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Recent State and Local Education News
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Virginia again earns top special education rating
The Tidewater News
July 14, 2017
For a fifth consecutive year, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded Virginia its highest rating for improving outcomes for students with disabilities and for compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This information comes from Charles Pyle, director of communications for the Virginia Department of Education.
Virginia received a “Meets Requirements” designation on the federal department’s 2017 IDEA report card. The commonwealth earned the maximum number of possible points on all 10 compliance indicators — including in categories related to the identification of minority students for special education services and disciplinary actions — and on seven of the 14 performance-related indicators. The 2017 IDEA report cards are based on data from the 2014-2015 school year.
“This is recognition of the individual efforts of thousands of teachers, principals and support staff in our public schools who provide the instruction and the services Virginia students with disabilities need to achieve and thrive,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Steven R. Staples said. “It also reflects the commonwealth’s long-standing commitment to inclusion of students with disabilities and accountability for improving educational outcomes and transitions for students receiving special education services.”
Virginia Department of Education Reconsidering Standardized Testing, Accreditation
Reston Now
July 10, 2017
The Virginia Department of Education is considering changing the benchmarks required for graduation and school accreditation.
The board is looking at lowering the verified credit requirement for students to five credits for both standard and advanced diplomas. The credits would come from math, science, reading, writing and social studies courses.
The department has scheduled meetings to get the input of communities around the state. The first meeting was held recently in Fairfax County, the Fairfax Times reported.
Currently, students must earn nine verified credits for an advanced diploma and six credits for a standard diploma. Verified credits are earned in classes that culminate in a Virginia Standards of Learning exam, also referred to as the SOLs. |
Recent National Education News
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Campus Rape Policies Get a New Look as the Accused Get DeVos’s Ear
The New York Times
July 12, 2017
The letters have come in to her office by the hundreds, heartfelt missives from college students, mostly men, who had been accused of rape or sexual assault. Some had lost scholarships. Some had been expelled. A mother stumbled upon her son trying to take his own life, recalled Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education.
“Listening to her talk about walking in and finding him in the middle of trying to kill himself because his life and his future were gone, and he was forever branded a rapist — that’s haunting,” said Ms. Jackson, describing a meeting with the mother of a young man who had been accused of sexual assault three months after his first sexual encounter.
Majority of Republicans Say Colleges Are Bad for America (Yes, Really)
Newsweek
July 10, 2017
A Pew Research Center survey published Monday revealed voters have grown apart in their support of secondary education since the 2016 presidential election season, when a majority of Democratic and Republican Americans agreed the nation’s universities serve as a benefit for the U.S. Whereas 54 percent of Republicans said "colleges and universities had a positive impact on the way things were going in the country" in 2015, the majority now believe the opposite, with 58 percent saying such institutions negatively impact the state of the union.
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What changes are coming to Virginia in school accountability?
Two major policy shifts related to educational accountability are simultaneously working their way from policy makers to the local school house in Virginia. Both seek to maintain accountability while providing a greater range of metrics for success compared to a past sole reliance on a snapshot of performance by students on annual standardized tests.
The first shift originates at the federal level because of the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015. The law, which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act, sought to add flexibility to accountability metrics by mandating not only a snapshot of achievement, but also measures of student growth (i.e. did a student do better than last year on the standardized test), graduation rates and progress of the rapidly growing subset of English Language Learners (ELLs) towards English proficiency. Each state was given greater flexibility to propose both precise metrics and ambitious standards. For running updates on how various states are approaching this flexibility, see
The 74 blog's ESSA page.
Virginia recently released its proposal. The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (not affiliated with CEPI) recently provided
a summary of the proposed measures on their Halfsheet blog, alongside a note regarding the
series of public hearings scheduled to gather public feedback on the proposal before the final version is submitted to the federal Dept. of Education on September 18th. Among the elements the highlighted are:
- Virginia will continue to use Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, specifically reading and math, to track academic achievement, but also progress.
- Virginia’s focus is to close the achievement gap between groups of students, requiring not only the overall student body to have a sufficient pass rate, but also that sub-groups such as economically disadvantaged students and ELLs also meet similar benchmark pass rates. Including these sub-groups as key accountability metrics will likely focus more attention and resources on their educational opportunities. (If you want to see what the 2016 gaps were between all students and specific sub-groups, check out pages 8-10 of the Virginia Board of Education's
2016 annual report.)
- ESSA specifies at least one non-academic indicator be chosen to measure school quality - Virginia is proposing chronic absenteeism, which they define as a student missing 10 percent or more of the school year.
Parallel to its ESSA mandated accountability proposal, Virginia also is changing the basis for accrediting public schools. A school being denied accreditation often triggers state intervention. (The map below shows the percentage of schools in each locality in Virginia that were fully accredited in 2016 under the old system - schools not fully accredited could receive partial accreditation or be denied completely - to explore the map in more detail, click on it or
here).
The Virginia Board of Education voted in June to propose revised standards for accreditation (here is
a link to the full 52 page technical language.) Diane Atkinson, chair of the board’s Committee on School and Division Accountability, wrote
an op-ed in the July 13 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, explaining the planned shifts. As with the shifts mandated by ESSA, accreditation will now include metrics other than standardized test performance, including "outcomes such as student growth, achievement gaps, dropout rates, and chronic absenteeism." Feedback on these proposed revisions to the standards of accreditation is also being sought in the
same set of public hearings mentioned above.
Given these shifts and the increased importance of demonstrated English proficiency among English Language Learners, we wanted to reach back in our polling archive and share the results of a question we asked in 2015-16. Because parental involvement is a key contributor to student success and many ELL students have parents who are not English proficient, we asked the public whether they would favor more state funds being used to make sure such parents are able to get information in a language they can fully understand.
See below for the results.
We also wanted to share the news that in collaboration with the Office for Public Policy Outreach here at the Wilder School's Center for Public Policy, we'll be fielding and reporting out the results of a summer version of our poll, including several questions about accountability standards. Stay tuned for a detailed release of the results in August.
In the mean time, we hope you're finding ways to stay cool in the July heat!
Sincerely,
CEPI
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Poll Spotlight - Increased state funding for communication with parents of English Language Learners
Similar to the challenge of delivering quality education in high-poverty areas, there are unique challenges to working with a higher percentage of English language learners in schools, whether the learner is a student in the classroom or the parent of a student coming in for a parent-teacher conference. Our 2015-16 poll (conducted in December 2015) gauged public perception on whether they favored more state funds being used to increase parental access to information about their child’s education in a language they understood.
As shown in the chart above, a majority of respondents (61%) support more state funds being used to make sure that parents with limited English have information about their child’s education in a language they can understand.
Younger cohorts were more supportive with 78% of those aged 18-34 being supportive, compared to 61% of 35-44 year olds, 51% of 45-64 year olds and 50% of those 65 years and older. Minority respondents (74%) were more likely than white respondents (54%) to support more funding being used to facilitate communication to parents in languages other than English.
Support varied by education level as well as with those with a college degree or more (70%) being more supportive than those with some college (53%) or a high school diploma or less (58%). Finally there were also significant partisan differences with support among Democrats (73%) being very similar to Independents (69%) while only 46% of Republicans expressed support for such a policy.
A copy of the full results of the 2015-16 Commonwealth Education Poll is available at
http://cepi.vcu.edu/publications/polls/.
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