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| State & Local Education News |
Virginia will take a wait-and-see approach on new education law
Roanoke Times
December 12, 2016
Virginia will likely take advantage of updated regulations that allow it to postpone implementing a new education law until the 2018-19 school year, State Superintendent Steven Staples said.
Initially, states were asked to submit plans for carrying out the Every Student Succeeds Act beginning in the fall of 2017. Final regulations released by the U.S. Department of Education last month allow states to push the start date back, and Staples said Virginia likely will use the additional time to refine its plans.
“We may not have to rush to get that plan in now,” Staples said.
The delay will also give state education leaders more time to see what direction the federal education department takes once president-elect Donald Trump takes office, Staples said. Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a Michigan education reformer supportive of charter schools and voucher programs, to serve as education secretary.
Virginia initially planned to submit a draft of its plans by March 1. The draft will likely come later in the spring, Staples said.
The Every Student Succeeds Act passed with bipartisan support in 2015 and replaces the No Child Left Behind Act, which called for annual testing in grades three through eight and required schools to show yearly improvement among all student subgroups.
The new law is an evolution of No Child Left Behind and not a complete departure from its goals. Overall, it was intended to give states more flexibility to determine their own accountability systems. At an education summit earlier this fall, Joan Wodiska, the vice president of the Board of Education, described the new law to legislators as an opportunity for Virginia and other states to show they can set high educational standards on their own.
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How long do school systems take for Winter Break?
We'll be heading into our own Winter Break here at CEPI, so we wanted to share with you our wishes for a happy holiday season and best wishes for the New Year. Compass Point will return on January 4th. And since in university circles, it's the high season for grading final papers and exams, we'll keep this week's Compass Point brief!
Taking a break from Compass Point got us thinking about the Winter Break for school systems in Virginia. Last fall we looked at the length of the 2014-15 winter break schedules as part of a larger look at school calendars and how start times compare to the traditional Labor Day opening. So we returned to the Virginia Department of Education site to pull information from this year and mapped it using Tableau Public (see image below or
click here for the interactive map.)
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In doing so, it was interesting to note that school systems don't report the beginning and end of Winter Break in a standard way. Shenandoah County looks particularly miserly in their winter break because, with Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, they report their break as extending from Dec. 26th to Dec. 30th (since we subtracted the start date from the end date in Excel, it shows up as 4 days). Yet a quick consultation of their website shows that when they say break ends on Dec. 30th, they mean that is the last day of the break. They also are off on January 2nd, but appear to have reported that observation of New Year's Day as separate from Winter Break. So take these lengths with a grain of salt and consult the actual school system website when actually planning your schedule.
That said, there is some obvious variation across the commonwealth. The shortest reported break is 4 days (though that should likely be counted more as a full week, as explained above.) The longest period reported is 19 days out in Norton City. The earliest start date for the Winter Break is Dec. 16th, while several school systems go all the way to Dec. 23rd before stepping out for the holidays. The latest reported return date is January 9th in Norton City and Danville City, though functionally this isn't any different than those systems that reported the end date as January 6th, assuming that the date was inclusive of the break, rather than the first day back.
Regardless, we hope your break, whenever it starts and however long it lasts, will be a happy one. Have a great week and happy New Year!
Sincerely,
CEPI
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