Jefferson Policy Journal

In a recent news release, Governor Terry McAuliffe heralded the fact that 86 percent of Virginia schools were fully accredited – “a record high” for his administration and a five point improvement over last year.
He neglected to mention that 88 schools failed accreditation – a 203 percent increase in unaccredited schools over last year, and more unaccredited schools this year than in the previous ten years combined.
In a new poll by Christopher Newport’s Wason Center, the most important issue most voters want the next Governor to work on is “improving K-12 education.” Improving educational quality for the children in those 88 schools ought to be a top consideration.
Thirteen schools have failed accreditation for three years or more. Despite throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra “Executive Leadership” funding at Petersburg, the students of Vernon Johns Middle School are attending an unaccredited school for the twelfth consecutive year. Despite a new $44.2 million school building, the child who entered first grade six years ago at Alexandria’s Jefferson-Houston Elementary has now spent her entire school career in an unaccredited school.
If anything, this year’s accreditation list points up two things –
First, the divide in education is growing. Good schools on the right track with the right leadership are getting better. Poorly performing schools without the right kind of leadership continue to decline. And continued geographic concentrations of poverty and wealth have all too often meant different tracks for the schools those children attend.
The second is that the state seems powerless to do anything to help the children in these schools. And while that may seem like an excuse, the reality is that the Virginia Constitution requires that “the supervision of schools in each school division shall be vested in a school board.” Worse, past court decisions have given local school boards nearly unfettered control over buildings, budgets, curriculum, and personnel – even if they run it into the ground.
To its credit, the State Board of Education’s proposed new regulations ratchet up the consequences for non-performing schools and school divisions, including the threat of withholding a limited amount of state funding. But the process is long, case by case and thin gruel compared with the dramatic and decisive action so badly needed. Besides which, “state takeovers” have a spotty track record — partly because states rarely take the time to rebuild school culture.
One alternative is to authorize new quality public schools run by successful educators, but outside the traditional system. And there are such schools defying the “demography is destiny” mantra. The problem: They aren’t in Virginia.
Today, 7,000 public charter schools serve 3 million students. While not a panacea, their track record with low-income children is striking: According to Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), after four years in a charter school, urban students learn 50 percent more per year than demographically similar students in traditional public schools.
In New York, 95 percent of Success Academy’s students are children of color whose families have an average income of $32,000 per year. In math, 95 percent of them passed the state exams and 84 percent passed reading, outperforming every school district in the state, including those with median family incomes of $290,000.
KIPP Academies educates 88,000 students in 209 schools – 95 percent of them black or Latino and 88 percent of them on Free and Reduced Meals subsidies. Eighty-one percent enter college and they graduate college at a pace four times the rate of their peers.
But these and other successful charter schools won’t come to Virginia, citing the Commonwealth’s “restrictive charter school law that limits autonomy and makes it impossible for high quality charter schools to fulfill their mission.” And without alternatives, parents will never be able to send their children to a public charter school opening the doors of opportunity for Virginia’s neediest students.
A measure earlier this year might have cracked that door a bit, had it been signed into law. It would have allowed the State Board of Education to authorize a new school board – an overlay of sorts – that could only target areas with one or more schools that repeatedly failed accreditation.
And while it would not have touched existing schools or local funding, it would have empowered the State Board to meet its own constitutional responsibility for the “supervision of the public school system,” taken steps toward the constitutional aspiration of “an educational program of high quality,” and helped several thousand low-income children who now have no quality choices.
Sadly, the bill was vetoed by Governor McAuliffe, shooting down educational justice for the children of places like Petersburg, Norfolk and Newport News.
As the voters who place a premium on K-12 education think about the issues, they should consider this: The parents of children in high-performing schools are rarely concerned about choices: They’ve already made theirs.
But how long must the parents of children in persistently low-performing schools wait to have better opportunities for their child? Four years? Six? A dozen years? How long?
(A version of this commentary first appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on October 1, 2017.)
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How do you handle a situation when a student is admitted to a college but isn’t academically prepared to do the work? Traditionally, colleges and community colleges have required students who fail basic readiness tests to take remedial courses. Nationally, students spend an estimated $7 billion a year on such courses, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But educational officials are souring on the practice, saying that remedial classes are typically taught by the least-experienced teachers with little training in remedial teaching methods, that student motivation is low in classes that yield no college credit, and that remedial students graduate with six years at a lower rate than their peers. Colleges in California, Colorado, Indiana, Tennessee and West Virginia are experimenting with an alternative approach, teaching supplementary classes targeting specific skills needed to pass specific classes. Thus, a student taking a sociology class who needs help with statistics would learn only the math applicable for that class.

It will be interesting to see where this experiment goes. I’ve long expressed concern that many colleges, desperate to pump up enrollment and tuition revenue, are too lax with the admittance standards. Under the guise of ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, they accept students who aren’t academically prepared for college. These students are disproportionately likely to fail to graduate and rack up large student debts that hobble them financially for years. Thus, for many, higher ed has become a source of social injustice rather than liberation.
Virginia colleges and universities are often accused of being excessively picky about who they admit, with the consequence that they provide less “social mobility” for poor and minority students. The flip side of that accusation is that the Virginia higher-ed system has the second highest six-year graduation rate in the country, meaning that fewer poor and minority students wind up saddled with debt they cannot repay because they failed to win the workforce credential needed to get a higher-paying job.
Perhaps the idea of teaching targeted skills required for specific courses has merit. Let’s face it, we all learned a lot of stuff in college that we never needed later in life. Speaking for myself, I barely passed a course in calculus, and, beyond retaining the fact that there is such a thing as “differential” calculus and such as thing as “integral” calculus, I remember nothing of what I supposedly learned. Maybe remedial classes teach a lot of stuff that students will never need.
On the other hand, I worry that replacing remedial classes with “basic skills” represents one more step in the watering down of college curricula, and one more step in the degradation of the value of a college degree. Businesses already complain that many college graduates are incapable of thinking critically and communicating clearly as it is. Will scrapping remedial courses make things better? I’m not holding my breath.
According to Virginia Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) data, only one of Virginia’s four-year institutions, Virginia Commonwealth University, provides remedial education, and VCU enrolled only 68 undergraduate students in remedial classes in the 2016-17 school year. By contrast, the community colleges enrolled 36,000. That strikes me as entirely sensible. If students need remedial work, they should get it in a community-college setting where they will incur far less cost than in a four-year college.
For what it’s worth, the number of remedial students in Virginia community colleges is down from 44,400 ten years ago. Either Virginia high schools are graduating fewer students who are academically unprepared or the community colleges are relaxing their standards. I pass no judgment as to which is the case. Either way, remedial education does not appear to be a burning issue in Virginia’s higher education establishment at the moment.
(This column first ran in Bacon’s Rebellion on September 28, 2017)
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