The county has had a Head Start and VPI program for several years, but this new VPI+, which is set to start in September, will allow more children to receive preschool services.

While the Head Start and VPI programs were funded by state and local dollars in the past, this new preschool initiative will help the county to provide programs without as much financial strain, according to Phil Kavits, the Director of Communication Services for Prince William County Schools.

In a message sent to thousands of teachers Tuesday, Deputy Superintendent Steven Lockard detailed a series of proposals under consideration to revamp how teachers hand out grades to students and to standardize exam scores across the county.

Brian Davison has pressed for the data’s release because he thinks parents have a right to know how their children’s teachers are performing, information about public employees that exists but has so far been hidden. He also wants to expose what he says is Virginia’s broken promise to begin using the data to evaluate how effective the state’s teachers are.

The document was signed in Washington D.C. by the Subsecretary for North America Sergio Alcocer and the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Evan Ryan.

On Tuesday, Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives released a spending blueprint that would freeze the maximum Pell Grant for 10 years and roll back some recent expansions of the program. On Wednesday they revealed that their plan would also abolish the in-school interest subsidy on Stafford loans, reverse a recent expansion of income-based repayment, and end public-sector loan forgiveness.

Those cuts in the federal student-loan programs don’t appear in a budget document that the House Budget Committee released on Tuesday. But when Rep. Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, asked during a markup session on Wednesday if such changes were assumed in the measure, a committee aide confirmed that they were.

Charter schools are a relatively new innovation in education. The first opened only in 1992 in Minnesota but by 1994, funding that could be used to support charter schools was included in federal legislation.  Over two decades the number of charter schools grew (map below is based on 2009-10 figures).

The general concept - creating an alternative school with public funds that parents can choose instead of their neighborhood schools which in turn should increase competition and effective educational practices - is both rooted in economic theory and simple as an assumption.  But establishing whether the theory holds, or if charters themselves are effective, is more difficult. As the Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post observed separating fact from fiction on charter schools can be difficult - especially if the speaker has an interest in the outcome.

A range of research on the topic includes:

• a 2010 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, which found that charters were no more or less effective than traditional schools
• a Boston Foundation report on charter schools' impact on college readiness among Boston charter students that found improvements on SAT performance, rates of AP test taking and performance on graduation gateway exams.
• a 2013 Stanford Univ. study that drew on data from 26 states and concluded that that closing of a number of low-performing charter schools resulted in improvement of the group as a whole. In aggregate, charters achieved similar performance on mathematics among students (they had trailed significantly in a 2009 report) and achieved better performance on reading among students. Broken down, 25% of charters performed better than traditional peers on measures of reading acheivement, 56% showed no difference in performance and 19% were worse. For mathematics, 29% were better, 40% were similar and 31% were weaker.
• The 2015 Stanford study which found that students in urban charters in 26 cities outperformed similar peers in public schools on reading assessments while in 11 urban areas, charter school students underperformed public school peers.  Charters in San Francisco, Boston, DC and Newark, NJ were cited as producing some of the best results compared to peers. 

There also are various opinions on what drives the relative success of charter schools.  One writer argued recently that a key factor is how careful education authorities are in providing approvals and having oversight - the more careful the process, the better the results.  

There was some variance in this along income and racial lines. 

Respondents with family income between $50-100K were most likely to say they would choose a charter school (14%), followed by those with family incomes over $100K (9%) and those with family income below $50K (6%).  

White respondents were more likely to say they would select charters or homeschooling (9% and 8% respectively) than were minority respondents (5% and 2% respectively).  A majority of minority respondents selected regular public schools (57%) while only 48% of whites said they would select public schools. 

While the low percentages selecting charters may indicate limited current demand for more charter schools, it's also possible to say that there is likely unmet demand for charters in Virginia.  If we consider that 8% of Virginia's 2013 PK-12 enrollment (1,273,211) wanted to go to a charter school, that would equal a demand of more than 101,000 students - significantly more than are currently served by six schools with capacity of under 1,000. 

(To read the full results of the poll, visit our website. Question 15 is the question cited above on school type choice - topline results are on page 32; crosstabs are on page 60.)