There are many unanswered questions and grave concerns about these changes, especially in more rural parts of the state, like where I am in SW Virginia.

We’ve not been told the cost of implementation and how much, if any, additional funding the state is planning to provide to ensure small class sizes and enough experienced teachers are in every school in the state not meeting your new mark of success.

It appears the VA DOE is conveniently ignoring the 2023 JLARC study detailing the systemic underfunding of Virginia’s public schools and placing further unfunded mandates on financially struggling localities.

Too, this appears to be an over-simplified grading system that disregards variables out of the control of public schools, like poverty and home and community life. The high stakes, standardized tests this administration is fixated on never tell the full story about a student, teacher, or school.

The DOE has used the term "honesty gap" when referring to state test scores but the truth is, NAEP and SOL tests are very different from one another and lumping them together creates an apples-to-oranges comparison. For example, proficient on the NAEP test is above grade level and the test isn't given to all students in the state. 

This rush job of an initiative further elucidates a problem we have in education: Just when teachers hit their strides in implementing a program, people removed from the classroom decide to change it.

It’s illogical to expect students who don’t speak English well to perform at the same level as students whose first language is English. The BOE isn’t listening to ELL teachers across the state who’ve shared this concern in much greater detail.

These changes will likely have a domino effect on under-resourced communities when parents decide to eschew the schools in them, further removing desperately needed funding and resources from them.

For good reason, many believe this is more about promoting school choice than about ensuring a quality education for Virginia’s 1.26 million public school students. If we label public schools as failures, they can be privatized for profit and religious purposes. We can confidently infer that almost everyone in favor of these changes is also pro-school choice.