ANALYSIS: A Political Victory, but Will Education Benefit
Gov. Spanberger is celebrating the signing of more than 20 education bills that enjoyed broad, bipartisan results. The question is, will they make a difference?
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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For a moment on Wednesday, Gov. Abigail Spanberger was able to create some distance from the redistricting-fueled charges that she has swung hard left and lean into her track record of moderate political leadership.
In a news release, the governor’s office celebrated the bevy of bipartisan legislation she signed earlier this week, several of which bills passed unanimously in the General Assembly.
The bills are broadly focused on strengthening schools, supporting students, and the health and safety of students.
What they will actually accomplish, however, bears monitoring.
Technical, Dual-Enrollment Instructors
Teacher shortages may be old news, but solutions to the problem have proven difficult to find.
This is especially true in high-demand fields, as well as in fields that require specialized training — career technical education (CTE) and dual-enrollment (DE) courses.
A bill signed this week is aimed specifically at increasing the number of people who can teach CTE and DE.
Carried by Delegate Sam Rasoul (D - HD38) and Sen. David Suetterlein (R - SD4), the new law allows for current higher-education instructors to secure renewable three-year licenses to teach CTE or DE, without having to secure a formal K-12 teaching certification, which can take years and several thousands of dollars to earn.
Under Rasoul and Sutterlein’s bills (HB 1221 and SB 203), instructors currently working in higher-education institutions (which generally require only a terminal degree to teach — a master’s or a Ph.D.) can secure a three-year license to teach CTE or DE at the high-school level.
Local school boards will also be required to provide those issued a three-year license an unspecified amount of training for the first year in “instruction and assessment.”
As a condition of employment, the individuals must continue to be employed in an institution of higher education.
While instructors at both four-year institutions and community colleges stand to benefit, how many people this will attract to the K-12 world remains to be seen.
Spotsylvania Schools Superintendent Clint Mitchell sees the bill potentially helping smaller high schools.
“I think it’s going to help at our smaller high schools that don’t have the teachers to offer dual-enrollment offerings,” he told the Advance.
Dual-enrollment courses are college-level classes that carry college credit with an acceptable grade. Most of these courses require the instructor have at least a master’s degree in the subject matter.
People with the new three-year license, however, will have to continue their employment at a higher-ed institution. This could create challenges for people who may want to offer DE courses, but for scheduling or course-load reasons at their higher-ed employer, find it difficult to take advantage of the new opportunity.
The same challenges will face those who may want to teach CTE courses at the high school level.
Within two to three years, however, we should know if the program is successful by the numbers of new CTE and DE teachers it creates.
The Crux of the Problem
Other bills signed into law simply reinforce current practices or add requirements that, while beneficial, aren’t likely to address academic achievement.
Sen. Stella Pekarsky’s (D-SD 36) bill SB108, for example, simply makes “clear the prohibition on student cellphone and smart device use on school property from bell to bell….” State law already requires that districts adopt cell-phone free policies.
Another bill sponsored by Rasoul (HB1486) and Sen. (R - SD 12) (SB 568) will provide for instructing “students on the addictive potential of electronic devices.”
Finally, Rasoul’s HB924 will require the “Board of Education and Superintendent of Public Instruction to support the improvement of low-performing schools.” The bill doesn’t appear, however, to substantially change the way this is done.
It’s “just a continuation of what we’re already doing,” said Mitchell, “but tightening things up a bit. In my opinion, the bill allows them to have very specific recommendations that they can approach from the state to the school level.”
For Matt Hurt, who runs the Comprehensive Instructional Program — a consortium of some 70 school districts, some of which have realized notable improvements on state testing performance — many of these bills lack clarity.
“We say we’re going to pass this law,” he told the Advance, “and the law says we’re going to focus on better outcomes. But what are the criteria? The measures? The incentive structures? And what happens if we aren’t successful?”
For Hurt, such laws are dancing around the real problem — “We don’t have a definition of what a good educational system is,” he said.
The new accountability system introduced in the final year of then-Gov. Glenn Younkin’s administration “started that conversation.”
There’s a long way to go, however.
Hurt notes that the new cut scores recently established will show just how far that is.
“We applied the new cut scores to last year’s student level data [for districts] in the CIP Consortium,” he said, “and our proficiency passing rate would have been cut by roughly half.”
Another challenge is the amount of attention paid to minimum efficiency.
“Minimum efficiency,” Hurt said, “is not the totality of the educational program.”
To explain, Hurt noted that some districts have “a floor problem” — they can’t get their students up to minimum standards in core subjects.
Other districts, he noted, have a “ceiling problem,” which is delivering the more-challenging curriculum offerings that students need to excel.
Whether these bills will have dramatic impacts on either of these challenges remains to be seen.
If they do, credit the governor and her team for getting to the crux of the problem and doing what is necessary to make a difference.
If they fail, let our legislators and leaders look to the bipartisan way in which these bills were put together and passed, and get back to work to find ways to significantly improve Virginia’s educational system.
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