VIRGINIA SMOKESCREEN A Report by the Virginia Education Association Failing State, Not ‘Failing Schools’
To reject the “failing schools” narrative is not to say that teacher and administrative leadership quality can’t vary from school to school - it certainly does and can have major impacts on student outcomes. However, when we zoom out and consistently see race, history of housing segregation, and pover ty as overwhelming indicators of whether a school is designated as not fully accredited in Virginia (usually what qualifies as “failing” for policymakers and media), then it becomes abundantly clear that policy choices over many years contributed to and sustain this trend. Most of us hold that race does not im pact individual capacity to learn, collaborate, or achieve, and this is why we must rebuff any notion that it’s natural for Black students to make up the majority of the population in Virginia’s not fully accredited schools, de spite only representing around 1 in 5 public school students in the state. The history of anti-Black policy choices made over the years to deliberately isolate and disinvest in certain communities cannot be disentangled from the outcomes we see today. Despite the fact that these schools receive less state and local funding per student on average than fully accredited schools, the current intervention model for these schools includes only more accountability paperwork and advising. Decades of longitudinal research has come to the conclusive find ing that money matters in educational out comes. Schools with a high share of students experiencing poverty need supplemental support in the range of 40-200% per student, according to most adequacy studies, to overcome these barriers. State lawmakers have many tools to provide more adequate resources, wraparound services, and tech nical advising to schools that don’t meet full Thisaccreditation.reportreviews the modern history of Virginia’s accreditation system and the connected “failing schools” narrative, the state of schools without full accreditation, and high-impact policy solutions to intervene and improve student outcomes.
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No matter what we look like, where we live, or how much money we make, most of us want our children to attend well-resourced schools that help them pursue their dreams. No educators endeavor to fail and every school has hard-working professionals that strive to meet students’ needs. Yet certain politicians have deprived many of our schools of critical resources, particularly in Black communities, and then point the finger at educators for the challenges these schools face by referring to them as “failing schools.”
This deflects blame and ignores the legacy of state-sanctioned policies that underfund schools, entrench poverty in certain Black communities, and perpetuate inequities we see in student outcomes to this day. The “failing schools” narrative has been weaponized over the years to erode trust in public schools and prevent people from coming together to make critical investments and fixes to our schools that need it most.
INTRODUCTION
The commonality between the two approachesaccountabilityofthe90s and 2000s was the attempt to find avenues to improve outcomes without serious new investment to support students and educators. In 2013, the edadministrationMcDonnellattemptanewaccountability approach. With the governor’s support, the General Assembly passed a bill to allow the state to take over certain schools that were not fully accredited; however, a Norfolk Circuit Court ruled it un constitutional in 2014 because it exceeded the authority of the General Assembly. At the time of consideration, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post endorsed Governor McDonnell’s plan for the state to take over so-called “failing schools,” saying in 2013: “Mr. McDonnell is correct: ‘the time for tolerance of failing schools is over.’” The Editorial Board cited similar takeover plans in other states, like Michigan. Ultimately, Michigan’s particular state takeover plan ended in abysmal failure and a historic lawsuit that settled with stu dents who attended these schools, citing that the state of Michigan did not provide these students with a constitutional right to a “basic minimum education.”
The changes in Virginia were part of a broad er national movement toward more school accountability efforts that accelerated with the Reagan-era report, A Nation At Risk, which catalyzed both federal and state efforts to increase standardized testing and punitive re sponses to schools that had low achievement metrics on core assessments. A general tenet of the accountability movement held that many school staff members could try harder, there was existing slack in school labor, and with additional threat of punitive action, staff in “failing schools” would expend more effort and students would have better outcomes on their math, English, and science standardized tests. While we should certainly hold schools accountable for results, as for all public institu tions, we should interpret results through both the inputs added and the measures we use.
One lesson to take from Michigan’s strong-handed intervention on behalf of their “failing schools” was that administrators and educators working in many of these schools were already doing remarkable work consider ing the enormous barriers many of
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For the accountability movement in Virginia from the 90s until the late 2010s, most stock was put in measuring select subject areas from a handful of state tests, and this led many schools to modify much of their effort to achieve this narrow metric - known colloqui ally as “teaching to the test.” Over this period, Virginia’s funding system remained highly unequal and not tied to accreditation. Schools with the highest student needs had fewer resources and less than the state’s highest performing schools - much like Virginia’s current funding system.
In the 2000s, Virginia made additional efforts not to just hold schools that didn’t achieve full accreditation accountable, but to offer them advice to move out of that status. In 2002, Governor Mark Warner led efforts to create a task force called Partnership for Achieving Successful Schools (PASS), which brought together education leaders from around the state to support the 34 “worst schools” that were not fully accredited. With most of these schools residing in the majority Black cities of Richmond and Petersburg, the program aimed to bring advisors from “affluent and nearly or fully accredited jurisdictions, including Fairfax County, to lend administrators and other edu cation experts to help needy school districts.”
While the early version of the Standards of Accreditation in 1970 involved a more holistic in-person review of various school programs and curriculums, this new approach in the 90s represented a departure and is more reflective of the highstakes standardized testing approach Virginia employs today. The premise of reforming the Standards of Accreditation in the 1990s rest ed on using punitive responses when schools failed accreditation. In the words of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the time, William Bosher, “for those who continue not to show improvement in any way, we have to show them some consequences.”
Since the 1990s when the Standards of Ac creditation in Virginia were being tied to state testing and linked to a school being accredit ed or not fully accredited, schools anticipated to not meet the new standards were already being labeled “failing schools.”
This was an evolution in thinking from earlier accountability efforts that assumed school staff needed more motivation, and this new effort assumed there was a lack of technical knowl edge by leaders to imple ment effective reforms. While this represented a more empathetic version of a bootstrap philoso phy, assuming the missing input was knowledge, the approach failed to recog nize the vast differences in student need, barriers to education, and resourc es available at schools deemed to be the “worst.”
“Failing Schools” Narrative Reinforces Racist Assumptions About Meritocracy
In a notable series of articles this year in The Roanoke Times by Matt Hurt, director of the Comprehensive Instructional Program within Wise County Public Schools, assertions are made from comparing student test outcomes and poverty in a linear relationship. Given the easy availability of the poverty metric, and the accurate public perception that it indeed acts as a multifaceted barrier to education, it’s tempting to ascribe this variable as the main explanatory factor for inhibiting student out comes and any high-poverty school that can defy the assumed barrier as doing well by its students. Yet, using this oversimplified expla nation can inadvertently lead to and reinforce racist assumptions about ability. The racial wealth gap hides many of the underlying bar riers that are not captured by poverty rates. While many rural white communities through out the state have similar high poverty rates to cities with a high share of Black residents, we know from research that white families have a median wealth that is 10 times that of Black families. Some of this divide is explained by the fact that white families were given prefer ential access to lending and had more access to move to neighborhoods with increasing property values throughout the 20th century - allowing them to invest in home equity and pass on substantially more wealth to younger generations than Black families. Having a nest egg in the bank is the difference between a car repair being an unfortunate inconvenience for a family, or a life-shattering event that cascades into job loss and other challenges. It’s the difference between a health condition being treated early, or becoming a long-term disability. Incomes might be similar between some lower income Black and white commu nities in Virginia, but it’s reasonable to assume wealth is very different, and corresponding ly impacts student privilege and barriers to education. Furthermore, there are many less visible everyday discriminatory factors that impact Black students in Virginia, including harsher discipline in schools, the highest national rate of referrals to law enforcement, and fewer teachers willing to work in majority Black schools. When we ascribe too much weight to poverty as the main factor to overcome in schools, we can come to the racist conclusion that rural, majority white schools in Virginia with similar poverty rates to majority Black schools are simply better at educating their students and have much higher graduation and testing out comes as a result. Indeed, in the most recent accreditation process in Virginia, Black stu dents were the only overrepresented student group by race or ethnicity at not fully accredit ed schools and constituted the majority of all students attending these schools. The history of Virginia’s policy choices and continued social discrimination shape the student outcomes we see today, and to say our majority Black schools that have been most disadvantaged by external factors are “failing schools” continues a pattern of certain Virginia policymakers deflecting cul pability for outcomes in these places. In actuali ty, failing state policy is the most obvious factor contributing to the remarkable disparities we see in Virginia schools.
Virginia Updates Accreditation in 2010s to Account for Improvement In the 2018-2019 school year, a new set of Standards of Accreditation was fully rolled out, adding measures such as absenteeism and growth to measurements of school quality. After an incremental change to add more catego ries of accreditation in 2016, this most recent update signified a major shift in how Virginia recognized success and cast disapproval. While overall proficiency and graduation rates remain factors for accreditation, now schools that start with a low baseline of student achievement can be recognized for the progress they do make over time. In the most recent accred itation measures (2019-2020), no school in the state was denied accreditation and the lowest rating was “accredited with condi tions,” meaning all 132 of these schools at a minimum met the requirements to develop an improvement plan and cooperate with the state to implement it. While this new system in no way ensures these schools have ade quate resources to improve student outcomes, it does represent an advance in the state’s accountability system from a strong punitive focus to one that emphasizes growth. With a greater focus on closing achievement gaps and reducing absenteeism, even over the first two years of measurement in the new system, schools showed solid improvement in student attendance and focus on high-need student Ingroups.thepast, schools were known to pour more resources into assisting students close to the passing threshold on state assessments (known as students on the bubble). By helping these students pass the tests, schools could get the highest return on their investment
their students faced, and the state was simply not providing adequate resources needed to overcome these challenges. This account ability approach once again assumed staff at “failing schools” lacked technical knowledge to adequately improve outcomes, but went further and implied that existing staff would be unable to improve even if given the knowl edge and therefore the state needed to take over (the state district in Michigan began operations by laying off all existing staff and asking them to reapply). It is fortunate for Vir ginia that this legislation did not pass in 2013 to replicate the failed Michigan accountabil ity model; however, the seed that the state’s lowest performing schools were irredeemable was planted and has morphed into a louder constituency of school reformers calling for privatization of the public school system.
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student, many funding adequacy studies show that students facing more barriers and living in pov erty generally need an additional supplement of 40-200% more funding to have education out comes comparable to students not living in poverty.
For decades, many of Virginia’s not fully accredited schools shared the same predictable characteristics based on the racial composition of the student body and poverty rates. Not fully accredited schools tend to have fewer resources, more teacher vacancies, and significantly higher student need than fully accredited schools. Looking at school level data over the past few years gives us the clearest indication yet that state lawmakers have failed to adequately re source our highest needs schools. Schools that were not fully accredited in the 2019-2020 school year (the most recent year of publicly available data) received slightly less state and local funding per student on average than fully accredited schools. (Note: no school was denied accreditation this year and schools not meeting standards were accredited with conditions.) Even if these schools had the same amount of funding per Henrico, Lynchburg, Newport News, Norfolk, Petersburg, Prince Edward, Richmond City, Portsmouth). It’s hard to escape the notion that when politicians use “failing schools” rhetoric in Virginia, they are mostly talking about majority Black schools in neighborhoods that were seg regated and impoverished through state-sanc tioned policy choices. Select map above or use this Whilelink.average per student funding is Smokescreen: “Failing Schools” MisdirectsSmokescreen: “Failing Schools” Misdirects
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Snapshot of the History of Segregation Accreditation this link to view the interactive map below. VEA analysis of VDOE most recent accreditation data (2019-2020) by American Panorama, ed., developed by Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, Nathan Connolly, et al.
Impacts School
Virginia’s failure to ever ade quately fund schools based on student background reflects pol icy choices to not build student need into the state’s core funding formula. Virginia asks localities with vastly different capacities to fund a larger portion of overall K-12 costs than almost any other state. Housing policy throughout the 20th century that segregated communities by race restricted opportunity for Black families and concentrated poverty, creat ing the conditions we see today where a students’ zip code is a strong determinant of the re sources available at the neighbor hood and school level.
HOLC Grade A “Best” B “Still Desirable” C “Definitely Declining” D “Hazardous” Source:
In the most recent accreditation year, 54% of students in schools accredited with conditions were Black, despite only making up 22% of the student population statewide. Black students are the only overrepresented racial or ethnic group in schools that are accredited with conditions. Most of the divisions with a high number of not fully accredited schools are in places with a history of redlining - a discrimina tory lending practice that denied loans based on neighborhood racial characteristics and contrib uted to significant segregation thoughout the United States in the 20th century (i.e., Danville, to avoid the punitive impacts of a lower ac creditation status. Meanwhile, students who were far from passing the state assessment often received less focused attention for this reason. The new standards for growth and closing achievement gaps mean that schools are incentivized to focus on their highest need Thestudents.updates to Virginia’s Standards of Ac creditation align with changes at national school rating sites that are popular in media and housing search apps like Zillow. Great Schools, one of the most well known school rating platforms, updated their rating method ology in 2020 to account for growth and begin disentangling entrenched racial disadvantage from the ca pacity of a school to help students learn and grow. Likewise, U.S. News and World Report updated its high school rating methodology in 2019 to account for an “equity gap” vari able, akin to the achievement gap metric used in the new Standards of Accreditation. These updates to major school ranking systems came after years of justified criticism of them missing the mark on measuring school quality, and consequently re inforcing housing and school segre gation. State of Virginia’s Schools Accredited with Conditions
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Current State Intervention Can’t Make Up for Inadequate Funding
Inadequate funding for schools that are not fully accredited creates a host of challenges around attracting and retaining high-quality educators. Schools without full accreditation have a higher share of inexperienced teachers with limited instruc tion background compared to fully accredited schools (5.2% vs 4.5%). Additionally, schools ac credited with conditions had twice the teacher vacancy rates in October 2021 that fully accred ited schools had (4.6% vs 2.3%). These staffing shortages were significantly more severe in schools with a high share of Black students, students of color, and students experiencing poverty. Schools with the highest student need will have a hard time making up ground and breaking down barriers to learning without high-quality educators.
While the state continues to under-resource schools facing the most barriers, the Virginia Department of Education and their dedicated professionals in the Office of School Quality work hard to provide technical advising, coach ing, and training to schools accredited with conditions and with low performance indicators. Schools that are accredited with conditions must work with this office to develop an im provement plan and implement it. While this leads to significant additional reporting require ments by school administrators and staff, the hope is that with a new plan and better techni cal advising, the school will be able to improve. Knowledge sharing and advice is certainly part of the equation for helping schools with the most student need, but this alone cannot over come a long history of inadequate funding and disinvestment in certain communities.
Unfortunately, the compromise state budget from this year’s legislative session slashed the new funding for the Office of School Quality from the introduced budget. This funding would have doubled the size of the office and offered regional support posi tions throughout the state that could have provided more responsive and proactive coaching and advising of schools with high student need. This would have likely allowed for more support rather than monitoring and compliance activity from this office. The in crease in staff size would also put the Virgin ia office in line with the scale of other similar state offices in places like Maryland and Massachusetts, which have more capacity for advising and supporting struggling schools.
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Solutions While it might be convenient for lawmak ers to imagine that schools with high-need students just require better advice or silver bullet reform efforts that don’t cost more money, decades of research has come to the inescapable conclusion that money matters when it comes to student outcomes. Instead of offering adequate resources to our strug gling and segregated schools, the solutions coming out of the new administration are for increased charter school options and offering vouchers and savings accounts to parents to pay for a small share of private school. These interventions have a spotty history of impacts on student outcomes, with many studies finding negative effects, and increased school segregation and
In a 2020 JLARC report, only half of school divisions that worked with the Office of School Quality indicated the support offered for their improvement plan was effective. Staff at the Office of School Quality and within school divi sions described the improvement plan process as “largely a compliance exercise,” according to the report. The report also found that similar offices in North Carolina and Kentucky had much lower ratios of office staff to schools on improvement plans, meaning these neigh boring states had more capacity to support schools with technical advising beyond basic compliance and monitoring requirements.
somewhat comparable between schools with and without full accreditation, the needs of the student body are vastly different. One partial indicator of additional need is pov erty status. Data from the Virginia Department of Education designates 70% of schools without full accred itation as “high-poverty,” compared to only 20% of fully accredited schools. Students living in poverty are more likely to be food insecure, live in homes with less parental capacity to assist with academic work, experience traumatic events, and miss school due to family re sponsibilities. Overcoming these barriers in school takes significant resources and therefore limits fund ing that could otherwise go toward instruction. That’s why all funding adequacy studies indicate the need to provide supplemental funding to schools with a high share of stu dents experiencing poverty. Virgin ia’s failure to do this means these schools are too often stretched thin.
2. Fully lift the “support cap” that was put in place in the wake of the Great Recession to cut state aid to schools by arbitrarily reducing funding for support positions. This cut was premised as a temporary cost-saving measure, but more than a de cade later it is still mostly in place and an entire generation of Virginia K-12 students has had less support staff to assist them with things like health care when they get sick or need counseling, keeping school buildings clean and healthy, or sourcing and making the most nutritious meals pos sible. We still have much lower support staff to student ratios in most schools, and the cuts in schools with the highest share of students of color declined at four times the rate of schools with the lowest share over the first decade the cap was in place on a per student basis. The most recent state budget partially lifted the support cap with an investment of $272 million, but this is still less than half of what is needed to fully lift it. Fully lifting the support cap would imme diately provide schools funding to bring on critical positions and make all school oper ations run more smoothly. Nowhere is this needed more than our schools accredited with conditions. Additional support would also likely lower the teacher vacancy rates we see at these schools, where current educators often have to play the role of nurse, counselor, and librarian because of understaffing. Playing so many roles at once contributes to burnout and less time to focus on instruction.
concentration of disadvantage. And what we know from aggregate reviews of charter schools is that on average we should expect neither changes in academic outcomes for students attending these schools nor innova tive instruction practices There are many interventions that we know work for improving student outcomes, but they do indeed cost money. The Youngkin administration is right in that kids at not fully accredited schools deserve better, but that “better” should involve investing in research-based approaches that we know improve student outcomes, which means at least experimenting with funding and resourc ing these schools at adequate levels for the first time ever before calling them failures.
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3. Invest in community school models to break down student barriers to education and create conditions where all students can better focus on learning because their essential needs are met. Community school models have become much more common throughout the country over the past de cade. These schools can offer wraparound health services, before and after school learning opportunities, coordinated family and community engagement, and leverage existing local, state, and federal resources to build more service capacity at the school site. Like in the health care sector with the term “determinants of health,” there is a sim ilar yet less known term in education, “de terminants of education.” Researchers have found that numerous inputs are strong pre dictors of a student’s educational outcomes, including whether or not their parents have health coverage, if the family owns a car, and how much greenspace is available in the community. Factors that lawmakers rarely discuss when it comes to educational out comes often play a larger role than actual inputs in the school setting. This is part of the reason that placing the blame for low academic outcomes squarely on schools by referring to them as “failing” is often misplaced and not helpful for addressing the underlying causes (the determinants of education). With enough funding, many schools can overcome external barriers to students’ lives that limit their access to education. Community school models have been proven to improve student out comes in the short and long term, particu larly for supporting students living in deep poverty. State lawmakers could follow the lead of other states and provide funding to high-poverty schools to hire commu nity school coordinators and issue them a modest budget to establish the model. With significant federal match funding for community schools, many of these models can self finance much of their operations over time. Lawmakers could begin by establishing a community schools support office in the Virginia Department of Educa tion to gauge interest and build technical expertise to offer support in establishing these models.
4. Fully fund the Virginia Board of Educa tion’s revisions to the Standards of Quality. Every two years, the Board of Education issues recommendations to revise the minimum standards needed for the state to offer an adequate education to students. While lawmakers have con sistently failed to fully fund these recom mendations, collectively, the ideas repre sent years of deep thought by education experts throughout the state and Virginia Department of Education who identified investment priorities that do the most to improve student outcomes. These
1. Significantly scale the At-Risk Add On, which provides supplemental aid to schools based on the share and concen tration of students that receive free and reduced lunch. Because these funds are consistent and provided on an annual basis, school leaders can invest in staff positions like reading specialists, instruc tional aides, tutoring programs, extracur riculars and more. Schools accredited with conditions have significantly higher poverty rates and would disproportion ately benefit from increasing this support. The current school funding formula largely ignores student need, leading to high pov erty divisions like Richmond City receiving relatively low levels of state support. Law makers could amend the distribution of At-Risk Add On funds to account for and add additional supplement to high-pov erty schools in neighborhoods that were deliberately segregated via sanctioned state policy. This could help meaningfully address the state’s role in creating condi tions that led to many schools accredited with conditions residing in majority Black neighborhoods with insufficient resources to invest in local schools.
Some of the first tier investments lawmakers should consider scaling to improve outcomes at our schools that don’t meet accreditation standards include:
6. Provide the Office of School Quality additional resources to better support not fully accredited schools. As mentioned earlier in this report, funding was slashed in the most recent state budget from what was introduced for the Office of School Quality, which supports and monitors not fully accredited schools. The new funding would have drastically scaled services within the office to provide more respon sive advising and training to schools with high student need. Restoring this funding in the next budget would be a prudent step to better serve schools that the state identifies as experiencing the most chal lenge.
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5. Pay educators and staff competitive wages to attract and retain high-quality workers. It’s well known that Virginia has low and uncompetitive wages for educa tors nationally, and this is a driving factor impacting our severe staffing shortages. With 90% of teachers reporting burnout according to a recent national survey, and a dwindling supply of people entering teacher preparation programs, without coordinated state-level intervention, we should expect our school staffing crisis to get worse in the coming years. Schools ac credited with conditions are acutely affect ed by higher teacher vacancy rates and a greater share of inexperienced teachers, making additional state funding more ur gent. Lawmakers have ample options over the long term to stem the staffing crisis. This includes getting serious about invest ing in ‘grow-your-own’ teacher pipeline programs and making it more affordable to enter the teaching profession, as many other states have done. The clearest need is to simply increase the total funding for teacher and staff pay. While lawmakers just passed a compromise budget that in cludes the state portion of a 5% pay raise over the coming two years, this increase may not go very far with inflation exceed ing 8% this year - Virginia school staff may even have less spending power next year despite this raise. Lawmakers should swiftly adapt to this new reality and make a bold investment in the revised budget to move Virginia educator pay out of the bottom tier nationally.
research-based investments would set new minimum standards for items like the counselor to student ratio, funding En glish learner students based on proficien cy, and would also increase a host of other critical support positions and programs in schools. Funding these standards should be viewed as the floor for state support and many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have long said this needs to be a priority. Progress has been made over the past few years on chipping away at fund ing these recommendations, but a sizable and sustained investment is needed to fully fund the rest. Schools accredited with conditions would disproportionately bene fit from these state investments given that they rely more heavily on state K-12 fund ing support.
7. Identify and create a fair and sustainable revenue source to invest in K-12 priorities. We’ve seen that promises to invest in high priority goals, like getting to the national teacher pay average, don’t mean anything unless adequate funding is secured. Virginia is still a bottom 10 state for state per student funding as of the most recent Census data release for the 2020 year - we hover between Louisiana and Mississippi. This is despite the fact that Virginia is a top 10 state for median household income. The legacy of our highly inadequate and unfair school fund ing system can be traced back to a gen eral reluctance by lawmakers to raise or invest new revenue as it’s become avail able through periodic budget surpluses, despite strong public support to do so. If Virginia is to ever move out of the bottom tier of states for per student state funding and toward a competitive level to peer states with similar resources, we need to see bold steps to raise revenue and invest it in our schools that desperately need additional support. A first step is to shift the perspective of a budget surplus being seen as indication that Virginians are overpaying to an opportunity to more adequately fund our schools. The JLARC study coming out in Fall 2022 may offer a set of recommendations for revising our revenue system in a way that every one can pay their fair share to ensure we have high-quality and fully funded public schools across the state. Lawmakers should closely review the findings of this report and consider a holistic revamp of our tax system. We all want to hold ourselves and our children to high expectations, but let’s stop pointing the finger at our hard-working educators for the systemic student outcomes we continue to see by race and poverty status, and let’s actually hold the state accountable to provide the resources these schools need to succeed in the first place. What doesn’t have a good track record for improving student outcomes at schools: punitive accountability efforts assuming school-based personnel are withholding effort and simply need more motivation. We need decision-makers in Virginia to stop scapegoating schools for low student achievement, consider deeply how racist policy choices shape which schools don’t receive accreditation, and then make bold researched-based investments to improve student outcomes.
Chad Stewart, Policy Analyst, (804) 506-0809 Virginia Education Association, 116 South Third Street, Richmond, VA 23230 Phone: (800) 552-9554 Photos and Images by iStock Virginia Smokecreen: ‘FAILING SCHOOLS’ NARRATIVE MISDIRECTS BLAME