It shouldn’t be hard for both political parties to agree that among those who suffered most from covid school shut-downs were low-income children.
In the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the assessment against which all states judge their progress, the percentage of Virginia students scoring at proficient or above in the 2024 NAEP exams demonstrate a huge gap between those who are low-income and those who are not – a gap ranging between 25 and 30 percentile points.
For NAEP, proficiency indicates not only solid academic performance and competency, but also the ability to apply that knowledge in real-world situations. Achieving it has been linked to better long-term outcomes, including higher graduation rates and increased job earnings — goals parents wish for their children and for which students should strive.
And while all states have gaps, in some subjects Virginia’s academic disparity is among the largest in the country. This is the wrong starting position in a race for academic excellence, certainly for a state that led the way nearly three decades ago in establishing assessments and accountability for its public school students.
And while Governor Youngkin, his appointees, and most of the General Assembly have done much to reform education in areas like Reading, Math, and school accountability, a Governor gets only four years. Term-limited, time just runs out.
The next Governor, and the General Assembly she will bring in with her, get an opportunity to dig a bit deeper in making fundamental education reforms. While Virginia broke new ground in 1997 with its Standards of Learning, that ground has now been well-trod by other states and sadly the Commonwealth has now been left behind.
This year’s crop of candidates might consider, then, what other states have done to improve education, particularly for students most educationally at risk.
One idea is already lying fallow at the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission: Weighted Student Funding (WSF). It needs a vigorous new Governor, Lt. Governor or General Assembly member to breathe life into it.
Virginia is one of only nine states funding education as if schools were populated by the middle-class cast of Ozzie and Harriett rather than serving a student population that is 42.6 percent low-income, 11.6 percent English Learners, and 14.6 percent special education – all of whom are demonstrably harder and more expensive to teach. But in Virginia, education dollars flow, not on the basis of students, but on the basis of staffing ratios, special program formulas, and the political savvy of individual school district and school leaders.
Under a WSF system, schools would receive an additional weight for each harder-to-teach student they have. Schools with special challenges (say, a rural school with harder to gain economies of scale) might also receive added funds.
More importantly is the opportunity to use funding to build accountability into the system. Right now, while principals and teachers may putatively be “held accountable” for results, in reality they have little control over how money is used at their school or in their classroom. How school dollars are spent is decided elsewhere, using complex budgets and allocations that leave educators, parents, and taxpayers in the dark and builds mistrust.
A true Weighted Student Funding system would put money in the classrooms where it is needed, give classroom teachers and school principals the authority to spend it where it would do the most good, and better hold the entire system accountable.
But even if getting there would take time (and it would), smaller steps could be taken to empower front line educators and provide needed and meaningful resources. As this chart makes clear, whether measuring 4th or 8th grade math or reading, Florida’s low income, black and Hispanic achievement gaps are narrower than Virginia’s – in some cases less than half of those in the Commonwealth.
One way the Sunshine State has accomplished that has been offering a wide range of incentives and consequences, including financial rewards for schools that improve or that maintain the highest ratings (teachers in the school choose how to spend it rather than district administrators or the state), free PSAT testing for 10th graders so they are better prepared for the SATs, and formal Advanced Placement teacher training and bonuses.
It takes funding, but tying funding to specific goals and rewards and decisions at the classroom level empowers teachers to help get kids where they need to be. And it lets taxpayers know where their funds are spent and what they accomplish.
But Florida’s key revolution was providing 100 percent state tax credits to donors underwriting scholarships to low-income students eligible for free and reduced meals at school ($57,870 for a family of four). Today, more than 106,000 such students receive an average $8,100 tax credit scholarship to attend a school that better meets their individual needs. Another 221,000 receive those funds directly from the state – a program that grew out of the success of the tax credit program.
Critics of such choice programs argue that they “take the best students out of public schools.” But these students come from among the poorest families. And still, Florida outperforms Virginia on indicator after indicator. Programs like this give children opportunity, not “cream” the best off the top.
It’s a path Virginia has been reluctant to take. Of 18 states with a tax credit for donations to scholarship granting organizations, Virginia’s 65 percent credit is the second lowest in the nation. That has translated into less than 6,000 student scholarships.
Virginia’s “Education Improvement Scholarship Tax Credit” desperately needs to be expanded and refined, offering a larger tax credit while limiting new scholarship recipients to those who are among the most at-risk students. And Governor Youngkin’s “Opportunity Scholarship” proposal providing new state money for new educational opportunities should be revived although it, too, would benefit by targeting, even more deeply, lower-income and at-risk students.
Finally, Florida has thrived by creating a competitive education system in which students and parents could increase success by finding the program that works best for them. In fact, more than 50 percent of Florida’s students now attend a school other than the one geographically assigned to them. While most still prefer their local school, parents have a choice of public charter schools, and other forms of public school choice, such as magnet schools, career academies, and open enrollment options.
Governor Youngkin worked towards that by energizing college partnership lab schools – an idea that initiated with Legislative Black Caucus Chair Dwight Jones and was initially signed into law by Governor Bob McDonnell.
Public charter schools (of which Florida has 700; Virginia has seven), on the other hand, are grossly limited by Virginia’s law, Constitution, and legal history. But they would do a tremendous service to Virginia’s children. As Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Educational Outcomes (CREDO) points out in a 2023 study comparing two million charter students with two million comparable traditional public school students, public charter schools provide stronger learning for students, with reading advancing by an additional 16 days and math an additional six days each year.
A 2017 proposal creating a path towards “regional charter school boards” that could create successful public charters in areas with consistently unaccredited schools was approved in the General Assembly. But despite the pleas of civil rights pioneer Wyatt Tee Walker to sign the bill “so that we can begin to throw a lifeline to the children we have left behind for far too long,” Governor McAuliffe vetoed it.
A new Governor and General Assembly should bring it back… and throw that lifeline to endangered children in poor-performing school divisions.
These ideas put the emphasis of education where it belongs – on children. They build accountability and transparency. They empower parents to do what’s best for their children and teachers to do what’s best for their classroom. They recognize we don’t live in a “one-size-fits-all” world. They put an emphasis on helping those who need help the most.
And they give more educational access to those who do not have it now. Those ought to be concepts both Republicans and Democrats support.
Chris Braunlich is senior advisor and former president of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. He is a former president of the Virginia State Board of Education and a former member of the Fairfax County School Board. He may be reached at [email protected].