The plan to downgrade Virginia’s excellent public school system by overburdening an already overburdened subset of teachers and tasking them with meeting an impossible metric is truly disappointing to say the least. Placing an entire school’s or district’s success or failure on the backs of non native English speaking children and their teachers is shameful. In many cases you are talking about kids who have come directly to VA from another country and are learning everything from the very beginning—not just the language but EVERYTHING. Friends, customs, new food, new environment. Often these kids have very limited financial means and resources, they may not have food or access to medical care, or even have come with their parents. Now the teachers working with those students are tasked with accomplishing language mastery on a ridiculously accelerated timeline despite that fact that zero educational data backs that timeline up? And if they don’t, the entire school or district has to have state supervision? What extra resources and funding will schools be given to accomplish this? How do you plan to retain teachers? Does the VDOE have the staffing required for this level of oversight at so many schools? Honestly, everyone I know who has read this initiative can’t help but see it as a plan designed to set public schools up to fail and to give the VDOE more control. Why else would you create metrics so drastically different from the established norms and target the students with the greatest needs to overcome the most obstacles in the shortest amount of time unless you want a fast pass to greater control over our schools? If you truly want these students to succeed, why not set them up for success with more resources and help for the teachers? I look forward to hearing the myriad ways the state will be scaffolding this initiative at schools with funding, better staffing standards, more resources, after school programs and tutors to truly help these students, as well as funding for administrative positions to support this work.