the school performance accountability system. 

Take Action Now

Please take action on both bills.

• Tell Delegates in the House of Delegates Education Committee to Vote YES on HB 2118 to require fair and equitable evaluations of public schools and improve student growth and learning outcomes across the Commonwealth.

• Tell your Legislators to Vote YES on SB979 to require fair and equitable evaluations of public schools.

However, between this session and next year, we need to do more than just delay. We need to make a new and better plan that gives the children and youth of Virginia a chance at their dreams.