COMMENTARY: CNBC, Youngkin Are Everything Wrong with our Education Discussion

CNBC loves Virginia's K-12 education system; Youngkin doesn't. Their disagreement provides some important insights into the troubles with our public discussions about education.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Email Martin

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Glenn Youngkin is at the 3/4-mile post in his tenure as Virginia’s CEO, and with national political aspirations out of the picture for now, he is surely thinking about his legacy as governor. That legacy received a significant boost earlier this month when CNBC named Virginia as America’s Top State for Business, besting perennial competitor North Carolina by three points.

Kudos to the governor for restoring the Old Dominion to the No. 1 slot after finishing second to North Carolina last year. (Virginia last earned the No. 1 slot in 2021.)

Factors that pushed the state over the top include the acceleration of “shovel-ready sites” under Youngkin, something his administration deserves much credit for developing. The Virginia Talent Accelerator Program, and the commitment to tech investment also weighed heavily in the commonwealth’s favor.

Another factor that boosted Virginia, but one the governor will not name or celebrate, was the Commonwealth’s preserving access to abortion — a factor that weighed heavily in CNBC’s “Quality of Life” category because “surveys [show] a sizeable percentage of younger workers would not live in a state that bans abortion.” It played a significant role in the final vote tally. Virginia ranked No. 19 in that category. The next four states ranked far worse — North Carolina (32), Texas (50), Georgia (40), and Florida (38).

But it’s the state’s education ranking in the survey that is most compelling.

According to CNBC:

Virginia offers a wealth of higher education opportunities, including five historically Black colleges. State support for higher education has increased a healthy 28% over the past five years, according to data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

At the K-12 level, Virginia offers some of the most individualized K-12 instruction in the nation, with an average of 10.9 students per teacher last year, according to the National Education Association. That appears to be translating to solid test scores.

That’s a far cry from the tone that Youngkin set on Day One of his administration when he lashed out at teaching “controversial” subjects, then went on to create a tattle-tale hotline to snitch on teachers suspected of discussing ideas that parents didn’t like. Fortunately, the hotline died a quiet death. The war on teaching whole-truth history continues.

He also threw his full force behind “Parents’ Rights,” an approach that seeks to give veto authority to parents over any curriculum they feel isn’t appropriate in their children’s education. Besides being utterly impractical — imagine being an English teacher with 30 students; 10 of whose parents insist their children be given an alternative to Romeo and Juliet or Beloved because they disapprove of the content — it strikes at the very heart of public education. The idea is that there are books, ideas, and subject materials that everyone who is well-educated should be exposed to.

Few places were hit harder by this than Spotsylvania County. The war that the School Board — which brought in a highly unqualified superintendent in Mark Taylor, and created a job for Youngkin acolyte and briefly State Department of Education employee Jon Russell — leveled against books, teachers, and schools has created a massive hole that new superintendent Clint Mitchell has to dig the district out of.

This is also the same governor who lashed out at Virginia in 2022 using a patently false comparison of proficiency standards between National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores and Standards of Learning (SOL) scores to declare:

The NAEP results are another loud wake-up call: our nation’s children have experienced catastrophic learning loss, and Virginia’s students are among the hardest hit.

Yes, Virginia experienced significant learning loss during COVID — as did every other state in the union — but Virginia was far from the hardest hit, as we demonstrated in a separate column that explained how Mark Taylor, former superintendent of Spotsylvania County Schools, grossly twisted NAEP data to distort the truth about Virginia’s educational progress.

All of Youngkin’s gloom-and-doom about the state of education during his tenure as governor also cuts against the grain of CNBC’s rankings of America’s Best States for Business over the past three years.

In 2023, Virginia also ranked No. 1 for education in CNBC’s survey, and No. 2 in 2022.

Gloom-and-Doom; Rainbows and Unicorns

What the CNBC rankings in education should have left Youngkin with was a serious feeling of cognitive dissonance. His anti-public-education rhetoric doesn’t square with the consistently high ratings CNBC has awarded the state. Nor have his pushes in advancing scientifically based reading and tutoring had enough time to significantly affect test scores.

But Youngkin shouldn’t feel alone in his discomfort.

In the same way that Virginia’s schools are far from the intellectual wasteland of indoctrination Youngkin has made them out to be, neither are they the stellar model of academic excellence that CNBC paints.

According to its methodology, CNBC rates a state’s schools on “multiple measures of K-12 education including test scores, class size, and spending. We consider the number of colleges and universities in each state as well as long-term trends in state support for higher education. We also consider historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which companies are increasingly seeking to partner with.”

As noted above, Virginia’s NAEP scores are relatively sound, but the Commonwealth is far from being tops in the country. (Explore the data.)

Virginia does have outstanding colleges and universities, but even with the influx of money the General Assembly has voted to support them, state-supported schools are far more expensive than in neighboring North Carolina (the UNC system is routinely ranked with the University of California system as one of the very best in the nation), West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland.

The expense is making it difficult for people to attend. So, while the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and William & Mary continue to attract students, mid-tier schools like the University of Mary Washington, Christopher Newport University, and others are struggling to fill seats.

And then there is the reality that other organizations with more credibility in the education space — U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, and World Population Review — rate Virginia well, but certainly not at the top of the heap.

It’s About Students, Not Data

The debate over public education has gone off the rails in no small part because of the obsession we have developed with rankings.

The Cato Institute, which has previously worked to build a better ranking system, acknowledges the flaw with the entire enterprise.

If the makers of state education rankings were to be frank, they would acknowledge that the entire enterprise of ranking state-level systems is only a blunt instrument for judging school quality. There exists substantial variation in educational quality within states. Schools differ from district to district and within districts. We generally dislike the idea of painting the performance of all schools in a given state with the same brush.

The obsession with “data” and “rankings” has turned education on its head over the past quarter century by turning tools meant for measuring where students are educationally so teachers can focus on elevating their performance, to a hammer that punishes schools that don’t hit arbitrary benchmarks.

Our political discussions pit numbers that too few administrations remotely understand against pre-conceived notions of what constitutes effective education, thereby creating a two-edged sword that slashes blindly through institutions with first one trend, then another, with no regard for what it does to students.

Education Is an Art

One doesn’t need to have tons of data to understand how a teacher is performing. Time observing them in the classroom will tell you all you need to know.

And the best people to assess that information are those in the building with them — fellow teachers, department heads, and administrators.

Until we return data and testing to its proper place in the system — tools for analyzing students, not teachers and schools and districts — we will continue to miss the mark in education.

Education works best when good people are hired and empowered to teach. Schools need to be empowered to hire, evaluate, and fire those teachers who aren’t meeting the schools’ objectives. And students should enter school understanding the value and importance of education.

At what we can only hope is the 3/4-turn in the disastrous experiment with data-driven education that began in earnest with No Child Left Behind in 2001, Virginia needs to take stock of a testing system that simply is not working.

It’s time to restore teaching to teachers and let people like Youngkin and organizations like CNBC do what they do best — develop and write about business.

Educators need their ears, and their support. They need their insights and their journalistic skills to hold schools accountable.

They do not need them dictating curriculum, or creating rankings, that at the end of the day serve everyone but those in front of the classroom doing the hard, human work of teaching.

Follow us on Facebook | Instagram | Youtube

Local Obituaries

To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit our website at the link that follows.

Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism

The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past month, our reporting was:

• First to report on a Spotsylvania School teacher arrested for bringing drugs onto campus.

• First to report on new facility fees leveled by MWHC on patient bills.

• First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project

• Provided extensive coverage of the cellphone bans that are sweeping local school districts.

• And so much more, like Clay Jones, Drew Gallagher, Hank Silverberg, and more.

For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.

Your contributions 100% support our journalists.

Help us as we continue to grow!