virginia governor national issues ad wars

#VIRGINIA GOVERNOR NATIONAL ISSUES AD WARS FULL#

There’s an exhaustive menu of Democratic-authored public education legislation offered and enacted the past few years.

#VIRGINIA GOVERNOR NATIONAL ISSUES AD WARS FULL#

Last week, Senate Democrats released a rebuttal that convincingly pushes back on the suggestion that they sat idly for years when they had full control of both the General Assembly and governor’s office. A VEA spokesman said Friday that the organization expects to have a more detailed response ready later this week. It accused the administration of deceitfully manipulating the data and belittling teachers. The state’s teacher advocacy organization, the Virginia Education Association, understandably took umbrage. For Hispanic third-graders, that figure fell from 66 percent five years ago to 43 percent last year. Forty-five percent of Black third-graders passed their SOL reading assessment for 2021 compared with 61 percent who passed it in 2017. In a study of math and English language arts outcomes in 11 states for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Virginia showed the steepest declines of all the states surveyed – 34.1 percentage points in math, and 10.1 percentage points in language.įor African American students, the report notes, the toll from the pandemic and online classes was harsh.

The report says that the learning loss among children who remained in public schools and attended class remotely for much of the past two years was significant for Virginia pupils, especially children of color. For the school year ending now, with students mostly back in classrooms, the number of home-schooled pupils declined by only 6 percent.Īcross cultural lines, home schooling has boomed since COVID-19 hitĪnother 3,748 public school students transferred to in-state private schools for the 2020-21 year, the report said. The number of home-schooled students in Virginia was 59,638 in the first full year of the pandemic, up from 38,282 in the 2019-20 school year, a 55.7 percent increase. The pandemic-scarred 2020-21 academic year was especially bad. It notes that Virginia parents are voicing their frustrations with public schools by moving their children to private schools or home-schooling them. By last year, Virginia had dropped to ninth. In 2015, for example, Virginia ranked third nationally in the percentage of high school graduates whose scores on college advanced placement, or AP, tests qualified them for college credit. There are discomfiting findings in the report that convincingly withstand protests of partisan authorship. The document refers to the 37 percentage point difference between the state and national figures for fourth-grade literacy as the “Honesty Gap,” a dig that implies deceit and certainly does nothing to win over Democrats. The governor’s report asserts some sobering findings that, distilled to their essence, show Virginia slipping from the top echelons of states with the most accomplished and highly regarded public schools, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at homegrown school assessments.įor instance, three-fourths of the state’s fourth-grade pupils were rated grade-level proficient in reading in the state’s 2019 SOL tests, yet only 38 percent were shown to read at a fourth-grade level in the NAEP survey, Youngkin’s report says. The report compares results from the commonwealth’s Standards of Learning tests with benchmarks from the National Assessment of Education Progress, which prepares “The Nation’s Report Card.” The 34-page report draws on data from respected national sources, particularly the last five years since the State Board of Education de-emphasized grade level proficiency in math and reading to enable more schools to meet accreditation requirements. That’s how political communications work.īut that doesn’t wholly invalidate it, either.

It does that in part by tacitly noting ebbing student performance metrics over the terms of two Democratic governors. His team designed it to position the governor’s agenda in its best possible light. Is the report a political document? Well, it’s not not a political document. Its conclusions, they insisted before the ink on the report dried, are just another way for the Republican governor to push ahead with alternatives to the state’s legacy system of public education like charter schools. Glenn Youngkin issued his report earlier this month that the status quo in Virginia’s public education has not held its own relative to achievement rankings of other states and that new approaches to schooling are warranted, legislative Democrats peremptorily dismissed it. Sometimes in debates on public policy, it pays to slow down, think a minute and ask whether the other guy just might have a point.

Virginia governor national issues ad wars