I am reaching out to support of the updates to the regulations Establishing Standards for Accrediting Public Schools in Virginia.

The system for determining accreditation and accountability for schools is broken. After years of statistics that show test scores and other metrics falling following the unnecessarily prolonged closures of schools, under the current system most of Virginia's schools are still magically found to be top performers. It's a laughable shell game that fails to provide transparency to families, and fails out students by pretending that everything is going so well, when it is obvious to everyone we have significant challenges that need to be acknowledged and addressed. We don't help our students by pretending most schools are top performers, even when it is obvious challenges continue to negatively impact test scores and achievement. It's time to update our standards to ferret out our problems and really target and address them.

I support the Framework’s emphasis on mastery over growth. While growth is important, it’s more important for students to achieve proficiency. I also support giving chronic absenteeism a meaningful weight in the performance measure. If we want students to progress academically, we need them to be at school. I also strongly support the inclusion of middle school advanced coursework in the performance measure, particularly for math. We want to incentivize schools to challenge students to their fullest potential. Lastly, it is important to hold schools accountable for newly arrived English Learners to ensure that they are building content knowledge as well as English proficiency.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide these comments.