The Virginia Department of Education and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration have released a new report documenting falling scores on standardized testing, a situation officials attributed to the previous administration’s focus on equity programs in the commonwealth’s schools.

Youngkin called for the report as part of his first executive order, which also required the state department of education to examine the resources and guidance it provides to schools for any trace of “critical race theory” and other “inherently divisive concepts.”

Administration officials on Thursday characterized the report’s findings as “alarming,” and said they were a call to action for educators, parents, and lawmakers across the commonwealth.

Officials said state policies to lower proficiency standards — generally, the number of questions a student has to get right on a test to pass — and a distracting focus on “equity” were to blame, and pledged to raise testing standards and refocus school accreditation on a student’s test-taking, not on their growth from year to year.

“We know that if we want to be the best, we have to change those trends and take bold steps forward,” Youngkin said in remarks announcing the report’s results Thursday. “Parents across the Commonwealth spoke loudly last year. They want us to restore excellence in education. They want to give their children best-in-class opportunities. And that is what we’re all here to do.”

Youngkin made what he called “restoring excellence in education” a significant campaign issue, particularly speaking out against racial equity programs in schools. On Thursday, some officials — including educators and Democrats — disagreed with the report’s characterization of the state of Virginia schools.

“To accuse Virginia’s education system of failure is an outright lie, supported by cherry-picked data and warped perspective,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw said in a statement. “The Commonwealth’s schools have been ranked fourth in the nation by Forbes Magazine — hardly a liberal publication — and the best high school in the nation according to US News & World Report is right here in Fairfax County.”

The report “serves no conceivable useful role other than for political purposes, to sow doubt in the Virginia education educational system,” said Virginia Education Association president James Fedderman.

Fedderman noted Virginia students still “perform quite well” on standardized tests compared to peers in other states, noting top-ten standings in reading and math scores and Advanced Placement tests and a rising graduation rate.

“By no means should we be described as failing compared to other states,” he said.

What the report shows

The testing trends examined in the report do mostly point downwards, but in most cases do not show a precipitous drop. Student scores on statewide reading and math tests fell by five percentage points or less between the 2016-2017 and 2018-2019 school years, though the report notes the state Board of Education changed proficiency standards in the 2018-2019 school year, which could have “masked several years of declining achievement.”

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test given to a representative sample of American students and often referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” Virginia students have done less well in recent years — but are still above the national average. The same is true for performance on Advanced Placement tests: in 2015, Virginia was third in the nation in students qualifying for college credit based on their score on an AP test; in 2021, the state ranked ninth.

The report also examines comparisons between scores on state assessments and scores on the NAEP, a measure called the “honesty gap.” For example, in 2019, the last year for NAEP data, just 38% of Virginia fourth graders were proficient or above in reading, but 75% of them were proficient or advanced on the corresponding state assessment.

The honesty gap in reading was wider for Black students (19% were proficient or advanced on NAEP testing, while 62% passed the state assessment) and Hispanic students (26% were proficient or above on NAEP testing, while 64% passed the state test). Similar gaps — for all students as well as students of color — existed in math scores.

On most measures — including literacy assessments for students learning to read and state and national standardized tests — the report documented wide gaps in scores for Black and Hispanic students.

That is especially true of the measures of pandemic-related learning loss. Virginia students’ performance dropped 7 points in math and one point in reading more than the national average between 2020 and 2022. On state assessments, Black, Hispanic, and low-income students were already significantly behind, and the pandemic worsened those disparities. In 2021, 45% of Black third-graders, 43% of Hispanic third-graders, and 45% of economically-disadvantaged third graders passed the state’s reading test. 72% of white students passed.

“It’s an important and relatively unsparing look at achievement gaps that are too rarely discussed in Virginia,” said Andy Rotherham, a former Virginia Board of Education member who now runs nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners, in a newsletter post about the report’s findings. “There is a lot of work to do to create a genuinely inclusive school system in Virginia.”

Experts say testing is just one tool to analyze the success of a school system — but that good test scores can sometimes be indicators of other positive interventions putting students on the right track.

“Standardized tests don’t necessarily measure all of the things that we think are important and that we hope our school systems are producing and doing for kids,” says Beth Schueler, a professor of education at the University of Virginia. “But I wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, just because they’re imperfect or incomplete.”

In evaluating schools, Schueler cautioned against focusing too much on average scores, which she said correlate closely with socioeconomic class, and rather at the growth of scores over time — in other words, what the school did to change the baseline.

“The school that, for example, starts out really low performing in one year and then moved up a lot in the next year, but is still low performing — that school is maybe more effective than a very high achieving school that started out very high achieving and moved down,” she said.

Youngkin administration officials said at the release event that celebrating the growth of scores year over year is important, but want to de-emphasize it in the school accreditation process in favor of looking at student proficiency.

Equity and fixing ‘gaps in student achievement’

Differences in outcomes for students of color “diminish access to opportunities,” according to the report, but its proposed solutions do not appear to be specifically tailored to fix racial gaps. In fact, multiple administration officials pointed to a focus on “equity” as a reason for declining scores.

“It is noteworthy that the rhetorical emphasis on equity coincided with the widened gaps in student achievement,” Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow wrote in a cover letter to the report.

“Leaders changed definitions. They lowered expectations. And they reduced the importance of proficiency in determining school quality and accreditation,” said Aimee Guidera, the commonwealth’s education secretary, in opening remarks at the launch event. “They often did this in the name of equity. President Bush used to refer to this as ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ I call it plain wrong.”

The push against “equity” as a foundation for educational policy is an abrupt U-turn from the approach of the Northam administration, which created EdEquityVA, a policy framework and set of resources designed to help schools address racial disparities in student outcomes and discipline, and to recognize the ways students of color experience racism in Virginia schools today.

Instead, the Youngkin administration’s prescription for getting scores to trend upward again includes presenting proposals to re-design the state standardized testing system to the General Assembly in fall 2023, pushing for the launch of 20 university-affiliated lab schools (a priority Youngkin has been advocating for with the General Assembly after his original push to expand the number of charter schools in the commonwealth failed), a micro-grant program for families to purchase educational support for children who experienced learning loss, toughening accreditation standards for schools, and more.

Rotherham hopes to see political action emerge from the report.

“It will be a good test of where we are politically in education. Is there a bipartisan center to set aside various disagreements and political issues and work on this particular issue?” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that but I hope so.”

But the report references highly divisive debates about race and history when it emphasizes the need for freedom of inquiry in classroom discussions “without injecting trendy political views or inhibiting free speech,” something his critics suggest the Youngkin administration itself has done by setting up an email address for parents to report teachers for objectionable classroom content.

Fedderman, of the Virginia Education Association, noted that funding was absent from the list of proposals and principles.

“There is no mention of cost in the report, and we know that money matters when it comes to education,” he said. “There is not a single dollar sign in the entire 33 pages.”

In remarks at the report announcement, Youngkin called on the General Assembly to send him a final version of the state budget.

“The step between here and there — there being a record education budget never seen in the history of the Commonwealth — is the walking distance between the Capitol in this building,” Youngkin said. “We need to get this done now.”

There are marked differences in education funding, particularly in teacher pay, included in the versions of the budget put forward by the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. The Senate budget includes a 5% increase in pay per year for teachers and support staff, along with one-time $1,000 bonuses this year. The House budget, by contrast, includes a 4% raise and a 1% bonus — and, according to the nonpartisan think tank The Commonwealth Institute For Fiscal Analysis, reduces state funding for educator pay overall by $68.4 million.

Rosa Atkins, the former superintendent of Charlottesville Public Schools and the Department of Education’s acting director for diversity, opportunity and inclusion — Youngkin has changed “equity” to “opportunity” in DEI role titles — acknowledged that the findings of the report could be demoralizing for teachers and administrators.

“It is never easy to give so much to a profession and then hear that the goal for which we all aim has actually moved farther away. I know firsthand the impact a report like this can have on individuals, families and communities,” she said. “It is hard, but we owe it to our learners to listen and to act upon the truth.”

This story was updated to include comments from Andy Rotherham and Beth Schueler.